Let’s answer this question from two perspectives: the narrative space of the film, and the narrative tradition that it draws from. In the narrative space of the film, Clark says Martha just after Bruce has spent the a very brutal battle dehumanising him. Clark is aware at this point that the only other vigilante capable of taking on Lex is probably Bruce. Clark’s windpipe is also being choked, which is why the less he has to say, the better. This also follows on Lex having said ‘Martha, Martha, Martha’ to him earlier on the helipad and that is probably the thought crossing through Clark’s mind at that moment, rather like how you can psychologically prime someone into reacting a certain way. (See: Pavlov’s dog, or on a lesser level that stupid joke about what cows drink after making someone think about white for a spell.)

Does Clark say the three-syllabled ‘my mother’, thus allowing angry!Bruce the opportunity to draw the inference that Martha is an alien/a witch like Lex did, and then allow him to go hunt down who Superman’s adoptive parents are? Or does Clark clob him over the head that a human’s life is in danger?

Yes, it makes sense given the emphasis that the only word Bruce remembers from the shooting is ‘Martha’, that the gargoyle in his dreams comes out of his mother’s grave and that the shot has Thomas’s name obscured, that Lex said ‘Martha, Martha, Martha’. That’s the application of the rule called Chekov’s gun, and I bet you nobody saw that coming and why it would be important. In a story about the dangers of dehumanisation, the protagonist who has dehumanised the Other always needed that reminder for anagnorisis to occur.

And then there’s narrative tradition. At this point I hesitate somewhat to deride the increasing trend toward extreme ‘realism’ where everyone is a rational person. Guess what, guys, economists will be the first to tell you that people are not often rational, thus screwing up all their lovely data. If you still don’t believe me go do a course in tort law where nearly every case might as well be a trigger for shouting UNREALISTIC and PLOT HOLE and People don’t do such things! Or do they? I raise narrative tradition as a yardstick because I want to demonstrate the boundaries for realistic and logical, as it were.

Firstly, it is normal to use the mundane on a symbolic level. Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman planting plants in his backyard, for instance. Secondly, it is normal for people to screw up as a plot point, see Hamlet stabbing Polonius through a curtain thinking he was Claudius, thus underscoring the genuine possibility of his madness. The core of the criticism against the Martha moment stems from the belief that one should not turn the plot around such a seemingly mundane occurrence, much like how the Bourne series should not be premised around the moment where Jason sees his target’s children and would have to kill them too, kill their father in front of them, or holy crap, my target IS a person!!! The problem with Martha in the minds of people who do not like this moment is that it is a coincidence, but hey, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles is premised entirely on coincidences. Oedipus literally goes to the oracle of Delphi, rage quits at the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother and so flees his country, and then meets a cranky old man in his self-imposed exile on a random road. Oedipus kills cranky old man in a fit of rage, then becomes king of Thebes because their king died and Oedipus delivered them from the terror of the Sphinx, winning him the hand of the widowed Jocasta. And then it transpires that the man he killed on that random road was actually his birth father, and Jocasta his mother, leading to a scene where Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus, saddened by the death of his love/mother/wife, takes her brooches and stabs himself in the eyes with them. Sophocles, my friends. Winner of the tragedy competition in Ancient Greece. Aristotle’s favourite playwright. But I am getting beside myself. In any story about free will v determinism, coincidence is the best way to show the hand of fate, as it were. And yes, BvS is about fate, see the conversation where Bruce thinks Clark is likely to go bad and his Knightmare sequence, or Lex’s mangled speech about Prometheus. 

What I’m saying is that the Martha moment checks both boxes of making narrative sense within the story, and the narrative tradition of tragedy which BvS borrows extensively from. So one can decide whether they liked it or not, and based on that, probably whether they can watch these plays or not (probably not), but I’m truly sorry to inform those people that the sort of ‘logical’ they desire only exists in formal philosophy where you can divorce the human element from it all. Then again, Aristotle did really like Sophocles… ;)