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Warning Spoilers...I am going to spoil the shit out of this movie so if you don’t want to have this movie spoiled for you, then move along.
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
First of all, can we all agree that this is maybe the dumbest title for a movie in recent memory? I don’t know anyone that doesn't call this movie “Batman Vs Superman” when talking about it, though get ready...since this movie wasn’t very good people WILL be referring to it as Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice with the same tone movie and comic nerds use when mentioning Fan4stick.
This movie isn’t terrible. It’s also not great. This movie rests in the wasteland of mediocre films that are comprised of both good and bad parts. The pieces do not come together to makes it better, they stay separated and distracting. I think this movie is very conflicting, so I’ll split this review into separate parts and go over the good and bad. Hopefuly we can bring it all together by the end of the review.
Plot:
Ok I’m going to run through the “story” here. So, in the movie, some people like Superman, some people don’t because he helped destroy most of Metropolis (which in this world is as close to Gotham as New Jersey is to Manhattan.) Aside from the events of Man of Steel, in the beginning of the movie Supes is involved in stopping a terrorist from killing Lois Lane and some other people end up dead (I think only a seemingly random photographer being executed was shown). [NOTE: I later found out that this was Jimmy Olsen...so in the Snyderverse Jimmy Olsen was not introduced and killed off right away] Somehow Superman gets blamed and Lois finds a weird bullet. She spends the majority of the first half of the movie finding out that Lex Luthor developed the bullet...this leads nowhere and has zero impact on the rest of the plot.
Luthor finds kryptonite in the Indian ocean and wants to bring it to the US as a possible countermeasure to Superman and any future Kryptonians. A senator that is holding hearing against Superman doesn't want to give luthor permission to bring the kryptonite into the country though he already has some in the form of a scalpel. After a series of misfortunes he puts explosives in a wheelchair and kills the senator and a ton of other people after threatening said senator with a literal jar of piss. Yes Lex Luthor uses a jar of piss to intimidate a US senator, then kills her and a room full of very important government type people with an exploding wheelchair.
Batman hates superman because Supes’ battle with Zod lead to the death of many of his employees. Then after a series of bad dreams including a possible time traveling Flash with an ominous warning, Batman does a Rocky 4 training montage and develops Kryptonite weapons to fight the boy in dark dark blue. Superman does a whole lot of nothing though he does have a long talk with his ghost dad and threatens Batman.
Batman and Superman fight for a couple minutes though the only reason it happens is Superman is blackmailed by Luthor (who off screen kidnapped his mom). Unlike almost every other fight between the two in comic history it is not based on their differing moral outlooks, because honestly both of them are just about the same in this universe, only superman can lift an oil tanker and Batman can’t. The fight itself is as over the top as a fight between them should be. Batman hits Superman with a sink and then swings him around like Mario throwing Bowser into a bomb at the end of Mario 64. Then Superman tells Batman that his mom’s name is Martha and is the same name as HIS MOM! Now they’re best friends and team up against Luthor to save Martha Kent. Batman then kills a bunch more people and saves her. Then Doomsday shows up because Luthor put Zod’s body into some goo along with his blood.
Everyone fights Doomsday, Superman sacrifices himself twice and is dead at the end of the movie. What? I told you I was going to spoil this movie. So here is one spot where Snyder missed a golden opportunity. At the end of the movie we see Clark’s grave and Lois throws dirt on it. Don’t worry though, Snyder immediately relieves all the tension when he shows the dirt she just threw on the casket move like when Superman first flew in Man of Steel. The movie should have cut to black and played sad music right after she threw the dirt. Then if he wanted to, at the end of the credits it should have returned to the grave and showed the dirt slightly shift. It’s like Snyder couldn’t wait to admit he didn’t kill superman.
