Batman vs. Superman: A Review

MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW

Let's not waste time, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

After two hours of adolescent bullshit, DC Comics' three biggest, most well-known iconic heroes team up to do battle with a rampaging monster. Theoretically, this would be an amazing moment. The first time all three of these characters, one of whom is making her cinematic debut, have appeared together on the big screen. It should be uplifting to the audience and gratifying to long-time fans of these characters. But's it not. Because the previous two hours have not given any kind of logical reason for this to happen and the moment is immediately ruined by Zack Snyder's shooting the film as though it was a disaster movie and not, you know, a fucking superhero movie. So the following battle is a disorienting mish-mash of explosions, lightning bolts, and Wonder Woman being tossed around like a rag doll by an utterly generic grey CG monster. It's boring, nonsensical, and not worthy of the portentous Hans Zimmer score blaring over it, the dingleberry-cherry atop this shit sundae.

And it's not like this was a hard concept to fuck up either. Putting aside the merits of doing a superhero versus movie, decades of comics have given the filmmakers a road map to follow to make this thing work. We've got two heroes, they don't like each other. Batman doesn't like Superman because he's nearly all-powerful and answers to no one. Superman doesn't like Batman because he takes the law into his own hands and beats up poor people. They start out merely exchanging threats until they're egged on by a super villain (Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor in this case) to distract the two heroes from his evil plan. The two heroes come to blows, neither winning, until the villain's plan comes to fruition and they decide to put aside their differences to save the day. Wonder Woman shows up to help, day is saved, villain defeated, and grudging respect is earned. Shake hands and see you in Justice League. And while Snyder's film follows some of those points, it diverts from this simple route into a convoluted mess and can't manage to establish any kind of coherent reasoning for anything that happens.

Here, the only good scene in the movie.

The central problem there is Lex Luthor. The entire thrust of the film is built around his actions and plans and none of them make any sense. He's working to convince the government to give him access to General Zod's body and other leftover Kryptonian stuff from Man of Steel by framing Superman as some kind of dictatorial God, dealing out death as he sees fit, but his entire conspiracy is unravelled by Lois Lane and the whole thing leads nowhere. Batman only gets involved with this whole story because he's tracking one of Luthor's henchmen for some reason that isn't clear. Wonder Woman is interested because Luthor's been tracking down super-people (the film's extremely clunky way of hinting at future DC films) and has some dirt on her. The film doesn't even give Luthor a clear reason for why he hates Superman besides some ninth-grade philosophy about "false gods & power" but we'll get back to that. And none of that is helped by Jesse Eisenberg's abysmal performance. What looks like it was supposed to be a riff on Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg becomes this weird, twitchy awkward Bond Villain. It comes across more like kid doing a bad impression of a malevolent puppet master.

Eisenberg is the weak link in one of the film's few strengths, its cast. There are a ton of talented people in this thing who could give marvelous takes on these chartacters but again and again are held back by the godawful script. Henry Cavill's Superman is still the confused, violent messiah from Man of Steel, Amy Adams' Lois is still little more than his morality prop. Ben Affleck almost manages to rise above with an interesting approach to Bruce Wayne but is dragged under by the filmmaker's slavish adherence to the Frank Miller psychopath Batman mold. The best performances come from Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, who immediately creates an onscreen presence and actually feels like she's embodying the character she's supposed to be playing, and Laurence Fishburne and Jeremy Irons' respective Perry White & Alfred. But that might just be because they get to make jokes and are too old for the heroes' schoolyard BS.

Superman (Henry Cavill) having an attack of Jesus Syndrome.

The only other good thing I can really say is that the heroes' costumes are all great. Wonder Woman put to bed all the doubts I had about her outfit and this is, by far, the best live action Batsuit ever. But even the few things and moments I liked were drowned out under the waves and waves of terrible decisions. The half-assed attempts to set up Justice League. Batman's bizarre hallucination scenes. The senate subplot that adds nothing. The awful dialogue choices. The Doubling-down on city destruction porn from Man of Steel. And most of all, the overwrought god metaphor constantly surrounding Superman. I think this was the filmmaker's attempts to both add some kind of thematic depth to the proceedings and justify more bullshit from Man of Steel. But what they don't seem to understand is that just comparing Superman to Jesus, depicting him as this weird ethereal floating being at the site of disasters, and having Lex Luthor go off on rambling tangents about, "Gods turning on mankind and power never being innocent" doesn't make your movie deep. It just makes it stupid. No, actually it's worse, because it's being stupid when it thinks it's being smart.

But it's no wonder they bring that stupid idea in, because Superman's Jesus Syndrome from Man of Steel turns out to be terminal this time around. Yeah, that's right. Superman fucking dies in this movie. Don't get mad at me, I gave you a fucking spoiler warning. Like it matters, there's no way he isn't coming back for Justice League. Which is really the whole problem with this movie. It doesn't understand superheroes at all. This is the "realistic" superhero taken to its logical extreme. This is a movie where Superman is dragged before Congress and Batman acts like Torture Guy from Zero Dark Thirty. It does that to characters made for children and I feel bad for every parent who took their kid to this depressing movie. And yes, there is a discussion to have about the maturing of Superheroes over time and how they can be used to handle difficult, real-world problems, but this movie isn't worth starting that discussion over. I'm sorry, Batman fighting pedophiles and human traffickers is just wrong. That shit's too gritty for prime-time network cop shows, let alone a comic book character.

I'd like to say I'm disappointed, but this is basically what I expected. A grim, desaturated shitshow that renders two of the most colorful, hopeful characters in American pop culture into scowling killers. A Wagnerian opera staged by a moody teen smashing his younger brother's action figures together. Everything that didn't sit right with me about Man of Steel amplified by a hundred. Batman vs. Superman is a deafening, defeating, and overly long slog. The only reason I'm not giving it a one out of five is because I like the cast and it promises some hopefully better movies. Come back and get me when my heroes are fun again.

Final Score: 2/5

Oh, and let me be the first to offer an apology to Tao Okamoto who plays Lex Luthor's assistant Mercy Graves. It's a thankless role with one spoken line, so she mostly comes off like Luthor's disposable Asian fetish model. Both Ms. Okamoto and the character deserve better than that.