What? You watched it, and you never even told us? Unacceptable! I demand that you briefly summarize your thoughts on the movie.
Well, as I alluded to in that post, I think Zack Snyder's biggest weakness is that he tends to go for over-the-top melodrama in a way that can be boring. In a weird way it works for something like
300, where its coupling with over-the-top action makes the whole thing a spectacle; it didn't work quite as well in
Watchmen, but the story in that is enough of a thinker that it may have masked the film's flaws (honestly I thought the opening montage set to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" was fantastic, and the rest of the movie just kind of lagged in comparison to its opening); and it really didn't work at all in
BvS. I mean, seriously, not at all. It might be partly that by now he's done things like this so much that it feels trite (is this really the kind of thing you want defining your career as a filmmaker?), but there were long stretches of the movie that were just boring.
I hated Jesse Eisenberg as Luthor. Hated him. Even worse miscasting than Affleck. I suppose that no one will ever match Hackman's performance of the character but Kevin Spacey's take in
Superman Returns was one of the highlights in that (also mediocre) movie so it's definitely possible for other people to make the character engaging. I don't know, I guess the fact that he played a billionaire sociopath to acclaim in the past made them think he would be a good choice? They were wrong.
And there was a pervasive dumbness throughout. Some of it was the studio's fault, no doubt; the moment where we see the files on the other future JLA members was clearly meant as advertisement for their respective movies and the Justice League movie itself, and its obviousness as advertising took me out of the story. Please, WB, get the trailers out of the way
before the movie starts in the future; why mess with a winning formula?
But the Martha thing... I'm not sure how much involvement Snyder had with the writing, or who was truly responsible for it, but it was, I don't know, fanboyish? Like he noticed as no doubt millions of other comic fans in the past have noticed that Superman and Batman both have mothers named Martha, and tried to work it into the story in a way that really didn't make sense, didn't feel the least bit natural or realistic, and had me rolling my eyes. It was like how they worked in the origin of Lex Luthor's baldness; was it really necessary?
Again, I think structuring the origin of the World's Finest team around Batman fearing Superman because of the extent of his powers was a good idea. Henry Cavill plays a fine Superman, in both his guises, which I think is important, and Gal Gadot really stole the whole show as Wonder Woman; my delight at her performance was the biggest surprise I got out of the movie, and the only real issue with her was that she was underused. And even though I resent the fact that they completely changed Doomsday's origin, I thought the action sequences at the end were pretty good; however, they ran too long, which I guess is no surprise with a Zack Snyder product. I also liked the decision to have Superman die at Doomsday's hands at the end of the movie. It was actually one nod to the comics that I thought was decent, and the ending had a kind of "ending to
Star Trek II" vibe to it. I dug it. It does make me wonder where they're going with Superman's story arc next; obviously it's impractical for them to do any kind of adaptation of "Reign of the Superman" as part of the Justice League movie (which is actually a shame as that's one of my all-time favorite Superman storylines) so they'll probably just go in a completely different direction. It'll probably be lame (especially with Snyder directing) but who knows?
Overall, I don't know, I guess I give it a C-. It has its positives but the positives just don't come close to outweighing the negatives. Zack Snyder needs to stop making movies and WB needs to do a better job figuring out what people want to see rather than trying to dictate it. That they seem to be failing so hard so far is really disappointing because I've been wanting to see DC do with their movies what Marvel has been doing for a while now, because I've always been a DC guy, and it's just too bad the execution is so poor.
Well look, you've done coaxed an entire review out of me.