“All of DC’s decisions are the result of fear,” Tim Burton once said in an interview about his pioneering comic book movies, and following the commercial underperformance of Man of Steel (making only 2/3 of the billion dollars they’d hoped for) their latest panicked flail is to throw Batman into the sequel in the hopes of riding the Dark Knight movies coattails to equal success. This has somehow lead us to Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman, a bizarre mishmash of heroes and world-building for which I cannot discern the intended audience.
The basic plot of the film, which is remarkably difficult to follow due to the almost total lack of narrative connective tissue or introduction, is that Lex Luthor wants to destroy Superman for some reason, so he has a terrorist organisation in somewhere described as ‘Nairomi, Africa’ (not a typo) machine-gunned which people blame on Superman for some reason, but has them all killed with his own proprietary ammunition for some reason (you may be noticing a theme here) which Lois Lane starts tracking back to him while Superman goes on trial before the US Senate (a jar of Lex’s piss is also involved for some reason). Bruce Wayne wants Superman dead due to the whole complete destruction of Metropolis thing from the last film and spends his spare time building Kryptonite gadgets from a chunk of Zod’s ship, while Lex goads the two into fighting. Then Wonder Woman turns up and they fight a Cave Troll together. If I’m missing anything (and I’m cutting out a lot) it’s because this film manages to be both absurdly convoluted and largely nonsensical. And before you ask no, neither Batman with his detective skills nor Superman with his X-ray vision realise who the other one is, nor does anyone connect the alien superbeing with the Daily Planet reporter who looks uncannily similar to him.
The cast all seem to be trying to see how far it’s possible to remove their characters from the audience’s conception of them while still retaining the name. Batman gets the furthest away, being a murderous psycho who brands criminals and kills at least fifteen people over the course of the movie, and not even in the Arkham games way of snapping their spine while the game insists they’re not dead, he just flat out shoots people. The only thing connecting him to other iterations of Batman I know of (besides the armoured fursuit) is the obligatory opening scene of his parents being shot in slow motion. Superman spends the entire film moping and outside of a poorly-shot montage sequence does very little that could be considered heroic. The entire film also seems to proceed as if his X-ray vision disappeared in between films, as multiple plot points would not be able to happen if Clark took even a cursory glance at his surroundings.
Lex Luthor spends the entire film either very, very high or in the middle of a manic episode, in what can be described as the 2016 version of Eddie Redmayne’s performance in Jupiter Ascending, and as such keeps wavering between entertainingly camp and jarringly annoying from line to line.
And as for Wonder Woman, despite barely five minutes of screentime she’s probably the best part of the movie. Her sudden entrance during the Cave Troll fight accompanied by a sweet guitar riff and subsequent dismembering of said troll is the most engaging the film’s action scenes get, even though I don’t think her and Superman exchange even a single line.
The movie Batman v Superman reminds of the most is probably Oz the Great and Powerful, another film that only exists as set-up for another story. BvS pays lip-service to greater themes of justice and fear and gods and stuff, but it all falls away by the final act leaving our heroes to fight a new enemy who has nothing really to do with anything, and several inconsequential dream sequences and a subplot of Lex tracking the future Justice League members tease future films without adding anything to the movie. I’m not really sure who this movie is for, the bizarrely grim elements are inappropriate for younger viewers (the traditional superhero audience) but unlike Nolan’s films they never coalesce into more thoughtful material that could appeal to adults. In the end I can only think to compare it to watching a twelve-year-old bashing their action figures together for 2 1/2 hours, by the end of which you’ll have long since ceased to care.
Film Runner 