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Messages - Crudblud

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1
Technology & Information / Re: ⚡Is my browser faster than your browser?
« on: September 23, 2024, 03:24:05 PM »
22.3 what

2
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?
« on: September 12, 2024, 05:29:44 PM »
These days if you say you're English you get arrested and thrown in jail.

3
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?
« on: August 12, 2024, 03:03:39 PM »
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/12/elon-musk-should-face-arrest-if-he-incited-uk-rioters-says-ex-twitter-chief

Quote
“In the short term, Musk and fellow executives should be reminded of their criminal liability for their actions under existing laws. Britain’s Online Safety Act 2023 should be beefed up with immediate effect.”

Is the UK okay?
What does some random guy who worked for Twitter have to do with UK policy re: Elon shitposts?

4
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?
« on: August 11, 2024, 09:04:18 AM »
I had to look up the Sky News video of Rowley since the article linked does not show it. From the way Rowley said it, I can only conclude that he did mean people outside the UK, although to extrapolate 'US citizens' from that is a bit of a stretch. He's more than likely referring to UK citizens who are currently outside the UK, like Tommy Robinson, who is alleged* to have played a major role in instigating the riots.

Rowley is asked about Elon Musk but he doesn't say anything about Musk specifically, nor does he say anything specifically about foreign nationals, US based or otherwise, only that 'keyboard warriors' are not protected from incitement laws.

NY Post is full of shit as usual, but Saddam's interpretation is also lacking imo.

*if you want a better example of how fucked UK speech laws are, I can't even say something obvious without qualifying it as an allegation that I heard somewhere else because libel suits are so easy to file and win

5
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: August 04, 2024, 12:38:09 AM »
Finally, the last time I will ever watch, think, or write about anything involving Zack Snyder! I've seen his name so many times recently that it ceases to look like an actual name that someone would have.

Zack Snyder presents Zack Snyder's Justice League (dir. Zack Snyder), a Zack Snyder film

It’s tempting, whenever a director gets to do it their way, to celebrate the triumph of art over commerce. We might think of Terry Gilliam’s successful campaign to have control over the theatrical cut of Brazil after Universal created its own secret cut which removed the so-called ‘dark’ ending. More recently perhaps we think of David Lynch being brought back on board the third season of Twin Peaks after initially dropping out over budgetary concerns, delivering on that basis a work of clearly unfiltered personal expression. We prize such stories so highly because they are rare, for the pitfalls of giving an artist creative control in a commercial industry are many. Famously Michael Cimino’s 1980 behemoth western Heaven’s Gate not only lost United Artists tens (today hundreds) of millions of dollars, but apparently caused them to drop out of movie production altogether because the damage to their reputation was felt to be an even greater loss. Heaven’s Gate is by no means a bad film, but it suffered the worst vagaries of the invisible hand nonetheless. Seeming to have learned nothing from this and similar examples of the artist crushed by the capriciousness of commerce, Warner Bros. gave Zack Snyder the helm of their DC Comics film franchise, hoping to build a competitor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe by appealing to a darker, more auteurish take on such beloved heroes as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash. Maybe they got a little too much of what they wanted, with Snyder’s vision highlighting the rift between different groups of comics fans. His conception of the superhero, which he refers to as ‘hardcore deconstructionist’, is one of those things which you either go along with or simply refuse to accept; I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be both interested in the superhero as a concept and ambivalent towards the idea that Superman killing his enemies makes him more mature or philosophically compelling as a character than he otherwise would be. Nonetheless, Snyder’s three directed DCEU features made money on their insane budgets, including Justice League, which Snyder himself did not finish owing to a family tragedy. Joss Whedon, who had notably helmed the first two Avengers films to great commercial success, was brought on board by Warner with the hope that he would give the DCEU its first mega-hit, or at least salvage the garbled mess that the film presumably existed as at that point. It made back its budget, meanwhile Snyder’s fans who had been awaiting the all too hasty culmination of the hardcore deconstructionist vision were left out in the cold. A massive fan campaign ensued with the result that in 2021 Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-hour epic, was released by HBO.
 
