So I recorded something off-the-cuff
for this, but it ended up being an incoherent, rambling, overly-long
thing that would have been unpleasant for an audience to sit through.
Much like Batman V Superman: Dawn of
Justice. ZING!
I'm partially kidding. Batman V
Superman is Warner Brothers and DC's attempt at jump-starting a
Justice League Movie Universe so that they can chase that Avengers
movie cash cow, which is something that's been tried before with
Green Lantern (and failed).
Actually, I saw the almost universal
panning of the film by the media as a curious thing, especially when
a couple people I respect on film/story opinions recommended it. This
made me curious enough to see it myself to form my own opinion. Well,
I have, and its complicated, and that's why I spent my Sunday night
hammering this out.
Short and spoiler-free take? Its a
disjointed mess with flashes of goodness but loaded with bloat and
inconsistencies that ultimately frustrate the viewer with wasted
potential.
From here on out, we're going into
spoiler territory.
No, seriously. HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD.
Bats V Supes is a direct sequel to
2013's Man of Steel, which was directed by Zach Snyder and starred
Henry Cavill as Superman. That was a deeply divisive movie that
garnered tremendous amounts of criticism, but did well enough to
warrant a sequel, and with Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy
wrapping up, meant that the time was ripe to open up the DC vaults
and get a good ol' fashioned crossover going. Two superheroes are led
by misunderstanding to fight each other, resolve that conflict, and
team up to take down the REAL villain. Tale as old as time, song as
old as rhyme.
Except Bats V Supes is something of a
bloated mess of a movie that has multiple ideas, plotlines, and even
tones jockeying for the limelight.
The plot of the movie, such as it is,
follows Superman trying to find his place in a world that is now in
awe of his godlike power, and sometimes fears him. Rightfully so, as
the opening sequence features Bruce Wayne rushing to Metropolis
during the climactic battle of the last movie and trying to save
people's lives while building an understandable resentment for the
carnage caused in Superman's wake.
We skip ahead to where Bruce
Wayne's hatred of Superman festers into a two-year obsession with finding a
way to stop or even kill the Kryptonian while Superman struggles with
trying to do Superman stuff like saving Lois Lane from bad guys and
being inspirational in a movie that wants to punish him for doing
Superman stuff. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor is trying to get the U.S.
Government to fund his attempts to experiment on Kryptonian
technology so that he can find a way to kill Superman. And Wonder
Woman shows up occasionally to justify her being in the climactic
fight scene with Doomsday.
Is it a total mess worth 29% on Rotten
Tomatoes? No. Zach Snyder continues to have a flair for shot
composition, and that's something I think people miss. Hell, during
Man of Steel, the movie goes from a washed out and gray color palette
that increases in colorfulness as Superman begins doing more and more
Hero stuff, so that by the end of the movie, its bright and colorful.
Which is not something I ever saw mentioned in Man of Steel reviews.
Action sequences are generally well put
together. When Batman fights goons, there's a visceral speed to how
he takes people down. When you get to the Main Event between Batman
and Superman, its a brutal slugging match as Batman has to keep
finding ways to hamstring Superman in order to be able to hurt him.
Ben Affleck is great as an older, more
jaded Bruce Wayne who's been doing the Batman thing for two decades.
There are hints at the cost of being Batman, such as the dead Robin
costume with Joker graffitti and the burned out husk of Stately Wayne
Manor. This is an older, wiser, but deeply flawed Batman who,
refreshingly, makes mistakes and gets outwitted occasionally. No
Batgod here.
Instead of Batgod, we get Bat of
Murder. This is terrible, because in just about every Batman story
out there that isn't a movie version (*cough* Tim Burton *cough*), Batman has two simple rules: No
killing. No guns. What does he do here? Kill people with guns. Quite
a lot. Even in his dream sequences. Which makes him a hypocrite when
he criticizes the destruction that follows Superman. It makes them
both hypocrites. Its a horrible mis-characterization that mars an
otherwise fantastic Batman.
Wonder Woman is played by the Fast &
Furious' Gal Gadot. The whole “she's too skinny to play Wonder
Woman” thing before the movie came out was dumb. She looks fine
enough and there are worse problems with the movie anyway.
Acting-wise, there's not much to evaluate her on. She shows up to be
mysterious in the first half, and then shows up for the big team up.
The biggest problem with Wonder Woman in this is that she's
unnecessary. The movie could've happened without her with minimal changes. “Wonder
Woman: International Woman of Mystery” isn't a bad hook for the
character, but I doubt the movie in the works will take that
direction.
I maintain that Henry Cavill is a good
Superman. He's got the face and can sell the earnestness of the
character, but both Man of Steel and this seem hell bent on not
letting Superman feel good about helping people. Yes he saves people,
but its in a slow motion montage that shoots for profundity and
misses. Part of the appeal of Superman is that he is always going out
of his way to help people, even if its for fairly mundane stuff, like
stopping car accidents, foiling amateur bank robberies, or talking a
suicidal person off a ledge. Showing Superman fix a spare tire or
save a cat from a tree would have gone miles to helping his character
in this. They mention this this kind of behavior, when Bruce Wayne accuses Clark Kent of
writing puff pieces for Superman, but this is a direct reversal of the SHOW, DON'T TELL rule of storytelling.
