MCU v DCEU II
The Nolanverse (I’M BATMAN!)
The Dark Knight may be the best superhero film ever, but it lead to many of the DCEU’s missteps
The rivalry between comic giants Marvel and DC has never been truly acknowledged by either company, but there is no doubt that fans of both companies take it very seriously. Their latest battleground, the silver screen, has been extremely one-sided, with Marvel the undisputed conquerer. Part 1 of this series covered the birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While Marvel was forging a future path, DC was perfecting the old way of doing things.
The Dark Knight is without question the best superhero film ever. That title is key. Marvel may have created the most successful superhero franchise, but DC made the best film. Released in 2008, The Dark Knight left Warner Brothers with some massive shoes to fill, a task it has struggled to keep up with. The shadow Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger cast still looms over the superhero genre nearly a decade after it was cast.
Much has been said about what makes the Dark Knight Trilogy, and The Dark Knight especially, so successful. Nolan was very good at bringing gravitas, realism and complex storytelling to a genre dominated by explosions, wisecracks and escapism. Each of the Dark Knight films leaves viewers contemplating the role that superheroes play in their own universes and in our world. However, in DC’s efforts to recapture the elements that made the Dark Knight Trilogy so successful, they have lost sight of the core branding elements that make their superheroes work in today’s world of cinematic empires.
In this article, we are going to break down both The Dark Knight and Man of Steel to discover how Christopher Nolan makes a film and how mimicking that formula is impossible without the right character, story and creative control.
The Dark Knight: saving Gotham’s soul
The Dark Knight is one of Nolan’s best films, ranking above Interstellar and Inception in my personal rankings. (It doesn’t beat The Prestige, which is the perfect Nolan film, but it’s close) All of Nolan’s films have a basic pattern to them: a brooding, middle aged, white male chases a dream that no one shares which causes him to lose everything he holds dear. He eventually achieves his dream, but at great cost and after some mind-bending storytelling. The film often begins at the end and is told through layered points of view. Michael Caine must also play a role.
The Dark Knight trilogy checks almost all of these boxes. Bruce Wayne is a orphaned billionaire who wants to make Gotham a place worth living, which is impossible due to the rampant crime and corruption in the city. To save Gotham from itself, Bruce Wayne gives up everything to be the Batman. At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, he is finally able to walk away from Gotham, but he has to kill the Batman to do that. Also, Michael Caine is Alfred. Ready for the mind bending?
With the Joker firmly in place as the perfect antagonist, Nolan is free to explore the other big piece of Batman’s psyche with Harvey Dent. Dent’s storyline is the most complex of the film because his character arc contains the real story Nolan is telling: the true battle for Gotham isn’t in the bombastic fist fight. It’s in Harvey Dent’s soul.
In one fell swoop, Nolan takes Batman’s greatest triumph and turns it into his greatest failure. Batman finally becomes the symbol his city needs, the Dark Knight Gotham has been waiting for, but the cost is exile. This subversion of the superhero arc is what makes The Dark Knight so compelling. In comparison, even Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises feel formulaic and stilted because Nolan has check the boxes of the superhero formula. (origin story, ultimate victory, gets the girl, etc.) The Dark Knight is good because it really isn’t a superhero film. It’s just a good film.
Mismanaging the Man of Steel
In 2010, news broke that the Nolan brothers and David S. Goyer were working on a new Superman film, entitled Man of Steel. When asked about the project, Nolan responded, “A lot of people have approached Superman in a lot of different ways. I only know the way that has worked for us…Each [film] serves to the internal logic of the story. They have nothing to do with each other.”
This is why Nolan’s Batman films worked so well. They had nothing to do with each other. You could watch each film in the Dark Knight Trilogy without having seen the others and still get the same experience. Knowing this bit of information, the thought that Warner Brothers executives wanted to mimic the tone of Nolan’s movies for their own cinematic universe seems a bit curious.
The film went through a long list of directors, including Ben Affleck, Matt Reeves, Tony Scott and Darren Aronofsky. Ultimately Zack Snyder, known for his work on 300, Watchmen and Sucker Punch, was chosen to direct the film. At the time, Snyder was considered a bit of a risky choice. His films were known to be visually stunning but frustrating. His adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen was panned by critics and trashed by fans of the graphic novel. These trends continued with Man of Steel.
Full disclosure: Zack Snyder’s style drives me crazy. I think he would make a fantastic Director of Photography, but his storytelling abilities rely too much on the visual to be effective. Snyder likes to beat his viewers over the head with imagery, and it only works about half the time.
Man of Steel is a perfect example. The entire film is based around the idea that Superman is a god among men. Which he is. However, the best comic book stories about that idea were always small, intimate, low-stakes stories. Man of Steel works very well until the stakes become “There’s a giant thing in the sky we have to destroy or the world will end.” Once Zod shows up, the film degrades into cacophonous explosions and confusing Kryptonian science.
Audiences had a hard time articulating what exactly was wrong with the film. Most chalked it up to a dreary tone and a desaturated color palette, but I think the real issue with Man of Steel are the not-so-subtle Christ symbols Snyder pushes. Grantland’s Wesley Morris laid out all the pieces of the metaphor:
“Instructed by his birth father to go to Earth and be man’s savior, Clark floats from a spaceship … with his legs together and arms wide open, as if he were on a crucifix. As a younger man in doubt, Clark visits a priest, and the camera frames him with a pane of stained glass depicting a New Testament scene in the background. As Superman, in U.S. government custody, he states his age as a perfectly messianic 33 years. Christliness has always been an element of the Superman myth. But this film’s near literal insistence upon it becomes absurd since director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer don’t dramatize the analogy, they presume it.”
Once this element was pointed out to me, Man of Steel became an incredibly annoying film. Subtlety is not a skill Zack Snyder posesses. He doesn’t know how to earn a moment like this:
Or one like this:
Had the Savior narrative been handled with more care and subtlety, Man of Steel might have been a revolutionary new kind of movie. Instead, it fell prey to the worst tendencies of its creative team. Man of Steel did have its defenders, but was ultimately a divisive, disappointing movie.
Unfortunately for Warner Brothers, there was no time to start over. Man of Steel was released in 2013, one year after Marvel’s Avengers. If DC was going to compete with Marvel on the silver screen, it had to get the Justice League up there, and fast. This time crunch, along with executive meddling, has doomed the first three films in the franchise (Man of Steel, BvS: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad) to critical failure. It’s now up to Wonder Woman (The first female superhero film, as well as the first superhero film to be directed by a woman. Well done, DC!) to save the DCEU from itself.
While DC was just learning how to make a modern superhero film, Marvel was perfecting its model and preparing for the most ambitious comic book movie yet: The Avengers. Understanding what made the Avengers successful will help us understand where DC has gone wrong in their films and what changes would have put it back on track. Part 3 of my series will take us to the Avenger Initiative.