Since the film is more or less the same as its theatrical counterpart but twice as long, to talk about the plot seems a waste of time, though to talk about excess that adds nothing is perhaps a fruitful use of our time. This will mainly be the purpose of this review, which I hesitate to call a review in my usual style since it is not really all that concerned with content but with form, though it is very much polemical nonetheless. My main concern is to attempt to understand Zack Snyder himself, what is it that makes him do what he does as a filmmaker, because I am rapidly approaching the point past which I will never have to commit to thinking about Zack Snyder ever again. I want from my last effort in this fraught space to feel like I have gained something, that there was more than just the pointless suffering of nonsense as if I were a character in a story by Samuel Beckett. If I find myself depositing a stone in one pocket, then removing that stone and putting it in another pocket, and so on until it has traversed all of my pockets, the discovery made through this work may be one of insanity. But we must do the work first. First, then, an answer to the question: should we celebrate this victory of the artist, this preservation of the original vision? It’s easy and perhaps even sufficient to say that if you like the DCEU then you like Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and that that formula holds true in the negative as well. However, for me, someone who has been fairly baffled by the idea that anyone could find this sloppy, incoherent, childish drivel even remotely compelling in any sense whatsoever, the answer is yes. While I will take the piss out of them and their fave relentlessly, I still want Snyder’s fans to have their cake. The real question, the snobby question, is whether Snyder should be thought of as an artist at all. In many ways he can be seen as a commercial filmmaker with pretensions towards a garbled aesthetics which may ultimately come from his favourite author Ayn Rand. Rand’s philosophy, while commonly associated with the mantra ‘greed is good’, in reality spans many different fields in its scope. I want in particular to focus on aesthetics and creativity, and Rand has much to tell us that will prove illuminating as we delve further on into the mire of Snyder’s action figure nightmare world.
 
In her fiction many of Rand’s protagonists are notable for some prodigious skill or ambition that makes them better than the people around them, a common thread running through these is a seeming obsession with invention, particularly in the fields of architecture and industry. In We the Living, Kira Argounova is an aspiring engineer who dreams of skyscrapers from within the suffocating confines of the Soviet Union, even while she is swallowed up by the grinding inhuman machinery of the communist system. In The Fountainhead Howard Roark is a genius architect who is shunned by the establishment because he is steadfast in his desire to build structures in new and daring styles. In Atlas Shrugged John Galt leads a revolution of ‘productive’ and ‘creative’ people in order to force the US government to do away with laws that restrict industry. In all three cases the message is clear, these people are the real people, individuals for whom the whole world should kneel in acceptance of its inferiority as a matter of existential necessity, for if these individuals are bound by those chains whose links were forged only to bind the common folk, the leeches, the ‘looters’, humanity itself will wither and die by a plague of mediocrity. In many ways we can see these characters as superheroes of one kind or another, Promethean figures heralding change, progress, evolution, bringing mankind towards a reckoning with its own limits. As with the titular department store in Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames you can be intellectually for or against them but to act to resist them is to invite your own doom, for in the real world per Rand theirs are inexorable forces that will sweep you away as though you were the merest mote of dust. However, I would like to think of this phenomenon of the all-powerful individual not entirely in reference to superheroes but also to artists, and in particular to Zack Snyder, the director who would build skyscrapers.
 
Like Argounova, Snyder dreams of skyscrapers, great spectacular man-made things that reach up to blot out the sun, looming over the world. Like Roark, Snyder is unorthodox, audacious in his methods, his stories move at their own pace, his characters to their own rhythms. Like Galt, Snyder’s creative vision is one that abhors all restriction, whether material or intellectual, and makes no compromise that is not to its own advantage. Snyder’s Superman kills because it is audacious, because it looms above the audience, because it negates compromise. This is the essence of his creation, a Randian action figure sandbox where big things happen not because of any logic of causation, any motive of character, but because they are big; not because they have substance to dig into or meaning to impart, but because their proportions and the awe they are presumably intended to inspire invite the assumption that they possess those qualities. Snyder’s interest is solely in the bigness of the event, and while he wrings some symbolic value from these gargantuan superhuman happenings, or at least tells us that he does, this can only ever amount to so much decoration on the periphery of the actual thing. 
 