The main issue I have with this plot is motivation. I understand Batman’s motives...he at least has a reason to fight superman (from his loss of friends and weird dreams). I have no idea behind Luthor’s motives. He hates Superman, because he’s Lex Luthor and we the viewer are supposed to just accept this. Superman doesn’t like Batman because he’s a hypocrite and doesn’t like that batman operates outside the law...despite the fact that he operates outside the law as well. Since we’re just scratching the surface so far, lets dig deeper into each character.
Batman:
Anyone who said Ben Affleck was a bad choice has to eat crow. Ben was great as both Bruce Wayne and as Batman. He’s a great actor and did a fantastic job. He has a serious and grim tone, this is a Batman that has seen some shit and Ben makes sure the audience knows it.
Now that We’ve gotten Batfleck’s amazing performance behind us, let’s get to the elephant in the room. Batman kills people. Batman kills a lot of people. Cold blooded, he guns people down, blows them up, sets them on fire, and straight up stabs motherfuckers. There’s a random dream sequence that has him killing, but I’m not counting that...it was a dream, I bet batman dreams every night of snapping the Joker’s neck. No, I’m talking about in the movie he’s chasing Luthor’s men down with the batmobile and shooting them, blowing them up and crushing them. Now Batman wasn’t chasing them to save a hostage’s life, he wasn’t trying to defuse a bomb, or protect an orphanage that’s on fire. No he’s trying to steal the movie’s mcguffin from Luthor. To steal the kryptonite from Lex Luthor, Batman kills about a dozen men. Later in the movie he kills a bunch in the Batplane when going to rescue Superman’s mom as well. This shouldn’t surprise us afterall, this is the universe that had superman killing the very first opponent he faced.
As any fan can tell you, this isn’t the first time Batman has killed, though I can only think of a couple runs in the comics that he has been this brutal...the almost universally loved Dark Knight Returns (this movie takes a lot of inspiration from) and the almost universally panned All Star Batman and Robin. Note: both of those stories are from the same universe and written by Frank Miller, they’re just separated by a few decades in terms of a timeline.
Superman:
I was never a huge fan of Man of Steel, though I thought Henry Cavill did a fine job with the script he was given. The movie was melancholy and dreary and he played it as such. In this movie he’s a plain white bread and mayonnaise sandwich. He’s the Bud-Light at a beer tasting, a Toyota Camry at a car show, the unflavored Jello at a dessert buffet. He is boring. There’s nothing great, nothing inspiring, just a mopey “Wahhh no one likes me” attitude. His is not any Superman I’ve ever known in comics, movies, or animation.
So Supes has a random montage of him saving people around the world to show the audience that he does good things, and he bangs Lois in the bathtub to show that...uh...he likes women? Anyway, he wants to give up at multiple times in this movie only to have Lois urge him on and he actually quits being Superman for like 2 minutes so he can walk up a mountain and talk to ghost dad while ghost dad moves rocks from one pile to another. If this is what Snyder considers a character arc or character development then we’re in for some trouble with all the characters involved in Justice League.
Wonder Woman:
Though Diana Prince doesn’t have a lot to do in this movie, what she does do, she does well. For the most part Gal Gadot spends her screen time looking pretty and flirting with Bruce Wayne, once she dons her practically colorless outfit to fight Doomsday, the kick ass meter gets knocked up to 11. She is badass and based on her action scenes, I look forward to seeing her stand alone film. Wonder Woman is the most comic-accurate character in the whole movie. She enjoys the battlefield and relishes going against tough opponents.
Lex Luthor:
Ok let’s do this. I’m not one to say that every incarnation of every character has to be the same. Heath Ledger’s Joker was different from Mark Hammil’s Joker was different from Jack Nicholson’s Joker was different from Ceasar Romero’s Joker. All of them are unique, all of the behave differently and would act differently in a different situation. All of them are still worthy representations of the Joker in their respective universes.
