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« on: July 03, 2024, 11:26:39 AM »
After a long—some might say too long—wait, the Odyssey continues!
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (dir. Zack Snyder)
Sometimes you just don’t know where to begin. Films are made up of so many different elements, plot, screenplay, cinematography, acting, editing, music, yet none of these is an adequate place to begin talking about Dawn of Justice, one of the most bafflingly inept and artistically bankrupt films I have ever seen. There may even be nothing I can say about it that isn’t both true and yet wholly insufficient to capture the depth of its stupidity, the shallowness of its ethos, the absurdity of its drama, or the banality of its action. I am therefore presenting this review as an admission of defeat. This is not the exhaustive catalogue of faults that I wanted it to be when I started writing, nor is it really a good summation of the film’s themes and concepts. It is perhaps better understood as a cry for help. I still haven’t seen the four hour cut of Justice League, but based on the state of my brain after three hours of Dawn of Justice I think that review will be even worse than this one. Nonetheless I have to begin somewhere, and I suppose a reasonable enough starting place, by which we may find our bearings out in the barren wilds of rural Snyder country, is its direct predecessor Man of Steel. In that film we witness the origin of Superman, which more or less amounts to things exploding and people being killed to little purpose, but what I’d like to draw your attention to, because it will be crucial to our understanding of Dawn of Justice, is its philosophy of drama. From Kevin Costner’s gusty goodbye to Zod’s sleeve-singeing swansong, so many moments in Man of Steel were contrived purely to yell ‘this is dramatic!’ at the audience without ever actually earning that impression. In Dawn of Justice this contrivance of the dramatic is amplified by orders of magnitude. There isn’t a single ‘dramatic moment’ that doesn’t exist purely to fulfil Snyder’s ends without means approach to drama; logic, significance, pacing, and character development be damned. If you thought the neck-snapping finale of Man of Steel was outrageously stupid, you know exactly what kind of idiocy awaits here.
The film opens with a flashback to a thing that has never been shown in a film before—that’s right, never!—Bruce Wayne’s parents being killed. Maybe this works for people who have never seen a Batman movie before but good god, in this version it is particularly silly. Adult Bruce monologues about things falling and having fallen in the falling fall of the fall that falls as Martha Wayne’s pearls, which are inexplicably wrapped around her attacker’s gun, fall (geddit? geddit? eh? eh?) to the ground in excruciating slow motion. This is the first of many, many ‘dramatic moments’ in the film which exist only for themselves. It would perhaps be not completely different, but significantly dissimilar nonetheless, if these were aesthetic moments which existed for themselves; many great and not-so-great films from all over the world feature moments in which they extrapolate and disentangle aesthetic beauty from their own drama for the simple purpose of expressing something beautiful. No, in Snyder’s filmworld the aesthetic is the body, the dramatic a sudden stabbing interpolation, inserted arbitrarily and retracted in much the same way; he puts the cart before the horse, the super before the hero. After all, a hero is so with or without powers, but a superhuman has yet to define themselves one way or the other. Appropriately then Snyder cuts from Bruce’s memories of mum, dad, and a hole full of bats, to adult Bruce, modelled on the apparently omnipresent spectre of Frank Miller’s middle-aged Batman, bearing witness to the events of Man of Steel so that we can see those awfully thrilling scenes in which Superman destroys local infrastructure to the tune of billions of dollars for no apparent reason in soft focus and from a different angle. Anyway, while in the distance a blue-and-red blob throws a dark grey blob around—or rather through—Metropolis, Bruce drives around in an SUV, also for no apparent reason, and then stumbles upon a handful of injured survivors, most of whom will never be seen or heard from again.
One of the major exceptions to the vanishing victims of Superman, and who even reappears a whole two times, is Guy With No Legs, hereafter referred to as ‘Guy’, a moniker which I’m sure will not become confusing at all. Guy is one of several people determined to wage war on Superman, and also the least well placed to do it. He has no powers, no gadgets, no weapons, no money, indeed he is just a guy with no legs, hence the name. If his wheelchair were a rocket-powered death machine with lasers and missiles then maybe, just maybe, he could cause Superman some small amount of pain and pause for thought, but alas. Guy has however mastered the art of parkour without legs, and so he climbs a monument to Superman and defaces it with graffiti. He is promptly arrested. Later he appears before a tribunal to testify against Superman, and then he, or someone else, literally explodes. It’s somewhat confusing, Senator Holly Hunter realises she has been drinking from a jar of piss, and then the room explodes. Said jar of piss was placed there somehow by Lex Luthor, who also spoke to Guy some time before the hearing. Was it Holly’s magical piss jar or was Guy’s wheelchair full of missiles after all? Well, that’s just one of those mysteries. Nothing in the film moves by some logic of human interactions, developments, whatever, only by the very much visible hand of the director moving his dolls about the scene on a whim. Yes, it has been a moment since something ‘dramatic’ happened, thus therefore ergo: an exploding jar of piss courtesy of Lex Luthor and the most lax government security known to mankind.