Snyder in many ways puts the lie to Rand’s idealisation of the individual, he embodies pretty much every Randian virtue but he is also of meagre talent. He is the real Howard Roark, an aspirant to greatness who was not shunned but who failed artistically, not because he was too brilliant but because he was an idiot, and not because he boldly transgressed the stuffy traditions of the establishment but because his alternative was founded upon nonsense. Crucial to Rand’s characterisation of ideal man Roark (and basically all her protagonists) is inherent victimisation, it is not enough for such a man to try and fail on his own merits, he must be the victim of a cruel system, a conspiracy to make mediocrity sacrosanct. It’s easy enough to see how this arises from her youth in the Soviet Union, where the good and the great were commonly ground down to nothing to serve the glory of the Motherland, of the Party. Kira Argounova is Rand’s most grounded heroine in that sense, yet in America, the setting of all Rand’s other fictions, the hero is beset by what exactly? Poor people who want help! A lesser woman would have clutched her pearls and fainted. For all her talk of individual merit, it is Rand’s preference that those who have talent but no money to begin with should loiter below their supposed true station for want of access, because what she holds sacred is not talent, not work ethic, not genius, but raw material wealth. In fact wealth is the virtue that retroactively guarantees talent, work ethic, and genius—if you have it, it must be because you earned it: the theory is not tested against the data, the data are tested against the theory and found wanting. When Bruce Wayne quips to Barry Allen that his superpower is being rich, the cuteness of the exchange only somewhat veils the Randian truth that Batman’s vigilante crusade and concomitant violence are validated by his virtue, the virtue of having lots of money. In this world, though he is presented in Dawn of Justice as a vanguard against the superhuman, Batman has purchased his own godhood, he has become a skyscraper to dwarf all those which he owns, towering far above the little hovels of other men.
 
The film itself is a skyscraper. At four hours in duration it is totally needless, a Burj Khalifa, testament to self-justifying excess. Compared to the theatrical cut, which was bad but unremarkably so, Snyder’s authorised version is an exercise in empty grandeur, like a gold toilet with gold toilet paper and a flush handle made of diamond. Amusingly this was expected to be the ‘mature’ version, yet a good many of the quips one might have expected to drip from the pen of Joss Whedon were Snyder’s own, laying bare the empty-headedness of the idea that Snyder is a mature, thinking person’s filmmaker. Rather he is a Randian filmmaker, someone for whom stamping one’s name upon something is more important than the quality of the thing being stamped upon. Snyder frequently makes ‘choices’ in this version of the film simply for the sake of having them be his own. Not better, perhaps not even worse, but his. There is something worthwhile in this in principle, but in practice it just serves to make you more and more aware of his own lack of artistic sensibility. Take the non-score music choices (please!) for example, during Bruce Wayne’s confrontation with Aquaman Arthur Curry we get to learn that Snyder likes Nick Cave, or rather that what he likes is people singing sad songs over a piano or whatever. I lost count of the number of drawn out sad piano scenes telling us nothing we didn’t already know, like for example were you aware that Lois Lane is sad because Superman is dead? Well don’t worry, there’s a drawn out scene with sad piano people just to make sure you got the point. But in fact it would appear that for Snyder ‘getting the point’ doesn’t really matter at all, it is enough for such scenes to be there because they add to the film’s duration, make it larger and therefore not just better but greater, a great work, a skyscraper.
 
