Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice follows on directly from Zack Snyder’s grand, underrated 2013 take on Superman, Man of Steel, with the immediately galvanising touch of replaying the apocalyptic action glimpsed in that film from the perspective of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). Wayne, greying and weathered, tries to aid employees in his company’s gutted and fractured skyscraper in downtown Metropolis, and witnesses Superman’s battles with General Zod with glowering frustration and impotence. This opening contextualises the discomfort many felt watching Man of Steel by using a well-known, long-familiar heroic avatar for the audience as witness, and sets up a drama where this very clash of perspectives and moral imperatives will be the essence of the tale. Snyder’s dramatic, thunderous if overlong finale for the earlier film took the idea of two virtual demigods fighting in our midst with stark seriousness, and the follow-up proves there was method to the mania. A year and a half later, Wayne has returned to his Batman vigilante activities with renewed zeal, saving a cellar full of human traffic, but with a new and foreboding habit of branding the criminals he targets.
This raises the ire of both Wayne’s stalwart aide and accomplice Alfred (Jeremy Irons) and Superman himself, aka Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), who starts to fixate on the vigilante, a dark doppelganger for his own selfless efforts at public service, to the point where his editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) has to bawl him out for neglecting actual assignments. Meanwhile Clark’s lover and colleague Lois Lane (Amy Adams) tries to interview an African warlord only to find herself taken captive. Clark saves her, but the situation proves to have been arranged and choreographed by unknown parties to make it look like Superman is causing more horror than that he heals. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is amongst other things a major gravitational force in the year’s roster of big-budget filmmaking if not its authentic event horizon, a bold tilt by Warner Bros. and DC Comics to take on Disney-Marvel’s industry-shaping success, and a licence to print money – just how much is the only enigma. The result extends not just Man of Steel but also the popular Christopher Nolan-led Batman films that came to a climax with The Dark Knight Rises (2012), albeit it ignoring the neat package that film tied up the character’s fate up in. Snyder replays Bruce’s life-warping early confrontation with crime and death at the outset, as his parents are gunned down brutally in a sequence where the director’s visual inspiration gets one of its few real work outs here, replete with colossal mechanistic close-ups of gun workings and flying pearls and the blank eyes of death – trauma codified cinematically as a whirling void of tiny details that become universes in themselves.
This is Snyder’s seventh feature film, and I’ve been a cheerleader for Snyder since his impressive take on Alan Moore’s Watchmen (2009) although for many others it seems he’ll only ever be the guy who made the lunkhead landmark 300 (2006). Batman v Superman, like its immediate predecessor, represents an honourable attempt by Snyder to engage more traditionally heroic superhero figures without recanting the critique of them in Watchmen; indeed, in many ways this film doubles down on this, portraying Batman as a borderline psychotic whose rage against inchoate fate makes him an easily manipulated tool, and Superman bewildered by why everyone doesn’t get how awesome he is after he levelled a city to save the world. Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) runs hearings and wants to keep Superman accountable to some form of consent, but also tries to keep walking a centre line between his admirers and critics. Chief amongst critics is the vastly wealthy entrepreneur and inventor Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). Luthor has discovered kryptonite in the ruins of the late General Zod’s space craft, and proposes using it as a potential safeguard for taking down Superman. Finch rejects Luthor’s plan but other government officials are interested, and they soon give him access to recovered paraphernalia of Zod’s doomed expedition, including the General’s very own corpse, to test his theories. Luthor’s real plan is, of course, far more monstrous, as he wants to snatch the fire of the gods and prove himself equal to any being earthly or extra-terrestrial. He’s the one orchestrating the plot to make Superman look dangerous, and setting up Bruce to take on the titan on the theory that a victory for Batman would take a far more powerful enemy out whilst Superman pummelling a puny human do-gooder would be the ultimate PR blow.