Now, you might be wondering why in the world I would devote so much time to a character whose defining feature is that he doesn’t have legs when the film has ‘Batman v Superman’ in the title, which on the surface at least promises far more interesting discussion. The reason is that, while Batman and Superman are undoubtedly more important characters in the narrative, Guy is a perfect example of the film’s and by extension Snyder’s dramatic philosophy. There’s no point talking about Batman or Superman or even Lex Luthor until you get your head around that basic problem. Guy did not appear in Man of Steel, and perhaps if we had had a scene in that film in which Guy suffers his terrible injury while Superman ignores his cries for help, we may have had some real dramatically compelling material. Instead he is only here now, and seemingly for the sole purpose of being found by Bruce. His later appearances hint at something more interesting than anything in the actual film, but we never get to see it, we are only told about it. And then he explodes and dies. Luthor exploits Guy’s anger and pain, which again we never really see the cause of, his plan with the explosive death by jar of piss seemingly to be to add to the growing public understanding that destruction inescapably follows in Superman’s wake, and to foment anti-superhuman sentiment more generally. It’s hard to believe, like The Dark Knight’s Harvey Dent falling for the edgy teen anarchism of the Joker, Guy taking Luthor’s bait, but once again we can perhaps assume that Snyder thought it best not to show the parts that establish why characters do stuff, after all that would only get in the way of the drama. Luthor speaks in outwardly pithy but typically meaningless soundbites—and okay, to be fair, so does basically everyone else in this movie—one of which is ‘[the oldest American lie] is that power can be innocent’. Now, you might be thinking this is an insightful comment on America as the world’s policeman, America the Superman to the common men of other nations, but no, that’s it, it ends there, and nothing else comes of it. Luthor, like so many characters in the film, constantly sidles up to some promised profoundity but never actually makes it all the way there, the plethora of platitudes thrown like confetti only serving to lay bare the meagreness of his, and by extension the film’s philosophy.
Lex Luthor truly is one of the worst portrayals of any character in a comic book movie, maybe even as bad as Jim Carrey in Batman Forever if not worse. It’s hard to tell if a bad serious performance is worse than a bad comedic performance. (By the way, why is it that it’s always a Batman movie?) It’s like Snyder handed Jesse Eisenberg a beer-stained napkin bearing only the words ‘eccentric billionaire’, winked, and then left without explaining anything, pretending on all subsequent meetings that he couldn’t hear Jesse asking questions because of a series of increasingly incredible obstructions to the ear. Eisenberg, who had previously portrayed Mark ‘Smoking These Meats’ Zuckerberg in The Social Network, could perhaps have stood to take some examples from actual eccentric billionaire behaviour, although I have to wonder how much of it was left up to him and how much of it was Snyder thinking that random noises, mythological references, and classical literary quotations made his version of Luthor appear sophisticated. In either case, Eisenberg learned a powerful lesson, I hope, which is that when life gives you lemons covered in shit, you’re going to make shit-flavoured lemonade. Nonetheless Eisenberg can’t be fully let off the hook, he did after all do everything necessary to make what ended up on screen happen with his performance. Snyder, since he somehow keeps getting work, needs to be surrounded at all times by people who are willing to tell him ‘no’, Eisenberg’s failure to do so here made the film even worse than it otherwise would have been. Granted, that’s not saying much, and to restate the point: Luthor’s lemonade, dark brown and pungent though it may be, is really only as bad as the lemons it’s made from.
Our two superlemons, Batman and Superman, are seemingly defined for Snyder by one thing: their mothers are both named Martha. The first time we hear the name is in the very beginning, as Thomas Wayne has some kind of a Rosebud moment after being shot. Later on Lex Luthor says ‘Martha Martha Martha’ and reveals to Superman that yes, he knows all his secrets, and is holding his mother hostage in a secret location! Worse yet, the location will only be revealed if Superman finds and kills Batman! If only there were some kind of superhero with super hearing who can move at supersonic speeds and who could locate Martha from many miles away and save her. Well, no such hero exists, and so Superman goes to find and kill Batman, who is intent on finding and killing Superman, because there was once a guy who had legs, and his name was Guy, and Guy has no legs now, and that means people with superpowers are evil. After having an idiot contest for what feels like an hour, Batman and Superman decide to try talking, discovering within seconds that it is a much better way of learning about and understanding each other. Thus a truce is arrived at, and Batman flies off to rescue Superman’s mum. For the life of me I can’t understand why. In the time it takes Batman to get into his plane, Superman could have flown in, taken her, and flown back. But I guess Bats has to do something. It’s perplexing that this is the thing Snyder has Batman do on screen when we see the aftermath of his one-man raid on LexCorp, which would undoubtedly have been far more entertaining to actually witness in full. Regardless, we do get to see Batman hit a thug into a wall so hard that a bloody smear trails the back of his head, and I think we can all agree that that’s what Batman is all about.