Generally speaking I think that self-indulgence in art is a good thing, the greatest works throughout history in any given medium have not been made by following all the rules, indeed often they have made their own rules for other artists to navigate. As Walter Benjamin put it, I feel somewhat hyperbolically, a great work either creates a genre or ends one. If Snyder has rules of his own they are incoherent, like a child making up new rules for a game as it unfolds. Any genre he could create would begin and end in the same work, perhaps not even by the end but halfway through, for whatever ideal it pretended to in the first place would be gone, superseded by whatever needed right there and then to be the case. This entire review has of course been an extremely roundabout way of saying that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a confused mess founded upon half-realised, half-grasped conceptions of art, of drama, and of the superhero. Maybe even less than that, it is an attempt to figure out Snyder himself. My conclusion is that he wants desperately to be seen as a philosophical filmmaker, a thinking person’s director of blockbuster epics like the similarly ponderous Christopher Nolan. But he isn’t even as good as Nolan, because at least Nolan has in his head some actual design that guides his projects, despite being a design I hate. I fear nonetheless that I have been too extreme in calling Snyder an idiot. Since I am not a Randian I hold charity, which may loosely be defined as kindness at the root of the act of helping others, to be a virtue, but since I am also a garrulous and combative egomaniac I must build in prose my own skyscrapers with my own name hung haphazardly therefrom in blinding neon. As the clichéd movie villain speech goes: we’re not so different, you and I. But in that case I would be saying nothing more than that everyone is Zack Snyder, for everyone wants their name on something somewhere and hopes that it won’t be erased too soon. Even if I am just a writer of flowery pseudo-entertainments, I would like to think that my name has ended up on a few things that are at least not incompetently designed and constructed.
 
Ultimately, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is an exercise in pointlessness. It adds nothing to the theatrical cut other than the weight of its own self-importance. It revels in its imagined audaciousness, the daring required to unzip and let loose a weak but long lasting stream of piss on the audience. Four hours later the front row, thoroughly soaked with piss, claps furiously at the brilliance of having been pissed upon to no real end but itself. The rest of us, who have only watched the front row become perfumed with the sickly scent of piss, should understandably feel a little bit disappointed that we missed out. Perhaps we assume that there was in fact something to gain from being drenched in piss. Like the touch of a saint the piss of Zack Snyder may have imparted the gift of healing to us lepers who just don’t get it, healing through understanding that to be pissed upon and be thankful for it is a joy beyond joy. If I didn’t already know that this is the last time I will ever wittingly visit Snyder’s mass pissoir, I would resolve next time to bring a cup.

6
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: July 28, 2024, 12:59:40 PM »
I'm working on my Snydercut review and then that's it. I'm only on these because I foolishly decided that I should finish the Batshit Odyssey™. The most disturbing thing here is Saddam hasn't responded to my incredible takes in autistic detail.

7
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: US Election poll
« on: July 24, 2024, 05:59:14 PM »
My vote doesn't matter but clearly RFK is the most sane and normal person of all time.

8
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: July 23, 2024, 03:24:14 PM »
Well, now that there's definitively only one senile old pedophile in the race, who are YOU voting for?

Pretty tough for a lot of people to answer when one of the parties hasn't chosen a candidate to be voted for yet.

You really should pay attention to the news.
I did

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/kamala-harris-democratic-delegates

You should really pay attention to who you're quoting.

9
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden
« on: July 21, 2024, 10:09:02 PM »
Allan Lichtman must be furious right now. The keys, the keys!

10
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump
« on: July 14, 2024, 03:11:32 PM »
Damn it, just a little better aim and we'd have had great news.

I dunno, I mean... What would his raving supporters do if their leader was murdered by the only one with motive(they think): Biden and liberals?
Lots and lots of violence. 

It'd be worth it.
The last thing you should be hoping for if you want to see the end of MAGA is Trump as a martyr.

idk if you're trolling or you legitimately think accelerationism is a good idea but you need to stop lmao

11
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 07, 2024, 08:17:28 PM »
It's a Catch-22, the only way to get rid of the big parties is through PR, the only way to get PR is to get rid of the big parties.
I mean, we could have a referen—
wait
wait no
let's not do that
:')

In five years' time it could even be feasible to do it that way, although not preferable to a government with a mandate and an actual plan.

12
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 07, 2024, 11:04:31 AM »
The case for PR becomes stronger with each election. But will either of these dementia patient dinosaur parties let go of power? I doubt it. It's a Catch-22, the only way to get rid of the big parties is through PR, the only way to get PR is to get rid of the big parties.

