'Batman v Superman' - Film review

Review contains spoilers for this film. (But lets be honest the majority of the spoilers in this film are ridiculous. Besides, who worries about spoilers for the second film in a series?)

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was directed by Zack Snyder and is the second entry in the DCCU (If Marvel have the MCU then do Detective Comics have the DCCU? Does it have a name yet?). The first was Man of Steel which was fairly well received in the comic-book movies community but which I personally haven't seen. To be honest you don't have to have seen it to watch this film because Superman is Superman and he's pretty well established in this film anyway. I'll try to avoid comparisons to the MCU, although it can't be ignored that, coming second, the DCCU has to make a clear decision whether to avoid or embrace emulation.

This is a very large image if you click on it.

First let's talk about what the film got really right - Ben Affleck's Batman. Here we have the new best film interpretation of the caped crusader, better, even, than his incarnation in the Arkham videogame series. This dark knight really is a force of nature: the first time we as an audience encounter him from the perspective of an outsider, a policeman investigating a case, the atmosphere is distinctly oppressive and threatening and his first appearance heart-jolting. Maybe Bale's Batman was more valiant and honourable but he now seems lumbering, relying merely on brute force in comparison to Affleck's, who uses stealth and intelligence and demonstrates martial and athletic prowess in all of his confrontations. What's more, Affleck's more cerebral, reserved Bruce Wayne who gives the impression of an inner strength was a more complimentary and coherent fit to his Batman than in Bale's Bruce/Bat pair. There's something about the distance the audience are afforded from Wayne here which creates a sense of mythology around this bat - a force of nature, something of the dark which is separate from our sense of reality, which doesn't necessarily obey our laws of physics as he leaps from wall to wall and vanishes into darkness. We're occasionally offered a little look into how this effect is created, for example seeing Alfred tinkering with the voice alterer, but here Batman v Superman somehow manages to have its cake and eat it because while we see that it's just technology and can marvel at Wayne's prowess it doesn't take away from the fact that that 'Tell me, do you bleed?' is chillingly un-human.



But that's what Zack Snyder really gets right - the mythology. Watchmen, 300, Suckerpunch. The aesthetic, the macronarrative, the mythology. This world is steeped in bold visual symbols which create antitheses at every turn. The '1%' Bruce Wayne crushing the filth in squalid Gotham as the terrifying Batman, symbol of the night; the '99%' Clark Kent protecting the innocent in shining Metropolis as the saintly Superman, who draws his power from the light of the sun. Of course, these are images that exist in the comics, but Snyder makes a work of art by pulling them out larger than life and having the very imagery do battle. The world which is built is fantastic: dark and brooding with a sinister undercurrent and sense of ulterior motives which personified itself in Eisenberg's Luther, who in terms of characterisation and acting was just a perfect fit for this universe as the realisation of all its vices. This world also shows the tension between the ideologies of our two heroes as a palpable force which demonstrably threatens to pull this world apart by the seams - as with the ominous graffiti on the Superman statue and the crowds outside the Capitol, there are forces larger than any individual at work. Like the graphic novel medium every frame/scene has to say something about character, plot or world so the whole film is steeped in metaphorical meaning which I probably just read into it as an English student.

This all comes to a head in what is definitely the best superhero fight scene in recent superhero movie cinematic history. Not exactly a wide subset I know but I wanted to express that it was especially cool without having to try to remember every fight in a superhero film since Stark v Stane in Iron Man. Snyder's world-building works ceaselessly through the setup of the film to excite these two characters like charged particles so that at the slightest push will send them flying at each other, so you know (if you didn't already know from the trailers) that the final confrontation would be big. There's even an element of delayed gratification in the first 'Tell me, do you bleed? You will.' confrontation which makes the eventual confrontation all the more inevitable and satisfying. And this fight is amazing. Like, full, balls to wall, two titans of conflicting ideologies ripping the shit out each other in utterly brutal and holy-shit-did-he-just-crash-through-how-many-walls? fashion. It's partly because in the chase scene we get an early taste of this Batman as a Arkham-series-esque martial-artist that seeing him decked out in steel plates, lumbering along with an elemental force of determination informs the audience just what a threat Superman is. It is everything you could want from a film called Batman v Superman, that confrontation.