Instead we get a sort of dream sequence
where the ghost of Pa Kent tells a depressing story about how he
helped his farm in a flood but in doing so caused the neighbors'
horses to drown and some offhand lines about how he's trying fly
Doomsday away from a populated area to minimize damage. Instead of
Superman going to Congress and giving an inspiring speech about the
infinite potential for human goodness, we have an explosion go off
before he can say anything at all in his defense. Hell, the speech he gives to the UN in
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is a more effective moment, and that
movie is all kinds of dumb.
Its enormously frustrating because the
movie is hell-bent on turning Superman into a Christ-figure instead
of turning him into Superman.
Amy Adams' Lois Lane is fine. She
snoops around doing reporter stuff, gets in trouble, Superman rescues
her. Classic Lois stuff. I still feel that she would make a better
Lana Lang, but oh well.
Jeremy Irons is amazing as Alfred. He's
got the right mix of paternal admonishment and encouragement for
Batman. Its great. More Alfred, please.
Holly Hunter plays Senator Finch, a
character who doesn't really bring much to the table outside of being
part of a SHOCKING PLOT TWIST that lands with a thud. It involves a
jar of piss labeled peach juice because of a comment made to Lex
Luthor. Because scatological humor, am I right folks?
Speaking of Lex, Jesse Eisenberg's
version is just...bizarre. He's very young, very clearly Lex Luthor
Jr., and has a mop of unruly hair and twitchy mannerisms that jump
all over the place. Sort of like those insufferable millennial
hipsters that infest San Francisco. An SJW hipster is a neat concept for a
villain, except at that point he's no longer Lex Luthor. Part of Lex's character through
his various incarnations has been the projection of strength and
control, even when its just a front. This Lex can't even make a
speech to a charity event without losing track of what he's saying.
He's a creepy weirdo, but unlike Gene Hackman's clownish sociopath or
Kevin Spacy's charismatic megalomaniac, this Lex doesn't have that edge
of brilliance lurking underneath that justifies his arrogance.
Instead, he's pretty much the Joker without the greasepaint.
“But its a false front! He's a master
manipulator and he's just fooling everyone into thinking he's a
wuss!”
Again, that's not Lex Luthor. Part of the
reason he hates Superman is because Lex wants to be strong while
Clark Kent IS strong. Lex will never be that kind of strong
because Superman's strength comes from his selflessness and Luthor is
deeply selfish.
Its a pity, because Eisenberg gives
flashes of the real Lex here and there, but again, the movie doesn't
let the character be the character.
Adding to the bloat of the film are all
the teases for the Justice League. Batman has a dream sequence where
he's in a post-Apocalyptic world with a giant Omega symbol and he
gets attacked by evil army people, and he starts murdering the
hell out of them until he gets overwhelmed by goons and full-blown
Parademons. As a tease for Darkseid, its kind of interesting, but it
grinds the movie to a halt and doesn't add anything other than a
blatant “WE'LL GIVE YOU DARKSEID PLEASE KEEP WATCHING THESE
MOVIES.” In that same vein, we get a "thrilling" scene as Wonder
Woman receives an email from Batman with data on other metahumans and
she opens up video clips of the Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg. Its hokey,
especially Aquaman spending thirty seconds going Grrrrrr at the
camera before destroying it, and it could have worked if the movie
would have let itself be hokey.
Which comes down to the fundamental
problem running throughout this movie. It feels like there is a constant
struggle between the whether or not the characters should act like
themselves. When they do, the movie is better. More often than not,
they don't for the sake of fitting into the plot's demands.
A strong character can completely
derail a scene or plotline simply by acting in character, spoiling
the writer's outline and taking it in a different direction. This
movie feels like the characters are trying to do that, but
editorial/studio intervention is constantly trying to clamp down on
them so that the officially mandated plot can assert itself. Because
we have to force nods to The Death and Return of Superman as well as
The Dark Knight Returns regardless of them making sense.
Much like that jar of peach juice, the label on Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice tries to tell you its a fun
superhero movie about how Superman and Batman met and planted the seeds of the Justice League, when its actually just
a bloated mess of conflicting plotlines, characterizations, themes
that reminds me more of X-Men III than either the Justice League or
even The Avengers.
Its a huge letdown, made more so by the
flashes of quality gasping for air. If it was a smaller movie simply
about Lex Luthor manipulating the media into getting Batman and
Superman to fight each other for his own amusement/ambitions, it could have
been fantastic. The climax of the film was and should have remained
the fight between the title characters and the realization that
they're both good men who've been played. Instead we got a pointless
fight with Doomsday for the sake of a fight and Superman's death for
the sake of an obvious resurrection down the road to save the Justice
League at a critical moment.
If we're lucky he'll have that 90s era mullet.
Not recommended.