13
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: July 06, 2024, 02:07:32 PM »
Justice League (dir. Zack Snyder / Joss Whedon)

As promised by Dawn of Justice, the Justice League get their own feature length outing in the appropriately titled Justice League. This film is perhaps better known for its production difficulties, and its being a precursor to a fan campaign for the release of Zack Snyder’s four hour cut, which was put out by HBO in 2021, than it is for anything that actually happens in it. Zack Snyder was forced to step down from the director’s chair by a family tragedy, and perennial hack Joss Whedon was brought in to attempt to smooth things over with rewrites and reshoots. It didn’t work. While Whedon’s helming of the first big MCU team-up movie The Avengers—released in the UK as Avengers Assemble, in order to avoid confusion with the very relevant and current British TV show The Avengers, which is about a man named Steed who wears a bowler hat and has a cane sword—which now that I think about it is definitely cooler than the actual movie——was undoubtedly a major success, his quippy levity here sits ungainly alongside Snyder’s empty portent.

The story is as complicated or as basic as you want it to be by virtue of a lot of stuff happening to no real significance. There is an alien called Steppenwolf, and he was born to be wild! No, in fact he was born to be a space terrorist or something. He hops through dimensional portals looking for the infinity stones mother boxes which when combined will make everything go a bit Color Out of Space in order to resemble his homeworld for some reason. At one point Steppy mentions Darkseid, with the implication that Step-To-the-Beat is working for him, but Darkseid never shows up or does anything, so it’s unknown what the master plan is there. A long time ago Steppenwolf was banished from Earth by a coalition of Amazonian and Atlantean forces, and the mother boxes were scattered and hidden away. However, Step-On-Up has no difficulty finding these in the present day and is also basically impervious to everyone. That is until the Justice League uses one of the boxes to resurrect Superman, who is so amazing and perfect that Steppenwolf actively begins to lose power as a result, to the point that even Aquaman, who spends most of the movie being completely useless, even in situations where his powers should be at their most potent, can beat him. Steppenwolf gets scared, and his army of fear feeding fly fiends descends upon him, forcing him to retreat. And that’s it.

To call this film bad is to invite some comparison to previous DCEU outings. Is it as bad as Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice? In some ways it is, while in others it manages to be just bland and forgettable enough not to be. The most obvious problem that develops as the film goes on is its cast of heroes, there are simply too many to do justice (ha ha) to, and while three of them are semi-known entities from previous films, the rest are just sort of there to the point that their existences, powers, and purposes are mostly known through exposition. My favourite part might be when Wonder Woman tells Cyborg that she had a common life experience and that she had to deal with it. It’s not just that the dialogue and delivery are stunningly ham-fisted, but that this exchange somehow convinces Cyborg that being alive is good actually. As much as I make fun of the pretence towards depth in Snyder’s previous films, this film is particularly brazen in not even attempting to veil the fact that its drama is a literal flat 2D plane. I don’t actually know how much of what we see in this film is Snyder’s or Whedon’s ‘vision’, but my conclusion from this and from previous experiences is that both of them need to stop, and possibly see a therapist.

The film’s visuals are no delight either. From its chained sequences of establishing shots to its often shockingly poor special effects, the film is neither artistically nor technically compelling. It is marred by uncontrolled and purposeless excess in all elements, from the number of shots it takes to do something extremely basic, to the near constant movement of the camera. Its shots, which are almost entirely mock epic in scope and minuscule in impact, do nothing to help the storytelling. It is a film made by someone who, per the credits, wrote the script but did not read it. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that the film is boring, like stupefyingly boring. Where previous DCEU films were often hilariously bad, there is barely anything to make fun of here, or rather it makes fun of itself simply by existing in the form that it does. Whoever signed off on this at Warner Bros. was a fucking idiot. Forget Snyder, forget Whedon, forget whoever edited it, the fault here ultimately lies with execs who were too stupid to say ‘no’. You put up a budget of $300 million and not only is this what you get back, not only that, but you’re happy with it? Are you kidding? Are you pranking me bro? Fucking what. It didn’t even do that well, just barely making back double its budget. Who thought it was a good idea to put it out this way? I’m not saying you could have gotten a much better movie with more time, but it could have been a little bit less… whatever you want to call this. It’s so bland that my vocabulary fails me.
 
