Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice [Ultimate Edition] (2016)

Rated R just to add an f-bomb?  I know it was on the fence, but you could still keep this sucker PG-13 and just not have the f-bomb.  It's pretty brutal.  Batman kills all kinds of people.  Superman kind of kills a dude, but it is slightly ambiguous. I suppose there might have been a way that he survived.  A lot of people die.  It's a bleak Zack Snyder world where atrocities are just constantly piling up.  I mean, Snyder really wants you to feel each punch, so I don't know if this movie ever should have been for kids.  R.

DIRECTOR: Zack Snyder

I could have sworn that I wrote a blog about this movie.  I have a distinct memory of snippets of this blog.  Maybe I've just talked about it enough that I feel like I wrote something in depth about this movie.  Part of me, even after investigating my own archives, believes that I wrote something and it just disappeared from the system.  I also want to admit that I'm not thrilled with what the algorithm has been feeding me in terms of movies.  Part of me wanted to rewatch this movie just to say that I could have a DCeU collections page now that it is kinda / sorta done.  But let's talk about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice one last time.

Now, this is the first time watching the Ultimate Edition.  I had only seen this movie once before in the theaters, so it was a little bit new.  I had to look up a Collider article to see what the differences in the editions were.  I know that Snyder, especially in the wake of Zack Snyder's Justice League, has been mildly obsessed with the auteur's true vision.  A lot of that comes from the rabid and toxic fandom.  A lot of that comes in the wake of criticism of his movies.  I'm going to say, I never hated Batman v Superman.  This is the one that everyone lost their minds over and started quoting how bad the movie was.  I actually liked it way more than Man of Steel.  I can probably still stand by that.  I do like this movie more than Man of Steel.  But I also want to say that it is not a good movie.  That's maybe unfair.  A good chunk of this is an ambitious and beautiful movie, which is high praise.  But as a single work, it is missing so much that it ultimately becomes a bad movie.  I suppose I can say the same is probably true for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so that might help you give some insight.  

I don't know if I want to go from hate to love or vice versa.  I suppose I'll go with what's in my gut.  The third act, which is the thesis statement of the movie, is a mess.  It's built on a really rocky foundation.  Once Batman and Superman start fighting, the movie just goes in the toilet for me.  I watch the beginning of that movie and I love it.  I am Bruce Wayne in that moment.  I'm watching the horror of these gods fighting in the sky and stepping on these little people and I get mad.  After all, it's the same thought that I had watching Man of Steel.  (Snyder, from what I've read, has a really skewed, unapologetic perspective on the carnage of Man of Steel.  It's weird to see his Bruce Wayne borderline share the perspective of the critics of the first film.) But the movie is trying to prove that Superman was stuck between a rock and a hard place in the first film.  He's ultimately a force for good and trying his best against impossible odds.  I love that idea.  If Superman was revealed to the world in a wake of unspeakable tragedy, I like that he should be spending time to redeem that image.  But too bad that Zack Snyder is the one telling this story because everything in this movie is dramatic as heck.  Superman and Batman never act like people.  They're always acting like they're being filmed in super high def.  

There's this sequence that shows what Superman has been up to in the eighteen months. (Please remind me to talk about the eighteen months thing because it's one of the biggest flaws of the film).  Superman has been stopping disaster after disaster.  But he looks miserable as heck doing it.  He has this expression of the exhausted Christ that we see in icons.  He almost weeps for humanity because of its fallibility.  Instead of being humbled by what he encounters and the suffering that people face, it's almost like he wants to spread his arms and say, "I'm here.  No need to worry."  It's so close to what Superman should be doing without actually being what Superman is all about.  I know.  I'm a Christopher Reeve nut.  I always saw his Superman as "Okay, we're gonna get out of this as long as we all work together."  Lex Luthor's big treatise is that Superman and Batman are respectively God and the devil.  I get why he's saying that.  He's being worshipped and adorned.  The news is calling him God and he's not out there saying, "I'm just a kid from Kansas.  I'm baseball and apple pie."  Superman's silent treatment is just proving that Lex and Batman are right.  (I want to call him Bruce so bad.  Mr. Wayne is where I'm at right now.) 

None of it is Ben Affleck's fault, but Batman's a nutbar.  Golly, it's like Zack Snyder is making these movies to prove how intense he can get with every cinematic choice.  He's reading these comic books and he just looks at them as childlike.  Because people are nice and multifaceted, he thinks its quaint.  Like, I like Frank Miller's Batman because he's not the only Batman.  We all laud that book.  But look where that Batman evolved / devolved to:  All-Star Batman (a book that I don't hate that much).  That's what Batman is in this movie.  It's no accident that this movie's Batman comes from The Dark Knight Returns.  It's very Snyder and it's very Affleck.  But that Batman is almost a placeholder for a fully fleshed-out character.  He's all about embracing an archetype.  He's violence personified. It's not bad and it is fun to watch.  But also, Batman makes some absolutely insane choices in the face of what is practical.