So Superman’s an idiot, and Batman’s a killer, is there anyone else who can maybe come to our aid? The Batcomputer saves the day with trailers for other DC heroes for some reason. It’s sort of like back in the old days when you’d get a free demo disc with your PlayStation game, except nothing on it is good. Credit where credit’s due though, Snyder was the best part of a decade ahead of Netflix’s free with ads subscription model. I’m not sure who in-universe put these videos together but their choice of footage needs some work. First off we get a few pictures of Wonder Woman, one of which is actually a pretty good looking facsimile of a photo from 1918, so props to whoever made that, you were a shining light in the darkness of this production. For some reason this one is on its own, while the other three, for Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg respectively, are played together in one sequence. Even more confusingly, these three are shown from Wonder Woman’s perspective, who decides, as Lex Luthor’s Kryptonian monster maker machine knocks out Metropolis’s power grid, that now is the perfect time to watch videos with dramatic music on her laptop. Cut to Ezra Miller flashing (no, not like that, although I can see why you would think so) an armed robber while purchasing groceries; Aquaman veeeeery slooooowly destroying a camera; and Cyborg without legs pinned to a wall—more like Guyborg, ha ha ha. So they’ve got it all, a fast guy, a slow guy, a Guy guy, and add to that a gadget guy, an alien guy, and an Amazon guyrl. Only the last of these will actually make a real appearance here, but that’s fine because Justice League is next, yay! We also get an ad for an Injustice type storyline in which Lois Lane’s murder turns Superman into literally Hitler and Batman wears a trenchcoat over his Batsuit. I’m honestly not sure who’s worse between them in that scenario. Of course, the answer is always Zack Snyder, a man with the storytelling instinct of a ten year old playing with action figures and making boom zoom nyowww kapowww noises.
Throughout the film Superman is depicted as a Christ-like figure. Hordes of commoners reach out to touch him as if his glory will rub off on them and cure whatever malady—being human, perhaps—afflicts them, while authorities and systems of power view and treat him with suspicion at best and contempt at worst. Naturally the film ends with his death, a sacrifice to stop a much bigger threat, Doomsday, made by mixing Zod’s immaculately preserved corpse with Lex Luthor’s own blood in a giant bath filled with that sweet sweet lemonade in the aforementioned Kryptonian monster maker machine. Doomsday is basically Abomination from Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk, but I guess considerably more powerful since Superman can’t beat him alone. For some reason Wonder Woman, who has been lurking around disguised as a mere human lady for most of the movie, decides that now is the time to do something about stuff, and decides that a good way to do something about stuff is to barely use her powers. Ultimately a Kryptonite-tipped spear fashioned by Batman saves the day, but Superman must be pierced by it also. There was no way anyone could have just circled around a bit and pierced Doomsday through the side or something. Well of course not, you mocker, you naysayer, you clown, you doofus! If they did that then it wouldn’t be a patented Snyder ‘dramatic moment’™! And really what are we all here for if not unearned pathos and pseudo-poetic ramblings to no purpose? Regardless, we discover in the final shot that Superman isn’t actually dead so none of that mattered anyway. And that’s the Snyder philosophy of drama, baby. If you don’t like it you can leave!
Reviewing the extended cut of this film, having to actually acknowledge it as an experience that I had, to think and write about it, has been one of the most unpleasant passages of time in my life, I’m quite sure. And I’m only employing trace amounts of hyperbole when I say that. Three hours of morons reciting terrible dialogue that manages somehow to be both platitudinous and vague at the same time. A foetid smorgasbord of almost random and very much pointless scenes half of which could very easily be cut down for a 90 minute experience that, while still mind-boggling in its stupidity, would at least be over much faster. Last but not least, iconic characters who basically perform the function of action figures to be posed to little or no purpose. And I suppose that’s really the problem. There is no point. You could make the case that maybe that’s the film’s argument, that we are doomed to misunderstand and quarrel with each other over stupid things and that even superbeings from other worlds who possess the power of gods are marked by this frailty as well, but my point is not that Bats ‘n’ Supes should have realised that the real Dawn of Justice was the friends we made along the way, but that Snyder should have had some artistic point that he was aiming at, around which the characters and plots coalesced into some unified vision. It simply doesn’t happen, it’s not there. I’ve seen this film twice in different cuts and neither time did I recognise any sort of understanding on the part of the director of what he thought he was doing. His ad hoc justifications after the fact can only be a balm to those who are already predisposed to agree with him, children in adult bodies for whom action figures are not toys but symbols of something deeper which they are tragically and perfectly incapable of articulating. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was made by an idiot for idiots. It is a gigantic, steaming, reeking pile of shit, full of lemons.
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