One of the smarter ideas apparent in Chris Terrio (Argo, 2010) and David S. Goyer’s script, is making tropes that might have reminded the audience of the lack of imagination that sometimes went into thinking up the early superhero canon, like the fact that Bruce and Clark’s mothers share the name Martha and that Bruce and Luthor are each unstable, damaged, wilful billionaires, and turns them into the very stuff of the plot, working like distorting mirrors that contrast motives and worldviews and revealing the slight tweaks of chance and psyche that separate hero from monster. The first coincidence provides the film’s most dramatic and pivotal juncture, whilst the latter helps set the story in motion, as both Lex Luthor and Bruce Wayne share a determination to attack the looming, intimidating god figure when both are trying to hold onto to their ego integrity in order to function. There seems to be a new trend in superhero movies, first hinted by last year’s Fantastic Four, where classic supervillains are being remade in the image of contemporary tech tycoons. This isn’t a particularly gripping trend because such people, in spite of their great levels of power and potentially insidious influence, as a breed just don’t wield much gravitas, much as Hollywood creatives, tired of seeing their movies pirated and their mythos leeched through their wares, see them as a threat. That said, Eisenberg’s jittery, motor-mouthed, plainly cuckoo take on Luthor is one of the stronger new elements on board here, perhaps the closest Snyder comes to extending the surprising sure-footedness he displayed on Man of Steel in remaking a very familiar element of this hoary property. Eisenberg also maintains some of the ethos behind Gene Hackman’s great characterisation from the classic Superman films, making Luthor humorous but also unveiling a genuinely ugly, villainous side when the right time comes. One of the strongest moments here comes late in the film when he taunts Clark with pictures of one of his loved ones captive, relishing the moment of total power over the seemingly omnipotent alien and revealing just what a nasty piece of work he is.
Irons is also very entertaining in his brief contributions as Alfred, who bemoans his boss’s seemingly perpetual bachelorhood and grills him over succumbing to his nastier impulses. Irons captures the note Snyder is very busy chasing, a knowing, newly grave take on this fare that nonetheless still has a flicker of cavalier wit behind it all. Sadly, though, the rest of this tottering pile of impulses and priorities is doomed to constantly frustrate, and although the film’s barefaced intention to set up an extended franchise for the Justice League certainly contributes to its ramshackle state, Batman v Superman is actually hurt most badly by its own desire to be taken seriously. The Marvel films have charted a journey from fantasies of boyish power turned on real-world problems to storylines involving corruption, blowback, and the refusal of life to obey simple precepts of justice. They have therefore in their strange way charted the current zeitgeist more intelligibly than many a more serious-seeming fiction, even as they’ve remained essentially lightweight pieces of fun. Snyder, Goyer, and Terrio want to go much further however and explore Superman and Batman not just as our conflicting superego and id but as metaphors for the problems of recent geopolitics – the inevitable cost of even the most nobly intended superpower interventionism, and the terrorist’s neurotic desire to make the monolith bleed in any way possible.
Thus, Bruce’s urge is to prove his battered and terrified human soul worth more than Superman’s accidental hardiness, and Superman’s wake, no matter how good his intentions and necessary his acts, often littered with human wreckage. Meanwhile images of Bruce’s branded victims, random terrorists being gunned down, and Clark’s mother (Diane Lane, customarily good) bound and gagged with a flamethrower aimed her, touch the edges of a genuinely dark and nasty facet to this fantasy. This black-as-tar streak is scarcely going to raise an eyebrow on the post-Frank Miller comics fan but is bound to freak out anyone whose concept of this fare is still rooted in the Adam West Batman series. One core problem here is that Batman v Superman keeps reiterating points made early on, and indeed which were already iterated decades ago: that Bruce is a near-nutjob driven compulsively to take on any looming force that tasks him with an Ahab-esque streak that might break loose at any moment, and Clark is a naïf who can’t negotiate the fractious state of the modern world. The film’s lengthy second act runs in circles as a result, substituting things occurring, like Lois trying to prod former Army officer, now Cabinet member Swanick (Harry Lennix) for info, for things actually happening, whilst our heroes ponder their responsible tristias in 57 varieties of fret and glower.
In spite of all the conceptual paraphernalia and contemporary angst trucked in here, the basic story is actually a very classical comic book plotline – an attempt to disgrace a protagonist in the eyes of the people in service of a bad guy’s evil plan. One significant subplot depicts an amputated and angry survivor of the earlier battle (Scoot McNairy) as he is manipulated by Luthor into making a violent and dramatic strike at Superman, one which does pay off in another of the film’s more effective scenes, particularly as Finch registers quivering disgust and shock at a very precise insult levelled at her by Luthor moments before all hell breaks loose. Hunter gets to remind us what a good actor she is and Snyder’s direction is at its most fine-tuned here too, building up a queasy note of menace and bewilderment before the axe falls. But this segment also labours to mill more pseudo-political grist, trucking in suicide bombing and wounded-warrior angst, in a manner that unbalances the narrative in what is, after all, a film about seeing the two guys you and your brother dressed up as wailing on each-other. In part because of the detail-encumbered, poorly balanced script, and perhaps from attempts to winnow this extremely ambitious project down to an acceptable length, the texture of the filmmaking starts to break down. There are unnecessary repetitions in scenes and crash cuts between random zones of action, superfluous plot elements and shoehorned characters. By the end I was left wondering if editor David Brenner had cut the film with his feet, so jarring and muddled some of the time frames and event flow became, and this might just count as one of the most poorly assembled major films of recent years.
