Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer
Cast: Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Jessie Eisenberg, Amy Adams, Gal Gadot, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Holly Hunter, Scoot McNairy
Runtime: 151 mins.
2016
It's bad. Wow, it's bad. It's bad, boring, and bloated.
The real kicker is that we've been hearing about this movie ceaselessly for three years. All that time, all that buildup, just for a roasted turd of a final product. Not that it ever at any point in the development process looked at all promising. First it was the terrible idea to crib from the infamous graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns for a movie that is supposed to kick off your extended superhero universe. Returns is a mythology-killing work, not a mythology-building work. That's the point. It is the Batman and Superman stories taken to their darkest and most brutally honest conclusions. It is an evisceration of the superhero genre. How could you possibly think it would be a good idea to use that story as a scaffolding to introduce a world of superheroes who we are supposed to support as superheroes? It's almost as if Snyder and co. read The Dark Knight Returns once or twice and totally ignored every single theme, both textual and subtextual. They just thought it was cool that Batman took on Superman.
Then we got the godawful title. That alone was a harbinger of doom. The cluttered grotesquerie of it screams of corporate committee decisionmaking. The title cannot function as anything but a parody of itself. It's so bad that I find it embarrassing to say out loud. Every time I've talked to people about the film this week, the title has caught in my throat. I've just said "Batman versus Superman" or "the Batman and Superman movie." I cannot bring myself to say "Batman vee Superman" let alone the hideous appendage at the end.
Then we learned that Wonder Woman would be shoehorned in, and that we would get a million cameos, and that there would be an R-rated cut, and that Superman would yet again be an ass who everyone hates, and we got bad trailers, worse trailers, and these hilarious airline commercials. Absurdly, this joyless grimngritty cultural phenomenon even sapped all the color from my Trix.
I guess what I'm wondering here is how the hell did Warner Bros lay such a massive, inexcusable egg? I can only picture rooms and rooms full of be-suited business bros having endless thinktank meetings in which they try oh so desperately to decipher what it is that the rabble enjoys, like a teenage boy fumbling around with his first girlfriend in the back of a car. If that teenage boy had several hundred voices in his head giving him perplexing and borderline sociopathic sets of instructions.
That teenage boy is Zack Snyder. I realize that a senseless Frankenstein amalgamation of movie-esque pieces like Batman v Superman could only come to pass as the result of a soulless company's relentless tampering, but if we are going to pick one scapegoat to crucify, the shoe fits Zack Snyder. Some might say crucifying the man is a bit harsh, but it's only in keeping with the Christ imagery he insists on peppering throughout his movies for no apparent reason other than, "People seem to like this Christ guy."
Batman v Superman confirms that Snyder is the idiot jock version of Christopher Nolan. Like, he's just dumb. If you watch this movie and a few Snyder interviews, it becomes difficult to ignore. His work has always shown a sort of frustrating promise in the past, but this behemoth shoves the good and bad of his career into stark contrast. Of course Snyder wants to adapt The Fountainhead. I wonder how he's going to handle the rape scene. Somebody needs to take the keys to Justice League away from this man, which may prove difficult because for whatever reason he is the mastermind of this DC universe, the same way that Michael Bay has been the mastermind of the Transformersverse for the past decade.
How do you so lack an understanding of 1. How stories work on the most basic level, and 2. What is appealing about your internationally beloved heroes on the most basic level?
Don't see this movie. It's two and a half hours long. It's seemingly cut together by some sort of nonsensical algorithm. It's designed to make you feel miserable, as if it thought uplifting cinema were a pejorative term. It hates its characters. Its actors hate its characters. It's both pandering and unappealing. It's got a nonsense-spouting crack-addled six-year-old as an antagonist. It doesn't make any sense and it's unethical. Please do not give them any of your money. Go see Deadpool again, or 10 Cloverfield Lane, or The Witch. I am dying to see the fallout from critical evisceration and underperforming box office. Somebody needs to be punished for making these decisions.
All that being said, I have a confession to make. . . This has never happened to me before, but at some point during the movie I fell asleep. I don't mean dozed. I've dozed in theaters a handful of times. I mean that I was wide awake watching the movie one moment, and the next moment I popped wide awake and the credits were rolling. This film knocked me out cold.
On some level I feel embarrassed that I can't provide you with a proper review of this thing, but on another level I am kind of pleased. I think I may have had the ideal experience of watching BS. I saw enough to determine how truly rotten the film was, then my brain instantly transported me to the end. This way, I also got some really tremendous plot summaries from my friends and from the internet that didn't make one goddamn lick of sense. The whole of my conception of this movie exists in a dreamlike state, as if nothing quite like this could truly exist and if I look at it more closely it might evaporate before my gaze.
Like apparently there's a whole thing about a jar of Lex Luthor's piss in this movie that nobody can properly explain. Somebody drinks it because they think it's sweet tea?
At some point somebody thought everything in this movie was a good idea.
0.5 / 5 BLOBS
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