It's all kind of dancing around this concept that is actually vocalized by one of the film's quasi-antagonists, Senator Holly Hunter.  I could look up her name, but all I see is Holly Hunter.  Sorry, Holly Hunter.  You do a bang-up (no pun intended) job in this movie, but you are incredibly recognizable.  Senator Holly Hunter, almost immediately before getting blowed up, gives this speech about democracy and being able to talk to each other.  It's hard to follow because she's being distracted by Granny's Sweet Tea, but it's also the answer for this movie.  If people actually talked, there would be a lot of ways out of the situation that Lex Luthor lays down. (Note:  It's been a few days since I started this blog.  Life with babies makes it hard to write blogs.  I have two other blogs to write after this and I don't know when I'll have time for those.)  Everyone knows that they are in a Zack Snyder movie in this film.  Everything is the most dramatic way to hande it.  When Superman first confronts Batman, he allows himself to get his by the Batmobile.  Instead of bringing him to any kind of justice or getting his perspective on things (you know, like a good reporter would), he just flies off.  Then, Superman wants to talk to Batman about Martha Kent being kidnapped.  Batman opens fire on him and that does absolutely nothing to Superman.  So Superman shoves him?  Okay, there's a lot that's messed up about that whole fight, but if you want his help, stop shoving a dude who should absolutely be dead with that shove.  Just talk like person.  Anyone.  Any superhero in this movie should just have a conversation.

Okay, I want to talk about the scene that everyone makes fun of: "Martha!" "Why did you say that name?"  Okay.  It's silly.  I made fun of it for a while.  But I went into this viewing saying that I'm going to just accept what Zack Snyder was going for.  It was meant to be this grounding moment in this superhero slugfest rock opera.  I don't think it works, but with a little distance I have embraced it.  But I want to talk about why that scene really doesn't work.  The big epiphany that Bruce Wayne has is that Superman had a parallel upbringing, down to his mother's name.  Okay, I can kind of see how that might change Batman's perspective on the whole killing of a dude that he's never met.  Fine.  But something I didn't realize in the first viewing is the conversation that happens right before that big scene.  Batman full on accurately guesses that Superman's parents told him that he was here for a reason.  He then says that the only purpose of parents is to die in gutters.  It's very mid-90's Hot Topic, but whatever.  The problem with that line is that it completely contradicts the notion that Bruce Wayne had an epiphany of Superman's adoptive humanity.  It's because Clark Kent had parents that he spares him.  He sees that he's doing all of this for his mother and he remembers that he's driven by mother issues as well.  It just doesn't work both way.

Probably my last gripe: eighteen months.  (See, even with a few days off, I remembered to come back to this point.)  Eighteen months is both a great and terrible addition to the movie.  I'm going to start with great and then talk about how that kind of unravels the movie.  It's great because it is a commentary on humanity.  Zack Snyder has such a disdain for humanity because he states that it would take as little as 18 months for humanity to find Superman only to kill him.  That's pretty damning.  But the problem with 18 months is the hero worship of Superman.  With only 18 months out from the Kryptonian Invasion, I would think that people would be far more skeptical of Superman.  Instead, there's a full-on statue and memorial of Superman in Metropolis.  Honestly, I love me some Superman and I tended to lean the way that Bruce Wayne did in the first part of this film.  I just never see that guy being a normal dude saving cats from trees.  I talked about this already (I think.  I refuse to reread what I wrote sometimes.)  But that 18 months is a choice.  Snyder shares my frustration.  With every reboot and origin story, we fail to get to the stories that take a while to earn.  It's kind of why Marvel impressed me because we have enough Marvel movies to get to some of the more bananas storylines.  But we haven't earned Doomsday.  Honestly, the Death and Return of Superman needed a movie.  But it needed to be one of those stories that is in the twilight in a franchise's career, not the second movie in.

But like I said, I still didn't hate this movie.  Zack Snyder does some of the few things that he does best.  (Okay, the murder of Jimmy Olson kind of felt like stepping on a puppy.)  But the one thing that I really like about the film are Acts One and Two.  Snyder was always a little cynical about the DC Universe because it was too comic booky.  He always wanted to see how real people would react to a place where Superman and Batman existed and I think a lot of this works.  I love the idea that the government would have no idea what to do with Superman.  I love that people would be divided and that there would be conspiracy theories about how Superman could just be slaughtering folks overseas.  While I don't really get Lex Luthor's complete motivation, I do like the fact that his Elon Muskness in the movie kind of reflects the sheer ego of billionaires.  He has moved beyond right and wrong and is in his whole other sphere of evil because he's motivated almost by an unimaginable jealousy.  There's so much fun stuff going on here and I like the notion that Metropolis almost felt real. (I don't love that Metropolis and Gotham are so close.  It almost feels like Superman chooses to ignore the plight of the poor people across the bay as they get wrecked by a rich boy who likes beating up the lower class.)  

And boy, Snyder is at his cinematic best here.  For all of the garbage he sticks in movies, he makes a movie look great.  Okay, dream young Bruce falling in the cave was a bit silly.  But everything else looks gangbusters.  Snyder took Nolan's Batman and just ran with it.  

So overall, dumb movie.  That's not fair.  Snyder once again gets in his own way, but reminds us that he's not a dumb guy.  There's so much good in this movie that it is burdened by the crucial flaws that keep popping up.