The
DC Cinematic Universe is now officially on the move, beginning Warner
Bros' attempt to catch up with their rivals at Marvel and leverage
their vast catalogue of comic-book heroes into a multimillion-dollar
multimedia empire. Batman v Superman brings together the two most
iconic superheroes on the planet in a battle for supremacy... and
falls flat on its face as soon as it leaves the gate. It is not a
promising start for this brave new world.
This
isn't going to be a conventional review, as much as it is an
examination of all the areas that this film went wrong - at least in
my opinion. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
But
before we start digging around in this movie's guts, a few words on
what I did like. Ben Affleck is a good Batman, and Wonder Woman
steals pretty much every scene she's in; it's a pity she only has
about 15 minutes of screen time. The action is mostly very good, and
the final battle is actually quite spectacular - there's no denying
that it's extremely cool to see the Trinity team up to fight
Doomsday, as rubbish a character as he is. Sadly, the finale is also
where the film's fatal flaws become most obviously apparent.
Not
unlike Iron Man 2, the main problem here is that far too much time is
spent laying the groundwork for the inevitable Justice League film
instead of focusing on the story they're trying to tell here. The
clue's in the title: it's trying to be a story about Batman fighting
Superman as well as a prelude to the Justice League, and as a result
it's cluttered, overly busy and a bit directionless. There are a
bunch of cameos from the Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman that serve no
purpose in this narrative, and an utterly baffling nightmare / vision
of a dark future that serves only to confound and confuse.
The
final battle, as great as it is, has the effect of making the
preceding two hours of film seem almost completely irrelevant. The
conflict between Batman and Superman gets wrapped up quickly and
perfunctorily, and then they're off to beat up Doomsday. It takes no
time at all for them to become friends, which makes almost the whole
film seem like one giant act of misdirection. Which may have been
deliberate, but all it does is make you wish they'd skipped this
instalment and just jumped straight into Justice League, because it's
much more entertaining watching these characters work together than
fight each other. Honestly, the Trinity united is awesome,
and it's such a shame that it takes so long to get to that point.
It's not helped by the big Batman v Superman fight being curiously
dull and unengaging.
There
are two reasons why I haven't really discussed the first two thirds
of the film. The first is because, as I've said, they basically don't
matter in light of the ending. The second is that they're so
cluttered and convoluted as to make Age of Ultron look like the
Platonic ideal of narrative efficiency by comparison. It doesn't help
the titular fight's sense of irrelevance that it's founded on
misunderstanding and manipulation instead of any real ideological
conflict, and the ways they're manipulated into fighting are far too
Byzantine and labyrinthine to be worth getting into here. Suffice to
say, it's Lex's fault. Spoiler warning!
This
is actually the part where we do get into serious spoiler territory,
so if you want to see what few surprises this film has in store
without knowing them in advance, look away now. Come back soon,
because this stuff's pretty juicy.
Sticking
with the Batman v Superman conflict and how pointless it is: the way
it gets resolved truly has to be seen to be believed. It is
laughable, pathetically poorly written, and makes it all the more
obvious that the two halves of the film's title don't gel together at
all. In brief: Superman is down for the count from Kryptonite
poisoning, and Batman is on the brink of murdering him in
the face with a Kryptonite spear.
(Batman
kills a lot of people in this film. Loads of them. He's practically a
serial killer.)
Before
he's stabbed, Superman blurts out his mother's name, Martha, because
she's been kidnapped by Lex and is being used as leverage to make him
fight Batman. At which point, Batman loses his fucking mind and
starts screaming "WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?! WHO'S MARTHA?!"
in his patented growly voice, because his mother was called Martha
too. He then puts down the spear and they become friends. Let that
sink in: he went to war against an indestructible alien who
obliterated a city and was partially responsible for the deaths of
thousands, and he called a truce because their mums have
the same name. It beggars
belief.
Even
more hilariously, Batman then goes on to rescue Martha Kent and
introduces himself as "a friend of your son's". To
reiterate: not ten minutes ago he was about to stab Superman in the
face with a Kryptonite spear. Friendship is cheap when you're the
Batman, apparently!
There
are any number of other problems as well. The villains are extremely
weak: Jesse Eisenberg as Lex actually isn't as bad as I feared, but
his motivation is practically nonexistent; and Doomsday is crap, has
always been crap and will always be crap. The film goes to great
lengths to make it clear that they're fighting in uninhabited areas,
but the heroes decide to bring Doomsday back to the city anyway,
presumably because it's not a proper fight without at least some
civilian casualties. Most of the film involves very little happening
at great length, and some of the dialogue is truly atrocious, like
Lex declaring that it's "Fight night!" He might as well
have gone all the way and yelled "Llllllllllet's get ready to
ruuuuuumblllllllllle!"
Narrative
illogic abounds: Batman, the World's Greatest Detective, has
seemingly done shockingly little research into Superman's motives,
and apparently doesn't watch the news, blaming Superman for a bomb
blast which he clearly wasn't responsible for. And to return to that
dream sequence: it can't be a dream because Bruce has no way of
knowing that Darkseid Is; but if it's a vision of the future, why has
Superman apparently teamed up with Darkseid? Or did they just not
think this through? Also, why is Future Flash's costume so awful?
I
feel like I've dwelt on the final act too much, but honestly, vast
swathes of this film have just blurred together in my memory. It's
only in the final third that anything interesting happens, while
paradoxically undoing everything that happened up to that point. It
really does feel like two films awkwardly smushed together, and it
made me yearn for the World's Finest film that could have been if
Zack Snyder weren't fixated on recreating the iconic fight from The
Dark Knight Returns, which even there only happened because Frank
Miller couldn't figure out how else to end the story.
I'll
wrap this up as I'm going on at some length here. It's really quite
depressing. Superman is my favourite superhero, and I wanted this
movie to be good. I liked Man of Steel and I thought Watchmen was
genuinely brilliant, so I was prepared to give Batman v Superman the
benefit of the doubt. But sadly, cool fight scenes cannot rescue a
botched screenplay that can't make up its mind which of two distinct
stories it's trying to tell. Here's hoping that Wonder Woman's movie
is an improvement - she's the best thing about this one, even if
she's only really here to promote her solo outing. But that just sums
up Batman v Superman, really: everything here only exists to set up
potentially much more interesting films in the future. It's a pity we
couldn't cut to the chase.
Images:
Warner Bros.