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| source// Warner Bros. |
Let’s get the Doomsday sized white elephant question out of the way, shall we…
Does Batman V Superman deserve all of the hate? No, but it definitely deserves some irritation, and it mostly comes down to Zack Snyder’s story-telling and a general attempt to do too much. Inevitably, some of that does deserve praise, because the film stutters out of bravery and scope, but it’s hard to remember that during it’s more stunningly stupid moments.
Inevitably also, the film is stuffed with moments that are designed to pull jaws to the floor (even when a lot of the most valuable spoilers were shown off in the bloody trailers needlessly), and the attempt at spectacle is more than admirable.
Though there have been some vocal takedowns of the film (and that’s not just from “critics” no matter how insistent the film-makers are), the high-points are as high as the low-points are low. And as the heroes navigate both peaks and troughs they combine to create some of the most memorable moments in comic book movie history. It’s a movie built on what the f*ck moments…
25. Did Bruce Wayne Just Fly?
The opening sequence, which basically has four opening shots not quite knitted together satisfactorily, features a great redo of Batman’s origin. It is just brief enough (though it establishes an unnecessary perversion for slow motion), it’s beautiful stylised and it pays homage to The Dark Knight Returns in a way that makes you genuinely happy for Snyder’s occasional flashes of brilliance.
Weirdly though, when it expands out to the Waynes’ funerals and Bruce is seen fleeing into the forest in the grounds of his home, it all goes a bit magic realism. Are we supposed to believe that this is a dream or is the young Wayne’s symbolic rise on Batpower what really happened? Regardless, it’s so unsubtle and insistent that the decision to include it is questionable at best.
24. Jimmy Olsen, RIP
If you cast your eye over the IMDB cast list, you’ll notice that Michael Cassidy (the photojournalist who accompanies Lois Lane on her idiotic desert adventure) was playing Jimmy Olsen.
Yep, the mild-mannered side-kick/whipping boy of the Daily Planet office was beefed up and turned into a special agent of the CIA before being unceremoniously killed off for effect. According to Snyder, they did it because they didn’t have room for him: talk about your disrespectful, unnecessary deaths.
It doesn’t even count as a spoiler: Jimmy isn’t even afforded a name in the film (besides the credits), and his death appears to have been a joke to Snyder. Seriously, what the f*ck?!
23. Luthor’s Security All Needs Firing
The cliche of heroes infiltrating villains’ parties in order to uncover their secrets (because supervillains ALWAYS have a massive server room just off their kitchen, because they’re all morons who sh*t where they eat), is now a completely unwelcome cliche. But Snyder doesn’t care about that, so we got to see Bruce Wayne walking freely around Lex Luthor’s house.
Fair play if he’d shown off Bruce Wayne’s sleuthing skills it might have been fine, but in showing us two security guards who shrugged at him walking into the computer room and then painting Mercy Graves (a bad-ass in her source animated show) as an easily duped idiot was a step too far. She’s supposed to be Luthor’s most trusted side-kick and she basically just giggled at Wayne’s obviously terrible cover story and left him to it.
Does Superman actually know that Bruce Wayne is Batman? Why isn’t there some sort of acknowledgement or at least questioning, when Clark Kent is still supposedly investigating the Bat as a dangerous vigilante? How bad an investigative journalist is he?
22. Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor
Let’s get this out of the way straight away: Jesse Eisenberg’s performance as Lex Luthor is diabolical, and not in a good way.
The biggest selling point of his frenetic, chaotic dot com era supervillain in the marketing was that it seemed like an act; like it was going to be peeled away to reveal the superior, cold genius with a God complex. But no, that was way too artful and too subtle for this script, and we had to accept the hyperactive enfant terrible shtick was the only layer he has.
He’s playing the wrong character entirely: like he has the crib sheet for the Riddler and just tried to get as much of that into the character as he could, while stamping a bizarro Mark Zuckerberg into the DNA too.
Eisenberg tried too many tiks and too many idiosyncracies that made his performance as over busy as the film it’s in, and it is fatal that he has exhausted his welcome before we’ve even got to see him level up into the bald megalomaniac everyone expected. Instead he now looks like a crazed Darkseid groupie.
21. Wait… Was That Man Bat?!
One of Bruce Wayne’s later nightmares (visions? Who knows, since the line is decidedly blurred), sees him exploring the family mausoleum (because that always ends well), only to discover his parents’ grave is bleeding.
