Batman v Superman: Yawn of Justice Movie Review/Analysis/Rant

Following hot on the heels of the mess that was The Man of Steel (three years prior). Zach Snyder returns to the helm to give us the much anticipated Batman v Superman. After 15 years of production hell, comic book nerds finally get to see the caped crusader and krypton's last son on screen together, and even better, they are going to punch it out. Henry Cavill reprises his role as the current dark, brooding and mildly depressing interpretation of the titular Superman, along with (not everybody’s first choice) Ben Affleck completing the line up as Batman. 

The anticipation and build up after the release of the first teaser trailer of this movie was enough for me to get on-board the hype train, destination Suckersville. Luckily these expectations soon diminished after the release of the full length trailers that pretty much give away the whole plot and any big reveals that the movie had. Batman v Superman is just another entry in the "What should have been great" book, that also includes the Star Wars prequels, Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal (click on this shameless link to read my Indiana Jones review) and the Matrix sequels. 

Unrecognisable hero’s 

Batman has one rule, not to kill. However Batman v Superman totally seems to take a big steaming dump on this rule. Batman goes on a killing spree toasting 21 bad guys, he even goes as far as murdering people in his dreams. At one point when Alfred takes control of the Batwing I thought, Alfred was going to start murdering people also. This is one of the fundamental things about the Batman character, it's his code which he lives by, not to kill. Now people are going to point out that Burton's and Nolan's Batman either directly or indirectly killed bad guys in the other movies, these were isolated to perhaps a few through all those films, and not comparable to the scale of this movie. 

The Christopher Nolan Batman was different to the other big screen incarnations of the character. His Batman was dark and set in what could be considered the real world. It was very different to what we had seen before, it was interesting and it works well with Batman. It seems that for the Man of Steel, Snyder used Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy as a blueprint for his Superman movie, he made the error of trying to set his superman in the real world. It didn’t work out well, and all we got was a dark, uninteresting and depressing interpretation of Superman. I think that the studio were keeping the option open to reconcile Nolan’s Batman and Snyder’s Superman so they can share the same universe and easily crossover. Superman's character is supposed to live in a bright vibrant colored world. 

Superman also lacks any charisma and is just so boring and dreary. This is apparent in the opening montage of Superman saving people. He projects a gloomy expression when he rescues the Astronaut’s from an exploding rocket and a family trapped on the roof of a house during a flood, this is all done in slow motion, with no excitement or emotion, it’s as though saving people’s lives is a bit of a drag. Now if you cast your minds back to the Superman saving Lois Lane in the helicopter scene in the 1978 Superman movie, it felt exciting, we were experiencing Superman’s reveal to the world at the same time as Lois and everyone else. This was later used more recently and to good effect in Superman Returns, the plane scene was an excellent set piece, it showed what Superman was capable off. Superman is at his best when when he is saving people. These two scenes where more exciting than anything that was in Batman v Superman. Now I'm not saying that lines like "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's superman!", will fit into a present day incarnation of this character but it would have been nice for something that was a bit closer to the comic book version rather than something that has had all the joy sucked out of it. 

An established Universe 

Now you may accuse me of being a Marvel fanboy for criticising this movie, however the fact remains that Marvel have developed a model that has proven to be very successful. Although not all there movies may not be great (Iron Man 2 is pretty terrible) but overall they are pretty solid. Marvel were smart in taking their time to develop there universe and characters that inhabit it. When the time came to assemble the Avengers they already had a pre-established universe and developed their characters. The Marvel phase one to get to the Avengers was as follows. 

• Iron Man 
• Incredible Hulk 
• Iron Man 2 
• Thor
• Captain America: The First Avenger 

Dawn of Justice really brings together the three main members of the Justice League, whilst touching on some of the other members. For DC to establish there universe and characters there phase one consisted of. 

• Man of Steel 

One movie isn't enough to establish a universe with all the characters that inhabit it. Why didn’t DC use The Flash television series as a vessel to build upon the Flash? They would have had a pre-established character that would offered some familiarity. It’s a decent interpretation of the Flash and is actually a bit fun, instead the studio execs opted to recast the role and disregard the series entirely, makes sense. 

