BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE review

Writing has the honor of being the cheapest and the most important part of filmmaking. Look at the following two sentences:

“The sun rose in the East, lighting the horizon with the promise of a new day and a new hope.”

“As the Earth was engulfed by a crimson hellfire, every living thing — human, animal, insect, and plant — agonizingly transformed into its own demonic version.”

If I was shooting either one of those sentences for film, one would be incredibly cheap to execute; the other would be a sophisticated exercise to coordinate various departments to bring out the best those words seek to deliver. And neither one of those sentences cost me a penny to write.

I say this because Batman v Superman spent somewhere between $250 to $410 million dollars to be projected on a screen, and the Herculean task to get it there can be seen first hand. But not in its writing. A pal of mine used to look at special effects movie magazines, He’d rightfully say: “all that detail in the models and molds; imagine if there was that much thought put into the script.”

The movie looks great, mottled in contrasty sunlight and deep blues. The film offers a compelling version of Batman (one of the movie’s saving graces). Affleck adds a bit of James Bond to Bruce Wayne, making him a cool customer. It has the best Batman fight sequences I’ve ever seen in a live action film: he moves like a jaguar, pouncing on criminals and using everything around him as an extension of his arsenal; the Batmobile drags vehicles around like its personally punishing them for their actions.

But as much of a visual artist Zack Snyder is (and those visuals are grand), the man cannot pull together plot logic to save his skin. When you get past the spectacle, you realize there is no reason for any of it to have happened in the first place. Why would Lex Luthor force a dust-up between the World’s Finest? Why would he want Superman specifically to kill Batman? Why would Luthor create an indestructible monster (Doomsday) at all? For a guy whose motivations seem centered on stopping all-powerful gods, demons, and angels from wrecking havoc upon the earth, why create an all-powerful menace to actually wreck havoc upon it in the first place? There’s not an understandable or relatable explanation for Luthor’s motivations (something that is desperately needed in its two and a half hour runtime). Words are cheap and words are powerful. Think how Michael Caine succinctly saying, “some men just want to watch the world burn” sums up everything you need to know about the Joker.

Superman seems bummed to be Superman. He likes saving Lois (mostly because bathtub sex is a good motivator), but he looks so glum helping anyone else. There’s a shot where a neighborhood’s flooding over and some people have painted the “S” symbol on their roof. They have their hands outstretched, pleading. Superman kind of hovers there, cape flowing, judging (?) them. Is he going to save them? And what about the other neighbors who didn’t paint the symbol on their roofs? Does Superman pull a Soup-Nazi and say “no save for you”? It’s a weird moment when you have to question if Superman will actually save people or not. Think how odd it’d be if you saw Santa and had to seriously consider if he’s going to give a kid a present or snap-kick his face off.

Stranger yet is how quickly Batman and Superman change their views of one another. Views that took the filmmakers two hours to create and then enforce. In Superman’s eyes, Batman’s just a whacked-out version of The Punisher who tortures and kills criminals (a part of his character I didn’t agree with at all). Batman actually has psychotic dreams of Superman as the Übermensch enslaving humanity (at least I think they were dreams… it’s never quite clear and extraneous to the plot — what a shock). But we’re to believe just because their moms share the same name, they shrug off all doubt about each other and become best buds. Instantly. I’ll say this again: Batman thinks Superman will become Space Hitler and go all exterminate mankind. And the man who seems to be the very epitome of stubborn, narrow thinking (a lifetime one-man war on criminals because his parents were killed by a random mugging) shrugs it off because their moms have the same first name. It’s a good thing Vincent Bugliosi’s father didn’t share the same name as Charles Manson’s or we’d be knee-deep in Helter Skelter 2 right now.

The last part of BvS turns into another weird exercise in generic destructo-porn with CG damage flaring everywhere and property lying in rubble. I kept thinking on how Batman seemed so out of place in all of it. Superman, joined by Wonder Woman, valiantly lay fist and sword to something virtually un-killable, and here’s a guy in his mid-40s, without Iron Man armor on, swinging in and out of harm’s way. At least in the Justice League cartoon, it felt right: Batman, lithe and strong, uses gadgets to distract, coordinates strategy with allies and tactical intelligence to bring down stronger foes. It felt like a missed opportunity to bring Batman into a world of super-beings only to have him watch from the sidelines, sort-of/kind-of involved, but not really.

There’s an inevitable build up to the next installments: Wonder Woman, the Flash, Cyborg, Aquaman, Justice League. On one of the press interviews, responding to its dipping Rotten Tomatoes score, the cast and crew said they made the film for the fans not the critics. Well, I am a fan of these characters and their world. I grew up with them, learned to dream from them. The current filmmakers don’t have to do me any more favors.