Rather than running to the hills, he pokes at it until a gigantic, grotesque bat creature smashes out and fills just about everyone in the cinema’s trousers with smelly brown fear. Pretty sure that was Man Bat, or at least a nod to him.
Why can’t we just have a horror Batman movie?
20. Junkie XL’s Music
The decision to bring Hans Zimmer’s exceptional Man of Steel soundtrack was a great one, adding emotional gravitas to Superman’s heroic moments that simply wasn’t added by the poor script.
But the decision to also hire Junkie XL to inject his own immediately recognisable personality into the soundscape was inspired. As with Mad Max, his bombastic, ridiculous music is incredibly affecting because it is so deliciously otherworldly and other.
19. Alfred, Queen Of Sass
If you ask most people what their highlights of Batman v Superman were, they’ll no doubt leap to Ben Affleck’s new, hulking Batman as their number one. But as many people who praise Affleck will also no doubt pinpoint Jeremy Irons’ sardonic, booze-soaked new Alfred as another big selling point.
Gone is the constantly wet-eyed mother figure of Nolan’s trilogy, and the pleasant, slightly doddering man-servant of the Burton/Schumacher era to be replaced by an acerbic, sarcastic military partner who seems to just want Bruce Wayne to get laid. It was odd, but it was hilarious and an entirely welcome antidote to Michael Caine’s performance in The Dark Knight Rises.
18. Where Exactly Is Bruce Wayne?
Having said that Ben Affleck is great as Batman, he’s really not all that great as Bruce Wayne – or at least not as the Bruce Wayne who is supposed to be Batman’s real disguise. He’s okay as the all new businessman action hero too, but he’s missing the sliminess and the self-conscious douch-baggery that Wayne is supposed to cloak himself in to put people off the scent.
When he’s running into building rubble to save people and wearing suits that barely hide his UFC figure, it’s not all that hard to guess that he’s probably more than just a playboy millionaire. So hopefully Affleck will go back and watch Michael Keaton’s performances and we’ll see more in the stand-alone Batman films of his seedier anti-hero side.
17. The Knightmare
Let’s all take a moment to curse the bloody idiots who decided that they should show the Knightmare sequence. It robbed an excellent sequence of any impact whatsoever, and it’s hard not to feel robbed.
Regardless, the sight of Batman and Superman both killing multiple soldiers was definite WTF material – particularly when Supes cooked Batman’s fellow prisoners – and the forthcoming promise of Darkseid also fits the billing. So too does the sight of several of Superman’s soldiers literally fighting nothing, standing around brandishing their weapons at already defeated enemies waiting for their turn to notice Batman. Poor fight choreography is not the word.
So was it a dream? Was it a premonition of the future as it would have been without.
16. The Flash’s Time Travelling
Talk about bad story-telling killing a great fan-baiting moment. Why exactly did we need to see Flash’s appearance from the future? Sure, the idea was clearly to make his impact a game-saving play, but the way it was handled beyond the initial moment of shock was a comedy of errors.
The thing is, Bruce Wayne learned absolutely nothing from Flash’s appearance. Okay, so maybe you could argue that Flash’s input made it easier for Bruce to be switch to Superman’s team and help save Martha, but in order to do that he had to completely misread what Flash was saying to him.
It was all too vague and there was literally no time devoted to Bruce Wayne weighing up what he had been told. He just sort of banked the information, accepting that a man could appear through a lightning vortex at any point to give you crucial information. Bad story-telling.
15. Seriously, What’s With The Wizard Of Oz References?
Easter Eggs were always inevitable, and the film is soaked in fan-baiting moments, both from key source material The Dark Knight Returns and the wider DC comics universe, but to have three Wizard Of Oz references just seems like over-kill.
It’s not even like there’s any over-riding link between the two films: perhaps if they’d actually gone with Luthor’s public persona being a disguise (as per the wizard) the repeated references might have made sense. But as it was, three separate incidences just made it feel like an in-joke nobody at all was privy to.
14. The Justice League Files
The question of how the other members of the Justice League were going to be intergrated into the film was always a pertinent one (and one most people failed to correctly predict, aside from the time travelling Flash). What we got, on the surface was a clever, potted way of establishing their existence without having to see extended origins, even if it wasn’t particularly well crafted.
