Movie Review: “Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” presents us with a Clash of the Tentpoles.
Every night before I go to bed, my cats — Nina, a Russian Blue Calico and Greta, a Tortoise Shell Calico — duke it out in spectacular fashion in the living room area of the apartment I share with my wife. It’s quite a sight: they leap off the tops of bookshelves, throw each other into the couch, pin each other down like professional wrestlers. It’s nothing if not a spectacle. I’m sure if you were to blow it up to the size of a multiplex screen and cue it with the bombastic overtures of Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL, it’d be, at the very least, fun to watch. The cats also tend to leave ribbons of shredded toilet paper in their wake of their destruction, as opposed to, y’know, the ruins of entire cities, but that’s beside the point.
I bring this up because unlike the characters in “Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” my cats have the good sense to call it a night after thirty minutes of gladiatorial battle. “Batman Vs. Superman” offers no such respite: it is 153 minutes of growly, chiseled, unsmiling men making blunt proclamations about God and Power, intercut with scenes of eardrum-splitting, decibel-shattering carnage. Now, I thought director Zack Snyder would have expunged this particular compulsion his system after the morally questionable finale of “Man of Steel,” the superhero epic to which this film acts as a sort-of sequel and potential franchise platform. And to be fair, a lot of “Dawn of Justice” isn’t really his fault. The film feels confused on a fundamental level, perhaps as a result of studio meddling and the perils of fan service (fanboys, sharpen your daggers). I should also note that “Dawn of Justice” is a marginally better film than “Man of Steel,” and Snyder, as always, is capable of creating rapturous and dreamlike images that stick in your head long after you’ve forgotten most of everything else. But even the director’s gift for stylish overkill can’t disguise that this new Clash of the Tentpole Titans is (mostly) an unholy mess, a collision of state-of-the-art special effects with inexplicable motivations, hastily-edited big-screen mayhem and a relentlessly dour and downbeat mood that makes Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” films look like “Ant-Man”.
I don’t know if “Batman Vs. Superman” is really as paradigm-shiftingly awful as some of its more hyperbolic critics have suggested. Then again, the astonishingly ugly and almost instantaneous reaction of comic book die-hards the internet over — most of whom are convinced that the movie’s negative notices are indicative of some great critical conspiracy instead of the movie, y’know, just having problems — are just as troubling as the tendency of critics to get their heads stuck up their own asses. Though I gotta say, when me and the other critics have our weekly meetings in the lofty Tower of Criticism, where we haughtily look down upon the rest of humanity and no fun is ever allowed, these issues rarely come up. In all seriousness, though, this kind of black-and-white, nuance-free discourse is emblematic of a deeper dilemma that directly affects the way we consume and talk about movies. Something either has to be “the greatest superhero movie ever” or “a nail in the coffin for Marvel/DC/etc.” The middle ground has all but vanished. Ironically, that’s the ground that “Dawn of Justice” ends up occupying: the middle. It’s not nearly as bad as many of its critics have suggested, but it’s also undeniably a missed opportunity: too long, far too serious and grim to the point of parody. It may not be the Batman/Superhero mash-up we’ve been promised, but those who are looking for a city-leveling smackdown between two cheerless badasses in capes may very well get what they came to see.
Snyder’s film begins with about five or six different openings, all of which disorient the viewer as to what is happening when, and to whom. To kick things off, the director stages yet another vision of young Bruce Wayne witnessing the gruesome murder of his parents. We’ve seen this horrible scene many, many times before, but Snyder still stages it with a sadistic elegance: there’s even a genuinely chilling shot, Fincher-esque close-p of a pistol barrel protruding through the pearl necklace that belongs to Bruce’s mother (during flourishes such as these, you can tell the prodigious Snyder cut his teeth on music videos). Fast forward a couple decades later, where we open on grown-up Bruce racing through the streets of Metropolis as the apocalyptic showdown between Superman (Henry Cavill) and his archnemesis from “Man of Steel,” General Zod (Michael Shannon) brings the city to its knees. While it’s mildly refreshing that the filmmakers do briefly recognize the increasingly cavalier attitude that superhero movies tend to have towards the damaged caused by their titular saviors, it’s also dispiriting that Snyder and company inevitably return to the same kind of numbing large-scale destruction in the last half of this newest movie. Since the attacks caused by Superman have left thousands dead, others crippled and many pondering his purpose, the alien being known as Kal-El on his home planet and Clark Kent on ours has been painted as an enemy. Some, like Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane, (Amy Adams) buy the whole benevolent savior thing, but it’s safe to say that when “Batman Vs. Superman” opens, the caped crusader is viewed practically one notch above a common terrorist. Certainly Mr. Wayne feels this way: he lost members of his family on the day of the Metropolis melee, and has since aged into the toney life of a graying, well-heeled playboy fascist living in exile.
