In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Lex kidnaps Martha Kent, the adoptive mother of Superman, and compels Sups to fight against Batman. Lex Luthor seems to know about Superman’s secret identity when he addresses him as “Clark Joseph Kent” and threatens him for his mother’s life. Now the question is, how did Luthor know about Sup’s secret identity in the first place? We are about to find out.
Before we start, we need to acknowledge the fact that Lex Luthor is the smartest person on earth. He has the intelligence and resources to dig secrets like this. In 1987’s Superman #2 comic Luthor discovers that Clark Kent is Superman. Even in Batman v Superman, we see he already knows other metahumans like Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg who haven’t made their public appearance yet. Nobody even knows if they exist and yet Lex has eyes on them. So, knowing about a superhero like Superman (who’s already famous and renowned in the world) shouldn’t be hard for Luthor, right?
In Batman v Superman, Lex Luthor gets access to the abandoned Kryptonian spaceship and the possession of General Zod’s dead body. Lex extracts the skin from Zod’s fingertips and gets all the fingerprints to enter the inside chamber of the spaceship. Luthor assumes command of the ship and the AI program there lets him know that the Kryptonian Archive contains knowledge from hundreds of thousands of different worlds. And Luthor asks the program to teach him everything.
Zack Snyder didn’t show the exact way that Luthor getting knowledge from the archive. But we get the basic idea from where suddenly Lex knows everything about Superman. Jor-El, biological father of Superman built the ship. That ship must contain knowledge from our earth as well as information on everything about Superman. Gaining all the knowledge, Luthor comes to know about Superman’s secret identity. And uses it right against him by kidnapping Lois Lane and then Martha Kent and forcing Superman to fight against Batman in a death battle.
I liked the way Zack Snyder designed the particular aspects of Luthor. This decision by Snyder was a masterstroke. He could’ve shown everything about how, where, and when Lex learns Superman’s secret identity. While some might have preferred a clearer explanation, Snyder cleverly left this detail to the audience’s imagination, trusting us to connect the dots.