For the meta-humans to be discovered in files on Luthor’s computer wasn’t exactly without precedent but it wasn’t particuarly elegantly executed and felt more like an excuse to shoe-horn them in. In terms of pure fan-bait, it was all pretty clever – a tease without too much follow through – but it was such an island in the wider narrative that it’s hard to shake off the accusations that Batman V Superman was too concerned with being a trailer for Justice League.
And it really does seem the Flash is just going to be DC’s Peter Parker.
13. The Senate Bomb
Talk about your unexpected shockers (particularly since this might well have been the only key narrative moment kept out of the bloody trailers).
The whole Scoot McNairy conditioned terrorist thread was an intriguing one (though it deserved to be its own film really, and the trimming meant it didn’t have nearly enough development) and when his wheelchair exploded it provided a genuine WTF reaction.
Killing off such a big plot thread so symbolically in order to make Luthor seem more evil was a pretty big statement (not that any of it was necessary, really), but it also destroyed the interesting Trial Of Superman story (again, should have been a film in itself) and needlessly killed off supporting characters.
Poor Mercy Graves bit the dust before she even got a chance to say more than a couple of lines, and weirdly, there was no attempt to really talk about the fall-out. Superman wasn’t implicated – either as the killer or as the trigger – and it just felt like another shark jumping moment for effect.
12. Pa Kent’s Cameo
Was there really any need for this at all?
Superman’s ridiculous decision to retire for a grand total of about 13 seconds was unquestionably the film’s most pointless sub-plot. It didn’t lack logic, obviously, because the whole Weight Of Responsibility issue always crops up in superhero movies, but it wasn’t even barely fleshed out.
Instead of some moments of soul-searching, we instead got a needlessly distracting cameo vehicle to bring back Kevin Costner. But this wasn’t the earnest, moral barometer of Man Of Steel, it was a nightmarish abomination of Pa Kent, taking like he was auditioning for Twin Peaks of True Detective.
The entire script felt at times like it was a collection of cobbled together T-shirt slogans, but this fever dream (which AGAIN wasn’t even established as a dream or a vision, but whatever) was particularly poor. And why bring up a horrific story about drowning horses, when all he needed to do was steal Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility”?
11. All The Killing
Questioning the kill rate in a Zack Snyder superhero movie is nothing new, but with the furore that met Superman’s pained decision to kill Zod, it was hugely surprising to see him have Batman so gleefully kill multiple enemies.
Simply throwing out Batman’s code is exactly as bad as ignoring Superman’s code. In both cases, it would be an awful lot easier if they did, but therein lies their intrigue as characters. Apparently Zack Snyder didn’t care for that approach.
The component pieces were there of course – the idea that Batman had been transformed into a sadist by the ghosts of his recent past, but the explanation was left solely to the sight of dead Robin’s costume, and it wasn’t enough to explain the extreme shift.
10. Bat Cross Fit
Who knew that Batman was such a fan of the ultra-modern, ultra-hip fitness fad that is cross fit?
Having acquired himself a weapon to take down Superman, the Rocky-like hardcore training montage was a little redundant, but it at least gave Ben Affleck a chance to show off his ridiculous figure.
It was an exercise in macho porn, which makes a nice change from the way Snyder usually fetishises female characters. And again, it was mostly just distracting since Batman was ALREADY a massive physical threat before he started hitting tires with sledgehammers.
9. The Booby Traps
Yes, the sonic assault weapon was ported over from The Dark Knight Returns, but in the internal logic of the film it made little sense.
We’d literally just seen an extended montage of Bruce Wayne preparing the Kryptonite to turn it into a weapon he knows works against his God-like opponent, and yet he still wasted time setting up booby traps he knows wouldn’t have any effect.
It seems to have been another case of Snyder including moments that looked good, without considering the narrative effect (or the cumulative impact on run time), and the result was another flabby sequence that made Batman look a bit dense.
8. MARTHA?!
Obviously, the great fight scene between Batman and Superman (and it really was great) couldn’t end with a traditional combat resolution, but surely there could have been a better way of doing it than this.
Are we really to believe that Batman’s entire argument with Superman’s very existence was forgotten because their moms were called the same thing? That is a quite stunning narrative decision, particularly as it rendered the Flash sending a warning from the future entirely pointless. Seriously, what did Batman even learn from that?
And then, as a final insult to the story, we got a shot of Batman lying on top of Superman’s mother quipping horribly. Just stop it.
