Zack Snyder's Man of Steel was one of my most despised moviegoing experiences ever, mostly for what it did to the character of Superman, my favorite superhero. It always hurts to see characters you love treated abominably by a person who clearly hates them. In that instance, Man of Steel was a bad movie tarnished further by being an even worse Superman movie, which made it more miserable to sit through, for me personally.
But having gone through all that once, I went into Batman v Superman, directed by the same asinine, superhero hating filmmaker, knowing that his take on Superman and this time Batman as well, would be awful and backward and fundamentally opposed to the worldview that these characters are supposed represent. So I was prepared for the dour, depressing, grim and thoroughly unpleasant sit I knew it would be. I wasn't surprised by the fact that it was all of those things and worse. No, this time what really offended me was the sheer incompetence of the filmmaking on every possible level- from the atrocious and incomprehensible screenplay to the slapshot editing and dull, mindless, CGI shlock that were the fight scenes. To call it an incoherent mess is being kind.
When you start off with the premise that Batman and Superman have to fight each other, you might want to come up with some kind of a reason for that to logically occur. The movie doesn't even try, and the ridiculous fight scene doesn't happen until about 90 minutes in, so if you're waiting for that there's a lot of pretentious nonsense you're going to have to endure first. In this world Batman and Superman are both miserable assholes who hate all people and themselves, hate being heroes, and hate each other on principle. Boy does that sound like the characters we've known for 75 years or what? Who hasn't been waiting for a version of those two that really wants to make you hate them both, right? Anyway, forget all that- that puts us in a bizarro universe from the start, one that I'm not convinced anyone, fans or general audiences have ever really wanted to see. This Batman murders people remorselessly and mercilessly- people who “deserve” it I suppose, since they're the worst criminals ever, like human traffickers and pedophiles, but again, is this really appropriate for a Batman movie? Superman on the other hand, rescues people in slow motion and looks miserable doing it, taking on the burden of their worship with a constant frowning, constipated expression on his face that really strips all the joy out of your soul while watching him.
So into that premise, a series of disconnected and illogical scenes drag on for 90 minutes, throwing endless amounts of characters on the screen, some interacting aimlessly with each other, with people spouting random bouts of pseudo philosophical dialogue at no one in particular, and Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor chewing all the scenery as he contorts himself into a barrage of physical and verbal tics, one of the very worst performances in comic book movie history slapped on top of a character that makes no sense in either motivation or development. But he's actually not the only one. I'm very serious here- nothing in this movie makes any sense. There is no connective storytelling tissue from scene to scene, no motivation ascribed to any character to do or say anything they ever say, and no sense to be had from the awful, and I mean awful dialogue the actors are forced to recite (poor, seasoned vet Holly Hunter suffers the worst from this as she looks embarrassed to be sharing the screen with Eisenberg and confused herself as to why she's saying the things she's saying).
In the middle of this mess comes a ludacris fight scene with Batman and Superman, which despite an hour and a half of set-up, still has no reason to happen, and the resolution it randomly comes to before Batman stabs Superman in the heart with a kryptonite spear is so mindboggling and laughable that it's quite shocking it made it past however many rewrites this script suffered from. Oh, and throughout this collage of pasted together nonsense we have a multitude of dream sequences tossed at us in the form of Batman's recurring nightmares, which are essentially meant to provide the audience with a series of teasers for upcoming movies by throwing in Justice League characters who serve no purpose in this film either- and that includes Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, unimpressive and emotionless in her debut), who wanders into and out of the frame with virtually no explanation to justify her presence at all. It's apparently so she can pop up in the last big fight, where she joins Batman and Superman in ultimate poser mode (hilariously set to out of nowhere rock/disco music) as the three of them take on Doomsday, an ugly and uncreative looking grey, CGI troll monster for a boring and senseless battle that reaches no satisfying conclusion- unless you count the end of the movie finally arriving as one in and of itself (you might).
This is such an empty and soulless bore of a movie that it's hard not to feel drained by it as it steals nearly three hours of your life without giving anything back to you. There's not a single character who brings any color or energy to this film or whose actions make any sense as far as a story is concerned. Removing Zack Snyder from anything further to do with the DC universe would be the least punishable action that an overprileged, untalented hack like him deserves. I won't look forward to any DCU movie until WB does this, but if it makes the billion dollars in box office money that it was created to do (and that's really all this was created to do), I suppose there's no reason to expect it to happen. It's a sad day for people who love these characters, and an equally sad day for people who just want to be entertained by a decent movie. Batman v Superman was garbage, and I don't care how much money it makes- it deserves to go down in flames along with Zack Snyder's career.
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