This is particularly disappointing because for all his digital age showing-off, Snyder was usually reliable precisely for the fluency and clarity of his visual grammar and orchestration of images. Snyder is a born graphic artist, and his work to date had been distinguished by the proliferation of eye-catching delights. Man of Steel, particularly in its great Kryptonian prologue, achieved a genuine DeMillean sense of pictographic import to render its take on the comic book hero as new-age myth. But his touch is muted here, and the pictorial textures, although often striking, usually fragmented and rendered flatly declarative. I did like the cyberpunk quality to some of his touches, like Bruce’s new, mechanical suit of armour complete with glowing electronic eyes zeroing in on flying Superman with menacing intent in the midst of drenching rain. Several dream sequences in which Bruce and Clark are tormented by ghosts and have nightmarish visions of possible futures are interpolated throughout the film, as if specifically to give Snyder a chance to stretch his legs in a tale that otherwise takes a surprisingly long time to cut loose with real action. But instead these sequences are the worst parts of the film, particularly the longest one where Bruce imagines the earth a post-apocalyptic zone invaded by flying insect men, Bruce himself as Batman is forced to become the kind of gun-toting warrior he loathes, and Superman likes to randomly flash-fry anyone in his way. This sequence is intended to foreshadow the expanding DC universe and in particular the killer god Darkseid, but it just feels clumsy and confusing.
Cavill is still doing a good job in a role that’s more difficult than many credit it for, showing facets on a character usually presented as a flat pane of glass, and Affleck makes more impression here in a few minutes than Christian Bale did in three films as he’s allowed to show real feeling. Gal Gadot appears as a mysterious woman who bobs through the background of several scenes and eventually steps to the fore to taunt and intrigue Bruce: pre-release hype had long drained off the surprise and thrill when she proves to be the illustrious Wonder Woman, a character who is, amazingly, making her feature film debut. Here she’s used in an identical manner to Black Widow’s appearance in Iron Man 2 (2010). Gadot has exactly the right kind of statuesque charisma for the role and is interesting casting insofar as her clipped accent and aura of mystery not only cuts against the grain of macho posturing but also the increasingly grouchy brand of all-Americanness in these films. Batman v Superman doesn’t give much clear ground for Gadot to prove her acting chops, but when she turns up just in time to join in the boys’ big battle, she performs a narrative function reminiscent of Joanne Dru’s character in Red River (1948), and the film finally takes on some of the heroic lustre it seems up until then to be deliberately scrubbing away.
Something that’s hard to encapsulate about Batman v Superman is how it is, in spite of its many faults and bad stratagems, still a compelling, often intense experience nonetheless: it keeps coming at you with such force and desire to knock your socks off that sometimes it achieves that aim. The climactic confrontation between the two heroes is worth waiting for, particularly as Snyder is unrestrained in depicting their conflicting wills to power and personal terrors nearly driving one to murder the other before an epiphany leads them to connect. It’s a little bit jarring when just a couple of scenes later Batman is describing himself to Martha as “a friend of your son”, but I suppose that’s forgiveable, and besides this pays off with one of the film’s few, desperately needed humorous moments. Meanwhile Junkie JXL is now busy actually remixing Hans Zimmer scores instead of just imitating them. I also appreciated an early love scene between Clark and Lois – in a bath, no less – that trucks in a dash of actual, adult sexuality with a strong note of humane and erotic warmth. This is far more grown-up than any of the self-conscious naughtiness in Deadpool (2016) and almost a totally original moment in this genre.
The inevitable action-packed last act does give Batman a great moment of swashbuckling display as he decimates a room filled with Luthor’s goons to save Martha from their clutches. The climax, a confrontation with an unholy chimera Luthor creates using Zod’s body and his own blood dubbed Doomsday, sets up a conclusion where the result will be all too anticipated for anyone who followed the comic’s fate in the 1990s. But it unfolds wearyingly as a clichéd display of pummelling by a pixel monster interchangeable with five dozen others in modern cinema, and segues into a confused series of codas that point the way forward to more franchise service in a manner that renders this film’s attempt to probe the whole superhero ethos weirdly specious. Batman v Superman isn’t really any more overloaded and ill-focused than, say, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), and in many ways still heavily outclasses the Marvel films for cinematic and mythopoeic heft. And yet this makes the rambling, leaden, excessively grim, routine aspects of this work far more floridly disappointing and exhausting, because it can’t let its finer qualities come to the fore. In short, it’s a grandiose mess.