A quick note on the music, which kept pissing me right off, and while for the most part is as nondescript as that which it accompanies, does actually speak somewhat to the inability of DC to really let go of its cinematic past. Quotes from Danny Elfman’s Batman and John Williams’s Superman scores litter the soundscape here, and every time they pop up I feel a certain ire well up within me like stomach acid into my oesophagus. You failed to do justice (ha ha ×2) to them in the first place, laying waste to and burying Tim Burton’s expressionist fairy-tale Batman outings under Joel Schumacher’s insulting cack, and making worse and worse sequels to Richard Donner’s lovably silly Superman. Don’t extend them now as olive branches to people who expect a bare minimum of competence from writers and directors, please. The return of Michael Keaton’s Batman in the final Snyder-verse movie The Flash was a welcome enough piece of fanservice, but he undoubtedly didn’t really fit into that world. Similarly, trying to inject the swashbuckling triumph of those Elfman and Williams themes into this dour, miserable, barely-registering-as-a-movie movie is not merely an insulting reminder of better times and better movies for DC heroes, it’s also just plain incongruous.

Justice League is a bad movie that seems less bad than it is when taken in the context of its predecessors. Its characters, plot, action, pacing, cinematography and special effects are all dismal, and its one saving grace may be—with its first set of credits (the funniest thing about Justice League may be its confident teasing of sequels that will never happen) appearing under the one hour and fifty minute mark—that it farts along and runs out of gas quickly compared to Snyder’s previous efforts. Some time after its release, Snyder was content to start talking up his alleged original allegedly a vision for the film, which engendered a massive fan campaign that was actually successful. I’m always amazed when something that seems primarily to exist on Twitter and Reddit manifests in the form of something actually happening. Cue the four hour long Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a torturous task as daunting and dreadful as any I can think of in the cinematic world. The best thing I can say about this theatrical cut is that it didn’t make me want to scream, if only because it didn’t really make much of an impression at all. And with that I say justice has been done!

14
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 04, 2024, 11:15:43 PM »
Sad news, Hamas apologist troll and grifter George Galloway is projected to lose his seat. The entertainment we'll be missing out on is immeasurable.

15
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 04, 2024, 10:33:06 PM »
It's clear that Labour will win.
But there's not the optimism there was when they won in 1997. They'll win because of how much people hate the Tories, not because they like Labour or Starmer. The latter just happens to be the only credible alternative.
Yep, it's a vote against, not a vote for. Just like Brexit, come to think of it.

16
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« 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.

17
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: July 03, 2024, 11:12:02 AM »
An estimated couple of days left until Rishi packs his bags and buggers off to California.

Things to look forward to:
  • George Galloway and Nigel Farage trolling the Commons and each other
  • Most Tory bigwigs losing their seats
  • The most complacent Labour government in history
  • The impending failure of Labour leading to a Tory-like decline and the rise of smaller left parties five years from now???

18
Philosophy, Religion & Society / UK General Election, 4 July 2024
« on: May 22, 2024, 06:24:15 PM »
He could have waited out the year to see what, if anything, would happen that might make the Tories' inevitable defeat less absolute, but he decided the kamikaze option was the right one for whatever reason. Possibly he's looking forward to an early retirement in the US.



My biggest concern for some time now has been a Labour government without an effective opposition. If the polling is accurate then complacency will be the defining characteristic of Starmer's time in No 10.

Lastly I'm not sure if the date is supposed to be some sort of stunt because muh independence but it certainly seems a touch Boris.

19
Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Man or bear?
« on: May 10, 2024, 11:55:35 PM »
I'd prefer it to be a moose. I feel like a moose and I could just let each other be. There would be an unspoken understanding between us that its mooseness and my humanness present no legitimate potential for conflict. Thus harmony prevails.

Praise the moose.

20
Arts & Entertainment / Re: Now Playing (the Video Game Version)
« on: March 31, 2024, 06:25:29 PM »
Cyberpunk 2077 is presentationally fantastic but kind of boring to actually play. For the first few hours I approached it as an FPS, but it became obvious when I decided to try using my PS5 controller that it's a console action game that just happens to be played primarily in first person perspective. I've been warming to it since then, although the generous aimbot assist only really serves to make the garbage gunplay tolerable rather than fun. One thing I will say is just moving around the city feels nice, especially with the adaptive triggers and finer steering control making the driving much smoother and more responsive, although the experience is kind of barren in terms of non-mission content, even compared to now-ancient games like San Andreas.

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