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| If you don't know who these two are stop reading now. Seriously. |
Zack Snyder thinks you’re an idiot. You might
reasonably argue that you’ve seen his films and he’s one to talk, but bear with
me. When you sit down to watch Batman
v Superman: Dawn of Justice it quickly becomes plain that Snyder thinks you’re
an idiot because you’ve never heard of Batman.
You’ve seen his tawdry, inconsequential Man of Steel movie so you know about his take on Superman. But
somehow in your cultural wilderness, three Christopher Nolan movies, two Joel
Schumacher movies, two Tim Burton movies, Gotham
on the telly, the Adam West TV series before that, and even The Lego Movie, for Heaven’s sake, have
all passed you by.
That presumably is why he starts this film with
another retelling of Batman’s origin which he then conveniently discards for
the rest of the film. In comic books Batman fights crime because of the murder of his parents.
In this movie he fights crime because he is outraged by the collateral damage caused
by Superman fighting Zod at the end of Man
of Steel. Or does he?
Is he in fact simply coming out of retirement? He has, as
Alfred, his butler, tells us been fighting crime for 20 years. If that’s the case,
why has no one in Metropolis heard of him? Clark Kent thinks the emergence of
the ‘Gotham Bat’ is a story. But given that Metropolis and Gotham are on opposite
sides of a bay, like San Francisco and Oakland, why did no one in Metropolis ever
see the Bat-signal in those 20 years. But actually they did, because Superman
mentions it. And if Batman was prompted to fight crime because of Superman, how
did he build the Batcave and equip it inside 18 months?
Incidentally this hi-tech Batcave exists in a
world where news photographers still use film and not memory cards. Just so
Snyder can use the hackneyed cliché of the bad guy pulling the film out of the
back of a camera to discover a tracking device that doesn’t need to be there
anyway.
The handling of Superman is just as bad. The world
thinks he’s a menace, or at least those on the X-Men rip-off Senate committee do.
But he’s not a menace because he trashed half of down-town Metropolis, he’s a
menace because of a massacre in some remote African village where the victims
were demonstrably killed, in the presence of witnesses, before he got there.
Seriously I could do this all day but frankly life’s
too short. There are so many issues and inconsistencies in this film that the
only fun to be had is in trying to identify them.
The normal rules of scriptwriting apply on a cause
and effect basis; this happens and then that happens, or that happens because
this happened. Not in Snyder’s world. BvS is a catalogue of incidents; this happens,
then this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and so on for 150
soul-deadening minutes.
BvS is a film that just keeps
asking questions without answering them. All of the time it fails to answer the one
big question. Why is this happening?
It doesn’t make a lick of sense. Basically Lex
Luthor – actually Alexander Luthor in a nod presumably to the DC post-Crisis universe – is either an evil
genius or a spoiled brat? The writers haven’t taken time to work it out so why
should you. Anyway, he manipulates Superman into fighting Batman - the world's
greatest detective and the world's mightiest mortal are played for chumps by a hyperactive
nerd.
In deference to Man of Steel, we are pointedly informed that everywhere they fight
is either empty, deserted, or abandoned in case any other billionaire playboys
get outraged. Incidentally if Batman is so outraged at collateral damage in the
first film, why is he so relaxed about killing dozens in his own rampages?
Wonder Woman pops up for no good reason. Actually she
pops up for the same reason the film stops during the climactic battle, as a
teaser for next year’s Justice League
movie. Believe it or not the film actually stops dead for what amounts to a
glorified trailer.
Anyway after what will become known as the ‘Martha
moment’ – easily the dumbest scene in a film chock-full of moronic moments –
Superman and Batman become pals and join Wonder Woman to fight a Kryptonian
menace brought back to life by Luthor.
By this point I had pretty much lost the will to
live but, frustratingly, in that final conflict there is a tiny glimmer of the
film this might have been in the hands of an imaginative director. That just
makes the stuff served up here even more irritating.
With the exception of Jeremy Irons and Diane Lane
the performances are nothing to write home about. I know people are raving
about Ben Affleck’s performance compared to the other two but in this movie
that’s like being the best dressed man on radio. Henry Cavill’s Superman has
all the charisma of a clothes horse with a bit less personality.
The craft skills are poor too. The script is a
mess and the cinematography is dark and gloomy – just what you’d expect for a
character like Superman who is a beacon of light and hope. It’s the editing
that really got me. There is no internal logic to this cut; it’s like one of
those Burroughs stories where the scenes appear to have been thrown into the
air and assembled in the order they landed.
I’ll stop now but seriously I could do this all
day. I began by suggesting that Zack Snyder thinks we're idiots but, to be
honest, considering this film has taken half a billion dollars at the box
office, he might be right.