The final act 

The final act is where this already mess of movie really begins to fall apart. Batman is about to finish of Superman and the now infamous Martha plot point takes place. Once they learn that their mothers share the same name, through an awkward exchange, they suddenly bury the hatchet and become the best of buddies. The writers had obviously ran out of ideas on how to reconcile the relationship between Batman and Superman. One of the writers must have thought "I know, maybe we can get them to relate to each other as they both have mothers called Martha, and who doesn't love their mother?", if only Biggie and Tupac’s mothers had the same name, they might still be around today. 

The final act reveals that Luther has engineered General Zods remains into a weapon (Spoiler Alert, if you haven’t already seen the movie, why the hell are reading this post?). Snyder missed out on a golden opportunity of introducing a zombie Zod, they could have called him Zodbie, instead we get what can be best described as a cave troll. The first thing that popped into my head when I first saw Doomsday was Boromir in Lord of the Rings whilst in the Mines of Moria saying “They have a cave troll”. This whole reveal was not exactly a surprise either due to it being so heavily used in all the trailers. Doomsday felt awkwardly shoehorned in and it felt like the writers had ran out of ideas of how tie up the movie. They needed a climatic showdown for the final act. They needed a common threat so that Batman and Superman would have to work together to defeat. 

The Martha being kidnapped subplot is just to give Batman something to do, at this point all he was doing was swinging from building to building dodging Doomsday's heat vision. The final act of this movie should have been the titular showdown of Batman v Superman, after all the movie is called Batman v Superman.   

Things I didn’t like 

Below is a list with a detailed analysis of things that stand out in this movie that did not work or make sense.  

• Bruce Wayne's justification for going to war with Superman, he wasn’t totally responsible for the destruction of much if Metropolis in Man of Steel – Stupid 
• The Justice League all have their icons when Wonder Woman is looking at their respective files on Lex Luther’s computer, did Luther commission the design department to create them or did he bang them on Illustrator himself? – Stupid 
• Batman breaking his one rule 21 times, not to kill - Stupid 
• "I thought she was with you" line that Batman uses to try and inject some humour doesn't make sense as he knows fine well that Wonder Woman is with him – Stupid 
• Why did Lex Luther waste all that time to try and convince Batman and Superman to fight when he had created Doomsday anyway? – Stupid 
• Why did Lex Luther create a near indestructible monster that he can’t control? Presumably if Doomsday hadn’t been stopped he would have annihilated all of humanity including Lex- Stupid 
• Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of Lex Luther was totally mind boggling, to this day I don't know what was going on with that - Stupid
• Doomsday looking like a cave troll – Stupid 
• Doomsday v Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman fight sequence felt like a video game - Stupid 
• Batman stops himself from killing Superman because his mam has the same name as his murdered mam – Stupid
• Superman sacrifices himself to kill Doomsday, then 5 minutes later it shows that he is resurrected (More blatant Jesus symbolism), this devalues the whole idea of sacrifice – Stupid 
• Lois Lane being everywhere when they need a vessel to drive a plot point and the writers are not entirely sure how to do it - Stupid 
• Jimmy Olson is a CIA operative and gets murdered right at the start of the movie - Stupid 
• 151 minute running time - Stupid 

Things that I liked 

• Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Batman was probably one of the only decent performances in this movie. 
• I really liked the choreography and fight sequences with Batman in the warehouse. It’s the  only interesting action set piece in this movie, and gives you a little hope that a Batman movie may not be that turd (as long as Snyder is well away from it)
• And that's it.

Overall this movie isn’t the worst comic book adaption you will ever see, Fantastic Fourstic, Green Lantern and Wolverine Origins are all challengers to that title,. The Dark Knight trilogy is all but just a distant memory and Warner Bros. failed to build upon that. They saw that Marvel were raking in the money and decided that they wanted a slice of the action. Marvel took their time to develop a clear road-map of how they were going to get all there big heroes on the screen at the same time. It feels like DC have tried to take a shortcut and it has back fired in their faces. My expectation for the Justice League movie cannot get any lower so that if it is anything other than a big bag of crap then that will be a bonus.