Eisenberg’s Luthor is a fucking mess. He’s rich and influential and hates Superman but every single other aspect of the character is devoid of what makes Luthor seem like Luthor. Eisenberg honestly behaves more like the Joker or Riddler would if they were super rich. He’s not this cold, calculating, charismatic businessman we would expect. In many versions of the comics/tv shows/animated movies Luthor runs for president and wins by a landslide thanks to his calm exterior and ability to play 10 steps ahead of everyone else. In BvS, he can’t even make a speech, I was slack jawed at the ineffectuality of his words to everyone around him. He rambles on every chance he gets with literary quotes that wouldn’t be out of place if they came from Batman’s villain, the Mad Hatter. (In fact he goes on an Alice in Wonderland streak at one point!) Eisenberg twitches, ticks, and mutters under his breath throughout the whole movie.
Ugh I just want to punch him in the face
The worst part of his performance is that Eisenberg takes up more screen time than almost any other character. He is one of the main parts of this movie. He steals every scene he is in by shitting all over it. I found him annoying at best. He would not have been nearly as annoying if he weren’t in so much of the movie.
Lois Lane:
So Lois Lane is a character that is normally presents a problem for people to write for. Aside from comics, she’s normally used simply as a plot device or as a damsel in distress. Man of Steel had her on a kryptonian ship...for some reason...to I guess make her more important to the plot, though it came off as forcing the character down our throats. They solved that problem in the first half of this movie, giving her the duty of solving the bullet issue, but then in the second half of the movie she’s a useless distraction that throws away the world saving mcguffin, then tries to get back the mcguffin, then is trapped and turned back into a damsel in distress for the mcguffin. All character progress lost.
Supporting Cast:
Laurence Fishburne is great as Perry White in this one. Unlike Man of Steel he has reasons to be in this movie and comes off as a great character.
Jeremy Irons was a phenomenal Alfred. He captured the character perfectly and you really felt that he was a man that put up with Bruce Wayne’s war for 2 decades. While I have problems with the script, and it would have been nice to have Alfred scold bruce for murdering people, I give him a pass because Jeremy Irons did such a great job.
So the acting is hit and miss, the story is a bit of a mess, but how does the movie itself hold up? Honestly, it’s another mixed bag. First the good: The cinematography is great. Some scenes are so perfectly presented that any random screenshot could be mounted and framed on a wall. This is where Zack Snyder shines.
His signature slow motion and slight pauses in action scenes match well with comic book movies. However, the editing and transitions from scene to scene is absolutely fucking terrible. There are no establishing shots in the entire movie, the audience is pretty much just dumped from one scene to the next to watch two people talking to each other. The subpar editing and scene transitions really adds to the jarring feeling when watching this movie.
The disjointed plot certainly doesn’t help but it’s all made more obvious to anyone that pays a little attention to the way a film is put together, and for people that like to sit back and just enjoy without analyzing it knocks them out of the experience. The movie has two very dieirrent feelings to it, the first half is very disjointed and has plot points that lead nowhere (like Lois’ bullet investigation). The second half is action packed but skims over so many things so quickly that it seems frantic. So the first half drags and doesn’t seem cohesive and the second half is rushed. I wish they cut stuff out of the first half of the film and expanded on the second half.
BvS reeks of studio influence. Scenes like Wonderwoman opening her email to watch clips of future DC products featuring their logos was so jarring and embarrassing, you wonder why Snyder put it in his movie. Instead of a clever nod to future characters and events, it came off ham fisted and shoved down the audience’s throats. Instead of this messy jumble of plots and odd characters, this could have been 2 separate movies, hit the same plot points and been very cohesive successful pair of films.
So there we have it, a sloppy movie that is neither a complete success nor a complete failure. It lies somewhere in between. Was it disappointing? As someone who love these characters and comic book movies in general, yes. Is the DC movie universe doomed? Absolutely not. I consider this movie a stumble but it landed on its feet. I’m really looking forward to Suicide Squad and I can’t wait for a standalone Batman movie with Affleck. All together this movie was a mixed bag.
5.5/10