However.

This is the point at which a film called Batman v Superman would have been absolutely breathtakingly amazing, but a film called Batman v Superman: Damn of Justice just missed the mark by enough to leave you with a slightly nonplussed grimace on your face by the time the credits roll. What the film lacked was logic - it had aesthetic and mythology to build towards this titanic confrontation, all of the vital ingredients to form what was needed, and yet they were somehow mixed together in a way which left the final product decidedly half-baked. Cooking metaphors. This crumbling storytelling plagued the final act of the film but also cropped up occasionally throughout the main body of the 'Batman v Superman proper' bit. As I mentioned previously, the two heroes were so powerfully charged against one another that the slightest spark could have ignited the powder keg (mixing metaphors in this paragraph apparently). Superman even told Batman not to answer the bat-signal in the 'do you bleed' bit, saying 'consider this mercy': in which 'this' is presumably 'not killing you'. In the case of excellent world- and character-building culminating with Superman literally (figuratively) throwing down his gauntlet, why do you then need some convoluted gladiator-style subplot where Luther commands Superman to kill Batman, on pain of his mother's death? To protect Superman's integrity? Because he's too high and mighty to ever actually follow through on his warning? This felt like a cowardly step down from what could have been achieved in the unfurling of Superman's story, especially since a whole load of the film is about Superman, and the wider world, doubting his moral compass and the need for him to be do good.

As if that isn't bad enough, of course, the exact same thing happened in Batman's story with the absolutely absurd end to the 'Batman v Superman proper' battle. If Snyder had wanted the resolution to that conflict that he gave us then it's unescapable that he was just too good at making the two heroes so completely antithetical to each other. I was so excited wondering what huge catharsis could possibly resolve the differences. Even considering the events of the final act a 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but once we defeat the big bad this conflict still isn't settled' would have been acceptable. The resolution we got, however, was 'our mothers have the same name so alien god-man fascism is no longer an issue to me even though my fears were totally vindicated by that trippy dream/prophecy I had earlier'. A trippy dream/prophecy which isn't referenced again in the film, because of course Batman being shown a world stamped under Superman's heel isn't relevant to a film called Batman v Superman. I've seen a breakdown on Facebook of the multiple layers of meaning to that circumstance from Batman's point of view, where he is essentially become the evil which he thought he saw in Superman, but if that's the case we need to see that in the moment very clearly, not have to analyse it ourself based on knowledge of the comics, otherwise it's completely ridiculous. The hubris of a man who thought he could single-handedly cleanse Gotham, of a man who thought he could single-handedly fight a god, would prevent such a man from seeing the humanity in an enemy he thought was a threat to the world when he was so close to accomplishing the goal he had pursued so tenaciously as to have a training montage.

The final act is where everything just absolutely goes to shit. In our cooking metaphor from earlier, Snyder was making a Batman v Superman cake. Up to and including the fight on the rooftop, maybe it had a bit too much baking soda in parts but generally it would have been a nice tasting cake. Then, he went and took it out the oven too early and decided on the toppings and fillings: 'Jam, and buttercream, and icing, and... marmelade... and sprinkles, and oreos, and pickles, and a whole cod, and then sprinkle some arsenic - lovely!'. It was an interesting decision to 'start' the DCCU with a cataclysmic fight between the two main players, and it's easy to see a way in which it could have worked - unlike the MCU all Batman and Superman are very well established in pop culture as symbols in the themselves of what they represent (Superman: space Jesus, Batman: dark knight). In this almost 'innate'-cultural understanding of the two characters the DCCU had the scope to make the interesting decision to begin the series with conflict without losing the audience on where the conflict arises from. There you have the premise for a simple and effective movie based on character which creates a solid base for the growth of a new CU, but instead you end up with this disordered mire as the film fought to introduce as many new things as it possibly could. The film finishes almost unrecognisably different from how it started, from huge amounts of detail on a few things to bugger all on loads of fluff.

