"Batman v Superman" - Dinner with an old friend

Josh
Sep 2, 2024
7 min read

Zach Snyder (2016)

It's like catching up with a friend you didn't really like back in the day, only to remember quickly why you don't like them.

Oh, Batman v Superman. Oh, Zach Synder. My old friends. So, back in the day, a younger me would watch a lot of movies. I would eagerly search the newspapers for the Friday and Saturday night movies or spend hours walking down the isles of Video-Ezy looking at the covers for movies. Getting older, my love for movies stayed the same but I didn’t really evolve with media literacy. I could love a movie or hate a movie but I couldn’t really clearly articulate ‘the way’ around my opinion. And that all changed when a little movie came along called ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”. Little me at the time was excited for this movie. I had read and fell in love with “The Dark Knight Returns” comic alongside the animated adaptation. And despite the hype by the end of this movie I was constantly checking the time on my phone and comparing it to the run time on my ticket. And after leaving the theatre, something inside of me changed. It was like learning there was no Santa, I had discovered something about the world. I had to learn ‘the why’. Why was this movie so bad and why was I so bored? These were the questions I was seeking a definitive answer for. I remember going down a rabbit hole of reviews, written and videos. I was learning deeper film terminology, learning about themes, intent, subtext as well discovering some internet reviewers that I still admire today. This movie changed my life and severely elevated my love for film. After having this movie as a memory for over 5 years, I decided to give the original theatrical version a rewatch. And even after 5 years, I was still pulling out my phone to check the run time.

Before I get into why I despise this move, I can cover what I do like which will explain the 1 star instead of the a ½ star. I rather enjoy the bombastic heavy themes by Hans Zimmer, specifically Lex’s theme and the Wonder Woman theme. There are portions of the solo Batman scenes that I like, as he does a small amount of detective work. As a pretty big fan of Batman, seeing some of these scenes would leave me with a smirk but 9/10 times that smirk would disappear back to a frown. There are some visuals and shots I find quite visually interesting. Although, with every shot that raises an eyebrow, there are another five that are ugly and uninspired that aren’t helped by the outdated CGI. And that’s about it for positives.

I could easily write a novella on all my issues with this film but to save on time I’ll focus on a few specifics. Next to Doomsday, the biggest villain is the narrative. There is little to no thrust to the story or no one to really follow to truly understand their perspective. The movie starts, scenes just happen with little to no motivation or reason, numerous subplots vanish with unsatisfying conclusions or that are too obvious to be considered a mystery. Superman wants to investigate The Batman from Gotham. Batman wants to find out who the White Portugal is. Lois wants to investigate who these custom bullets belong to to prove Superman’s innocence. Lex wants to get an export visa for Kryptonite. Wonder Woman wants… to hack LexCorp for some photos? While on paper some of these might sound interesting but there’s so much going on it’s hard to keep up or flesh anything out. Characters follow these storylines with little motivation, so you’re constantly asking yourself why you should care. Lois spends most of the runtime trying to figure out who is behind the killings to frame Superman and surprise, surprise it’s Lex… shock? Lex wants Batman and Superman to kill each other… why? Because he hates Superman? What will happen if the invincible being kills Batman? If Batman did succeed, would he have still released Doomsday? What was even the point of creating Doomsday? It looked like it was created to specifically kill Superman? The more I think about his ‘plan’, the more the idea of the super genius Lex Luthor crumbles into a moron who just got lucky with how everything unfolded. Speaking of, I really don’t mind Jesse Eisenburgs performance towards the first half of the movie. Presented as a casual 3-point shooting millennial but obviously very smart, I thought his performance matched that pretty well. But when it came time for him to be a serious intelligent mastermind, he just twitched and muttered to himself like a crazy person within every sentence.

To further add to the convoluted plot to get to the conflict, Bruce is set up to have been there at Ground Zero during the hilariously titled sequence ‘Mankind is introduced to Superman’. Which recounts the final fight from Man of Steel from a ground perspective, which is presented as a horrific sight of destruction and death. So if first impressions matter, then as an introduction to Superman everyone would be living in fear. For some reason, Bruce has to call his Metropolis branch of Wayne Enterprises and tell people to evacuate the building while just outside the window a giant alien ship can be seen drilling into the Earth. But aye, the Boss said we could knock off early, right? Although, it’s too little too late as the building gets in between Zod and Superman causing it to collapse. Out of the rubble Bruce saves an employee whose legs are trapped under a metal beam as well as saving a child who is found amongst the debris (don’t ask why the child is there in the middle of the CBD, we don’t know). All this being said, this was a pretty decent setup to why Bruce is set out on this vendetta against the Man of Steel. But towards the end of the 2nd act, Bruce finds out that check’s he has been sending to the man he saved all those years ago, has been returning them to vague threats written on them. Bruce or any of his employees didn’t seem to know about these although they have been getting sent back for what looks like months. Yet, in a raving monologue, Lex rants to Lois that all to spark the anger in Bruce was some little notes while referencing some of the threats written on the checks. Making it sound like he’s the one that’s been intercepting the checks and sending them back? So, 1. How does the letters really affect Bruce's motivation towards hating Superman when he already had hatred from him? 2. How long has this been happening and how long was Lex involved with it? 3. Would his plan still have worked if Bruce's workers weren’t so incompetent and revealed the letters earlier?

I didn’t understand this plot line and I still don’t understand it now.

Now before anyone gets mad at me, yes I know that the extended cut does alleviate some of these issues but I still have a lot of the same questions despite the extra scenes.

The editing of this film is also extremely hard to follow. The biggest shock upon rewatching is the drastic lack of any establishing shots in the entire movie. Rarely do you ever see the environment the scene takes place in. We would just cut to a medium shot of our character in a new location, so you don’t know where it really takes place or when it is in relation to the previous scene. As mentioned, the flow of the movie has scenes that don’t really affect the next or that could be cut and not really affect the story. We have to watch Superman awkwardly save people during a montage that really adds nothing to the movie. Instead it just feels like a response to Man of Steel and the fact that you never saw Superman save any one. Batman also gets this treat as we have random scenes of him walking around the Batcave looking at statues and Batsuits which all feel like shots designed for the trailer. And during the final confrontation between our heroes in a Doomsday we get the most egregious example of moments that are specifically designed for a trailer but made it into the final product. Wonder Woman makes an appearance to save the day, and Superman and Batman make a quip about each other thinking one of them must have known her. Which in the context in the movie, makes little to no sense because Batman already knew who she was. He had photos and had run into her numerous times throughout the film. But it made for a funny moment in the trailer.

I would be remiss in my duties of hating this movie if I didn’t mention the titular fight between our two ‘heroes’. Heavily inspired from The Dark Knight Returns, the fight is extremely underwhelming and anticlimactic. As mentioned, their conflicts aren’t built up cleanly so the stakes behind them fighting aren't established so you feel nothing and you don’t care who wins. But the fight ends with Superman calling out the name of his mother, Martha. Which triggers Batman's PTSD and comes to the revelation that Superman also has a mother. And both of them have the name Martha. Batman has had no issue killing other random goons throughout the movie and I’m sure those guys had a mother. In fact, I’m almost certain that all of those men have killed less people than Superman as seen in the first scene.

I’ll be honest, after watching this again I couldn’t believe how bad it truly was. Even though I was watching this at home, all I wanted to do was leave. It attempts to have deeper themes about Gods and power that fail to be explored but even worse having basic motivation was missing for our main story. This experiment to revisit this film was pointless and if you ever think it'll get better with age, trust me it doesn’t.