7. Lois Lane: Superhero
Snyder’s treatment of Lois Lane was a marked improvement on how she’s dealt with in Man Of Steel, but it still left a lot to be desired. Again, she was mostly imagined as the damsel in distress, whose moments of bravery and revelation lead everyone into deadly situations.
The idea of her – as Superman’s point of conflict – was pretty sound, but the actual substance of her writing was remarkably poor. For instance, how exactly did she work out that Superman needed the Kryptonite spear when she had no knowledge of Doomsday?
And how exactly did she manage to run from the roof of a building to its basement in a matter of seconds? Shouldn’t Lex Luthor have had a meta-human folder dedicated to her too?
6. Batman Standing Around All Pointless
As soon as Wonder Woman appeared in the final battle with Doomsday, Batman was rendered entirely pointless as anything other than a target. That sort of goes without saying – he was a man fighting alongside two Gods against a basically invulnerable monster, but it could have been hidden better.
Instead of incapacitating Batman, or having him aware enough to simply hide (there was no issue making him cower in fear when Superman got his power back earlier), Snyder just sort of let him stand around on the fringes looking like a spare part.
Having done so well to sell this new Batman up to this point, this final missed stroke was horribly noticeable.
5. Doomsday Can Destroy Everything, Except What Batman Is Hiding Behind
Partly because Batman was left standing around as a spectator in the final battle, against a horribly mismatched enemy, Snyder was forced to manipulate the situation to save him from dying.
Having him swing around and show off his agility was a nice touch to show he’s basically Man Plus, but the repeated decision to have Doomsday give off massive explosive waves made his survival confusing and inconsistent.
With the entire docks and buildings falling apart with the blasts, Batman was somehow able to hide under a piece of rubble (same material as the buildings, remember) that survived the nuclear holocaust. Handy that.
4. Kryptonite Is VERY Inconsistent
And again with the inconsistency; does Zack Snyder not realise this is the kind of thing fans paying any kind of attention will pick apart immediately?
When Superman initially encounters Kryptonite in his fight with Batman, the mineral does exactly as it’s supposed to, robbing him of his powers and turning him into a man. That levelling of the playing field was actually the best part of their fight.
But then, when the spear was retrieved and Supes knew how to take down Doomsday, he was somehow able to resist the effects of his one weakness to still fly. Way to ignore the rules, there.
Sure, there’s a suggestion that it was a triumph of will, but if that was the case, Superman would be able to train himself to basically be immortal, and another of his selling points would be lost.
3. They Literally Killed Superman Twice
Killing Superman once would have been impactful enough, but it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Zack Snyder’s lack of restraint that he double-gilded the lily.
The sight of Kal-El “dead” in space looking like a super-zombie was undoubtedly striking, but in the context of the final sequence, the red herring tease just looked silly and lost all of that impact.
And like the ludicrously short retirement, it was so frenetically paced that all of the drama of the situation was neglected.
2. SUPERMAN’S NOT DEAD
Of course he’s not, he’s in Justice League: Part One (and presumably the other ones as well), but wouldn’t it have been nice to actually have some time to mourn and to at least pretend to accept his death? His death follows the same pattern as everything dramatic in the film: it lasts only as long as someone with ADHD can possibly commit to.
Isn’t this also just the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, where it’s suggested that Magneto’s powers are definitely all gone forever right up until the point he somehow just heals with no explanation?
Hopefully, we’ll get the (hokey) explanation that Superman actually just went into a Kryptonian healing sleep (which Zod was obviously somehow not able to), but it still smacks of that immediately retconning approach to storytelling.
1. No Post Credits Stinger?!
Say what you want about the culture of stingers and post-credits scenes and how much currency audiences put into short scenes that have no bearing on the film’s main narrative, but Batman V Superman needed one.
DC are embarking on a major expanded universe for one thing, and Suicide Squad isn’t far off, so the idea that they would consciously ignore that marketing opportunity was nothing short of preposterous. Couldn’t they have just tagged a TV spot length teaser for Suicide Squad? Or another dream that could have hinted at Bruce Wayne’s continued torment by the Joker?
Fair play, DC won’t be dictated to on their marketing, but having shown us almost the entirety of Batman V Superman in trailers, you’d have thought they’d be itching to show more of what’s to come…
Batman V Superman is in cinemas now.
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