What's more, whereas the premise of Batman v Superman gives the DCCU the chance to immediately distance itself from that other, largely homogeneous, cinematic universe snapping at its heels, the final act of all the goodies together against a baddy puts us back in very familiar and boring territory. Boring not only because it's been done before, but also because even viewed as a completely separate entity it's poorly executed and just turns into another action film with a load of explosions thrown in at the end to make the audience go 'ooo aaaaah'. At least, unlike Man of Steel, the final fight occurs on waste ground and not in central Metropolis so we know the stakes are absolutely nil. At least Superman punching a city-levelling leviathan into space and being hit by a nuclear missile and surviving proves the previous 'Batman v Superman proper' fight demonstrably ridiculous. At least we got some female inclusivity which amounts to Wonder Woman sort of helping (Batman and) Superman fight Doomsday I guess? At least a fight against Doomsday makes the coolest Batman ever, who just whipped 30-odd fools The Raid-style and who would have made an excellent bedrock for an emergent DCCU, look completely incompetent.

Looking to the future of the DCCU is a bit of a mixed bag. All of the principles taken individually in this film are on a solid course to create great spin-offs. Despite his humiliation in the fight with Doomsday I can't wait to see Affleck's Batman in his own films and in Suicide Squad, nor can I wait to see Wonder Woman developed in her own films as more than a tacked-on extra, as well as in ensemble films as more than a tacked-on extra. There's a sense that her being included at all was cynical, deflecting potential criticisms of yet another sausage-fest superhero movie by including a female principle, but then not really doing much with her and not even having her name in the title of the film. Ideally, she would have been crucial to fighting Doomsday or, ideally ideally, crucial to resolving the 'Batman v Superman' conflict without Doomsday having a look in at all, but I guess just having her show up must count as inclusion. The rushed trailer-within-a-film, the 'introduction' (teasing) of the other JLA members, was another cynical move which I guess is exciting for hardcore DC fans but just felt like another unreasonably rushed addition to an already overcrowded film - and the way in which they're all filmed together feels contrived (how did they get the footage of Aquaman's face if he destroyed the camera filming him?). Other things about the ending smack of cynicism, for one Superman's death, which is impossible to care about because he's Superman and earlier in the film he was pretty alright being smacked by a nuclear missile, and for another the last scene with Luther, which was a vague, poorly reworded reshoot of every post credit scene in that other cinematic universe, in which Luther could easily be threatening that Thanos is going to come and piss about in the DCCU after Infinity War. However, the threat of big bads out in space is significantly reduced when we've already been hastily introduced to the idea that there are other Aveng- sorry, I mean 'Metahumans' - out there just waiting to band together and fight big bads from space. Looking forward to Justice League Part 1, it's even more disappointing that the Batman v Superman conflict sits in the limbo between unresolved and resolved well, as that would have been great material to include in the forming of the new team.

So in summary Batman v Superman is a film excellent for its character- and world-driven aspects, thanks to the towering visual mythology constructed by Snyder, but which suffers in the story-driven department because of lapses in logic and many missed opportunities. The interpretations of Batman and Superman were however so perfect in presenting the essences of their characters that we just have to hope and pray that neither actor is too embarrassed by this movie to want to reappear and that future writers will be able to crawl their way out of the wreckage of this film to reignite some interest in the characters when the JLA movies comes out.

3/5.

Please feel free to comment what you agree or disagree with, I'd be delighted to discuss, and you can leave your email address to be notified of replies or comment anonymously if you'd prefer. More reviews coming soon :)

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It seems I write the most material on comic book movies, I remember my Ultron review was really long too, so I may do a direct comparison with Civil War as a separate article later down the line.