I gotta say, the movie’s conception of Batman as a right-wing bully feels pretty on the money, considering the filmmakers cribbed most of their inspiration for the character from Frank Miller’s spectacularly bleak graphic novel “The Dark Knight Rises”. Miller’s conservative worldview notwithstanding, it’s hard not to see political allusions at play, given that the film name-drops its many historical and religious signifiers like it’s a kid being quizzed in class. Batman, though: here is a Batman, finally, who is tired of being the city’s savior. He’s seen one too many decent people die to want to keep fighting the good fight. He’s world-weary and brutal and Affleck plays him with a delicious cynicism that’s actually quite moving. It’s always been easy to badmouth Affleck, especially at this sensitive point in his personal and professional life, but the fact is that he’s stepping back into a realm where he was once ridiculed (we all remember how the “Daredevil” movie turned out) and giving a great, consistently grounded performance in a movie that doesn’t match him. The criticisms that have often been lobbed at him that he’s a leaden or uninteresting leading man certainly don’t apply here: his Bruce Wayne is a vicious and damaged man, and one of the more interesting big-screen incarnations of the Caped Crusader yet. “That son of a bitch brought the war to us,” he snarls to his loyal butler Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons, underused). “He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if there is even a 1% chance of that happening, we need to take it as an absolute certainty”. In moments like these, Batman sounds more like Dick Cheney than the cowl-wearing crimefighter we’ve all come to know and love. This hyper-militaristic penchant for violence — Affleck’s Batman brands sex offenders and other lowlives so that they will face horrible punishment once behind bars — certainly comes into handy when he and the big, square-jawed alien guy have to join forces against a common enemy. That would be the malevolent Lex Luthor, played here in a performance of unhinged, glorious indulgence by the normally more subdued Jesse Eisenberg.
Let’s talk about Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor for a moment. A lot of critics have taken issue with Eisenberg’s go-for-broke performance here, some even going so far as to suggest that he’s the worst thing about the movie. I want to ask these critics what the film would be like if they removed Eisenberg from it. For one, it’d be a lot less fun. As good as Affleck is here, Eisenberg is the only performer in “Dawn of Justice” who seems to know he’s in a comic book movie, and as such, he’s having a blast. He seems determined to outdo both Gene Hackman and Kevin Spacey (both of whom have memorably embodied Luthor in past installments) in the overacting department, and while he doesn’t quite succeed, he ultimately turns the nefarious tycoon into something infinitely more interesting. His Lex is an eloquent, sinister dandy, a loopy yuppie nutjob given to name-dropping Copernicus and Zeus and going on long-winded and sometimes riotous monologues that suggest that Eisenberg still has those Sorkin rhythms running in his brain. Eisenberg’s Lex also has an aversion to meeting anyone’s eyeline that suggests he may very well be on the spectrum, and there’s even a genuinely funny/baffling moment where he stuffs a cherry Jolly Rancher into the mouth of an unamused Senator. It’s a bizarre, WTF moment in a movie that could use a few more of them.
The final showdown in “Batman Vs. Superman” — you know, the one we all came to see — turns out to be a deafening, seemingly endless slugfest in which skyscrapers are reduced to dust, Superman is flung into the outer reaches of space and somehow survives (I know dude’s pretty much invincible, but c’mon) and, by my estimation, the city of Metropolis gets blown up like, seven or eight times. Is it exciting on a purely sensory level? Sure, and overwhelming. Admittedly, few modern directors are as apt as Snyder as shooting sex and violence, though I fear that the days of him making modest, nasty genre flicks like his excellent remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” are well behind him. The overall feeling when the credits roll is one of exhaustion rather than exaltation. Superhero movies should lift us up out of the muck. They should inspire us and make us feel joy, reverence and awe. “Batman Vs. Superman” accomplishes this in its best moments, but for the most part, it exists mostly a placeholder until Snyder’s upcoming “Justice League” film — a problematic move, given that it’s hard to place a priority on any of the conflict that occurs in “Dawn of Justice” when we all know that “Justice League” will no doubt bring badder villains, sexier fighting babes, bigger explosions and just more, more, more… of the same. The studios that bankroll these movies have become so concerned with teasing out potential for future installments that they’ve seemingly forgotten to make the current installments engaging.
I would be lying if I were suggesting that there aren’t things to enjoy in “Batman Vs. Superman”. It’s worth seeing for Affleck and Eisenberg, and Snyder shows once again that he is no studio hack: he’s a true-blue geek filmmaker and unbelievably gifted visual stylist working in a genre that he has deep reverence for (a giddily weird apocalyptic dream sequence in which Batman fights armed insurgents plus a whole army of winged wasp-creatures has intonations of “Mad Max: Fury Road” and also Snyder’s “Sucker Punch”). And yet the enterprise on a whole feels entirely too… safe. For a film that’s supposed to act as DC’s launching pad into the stratosphere of success occupied by their longtime rival Marvel, there’s little to no variation in “Dawn of Justice” when it comes to tone, execution and the philosophy of these heroes. It’s obviously the result of a lot of talented people’s very hard work, but the unfortunate truth is that big studios see these movies as products and not as stories and it’s therefore hard to shake the feeling that “Dawn of Justice” is a potentially great movie that was undone by studio interference. We may never know. What I do know is that these movies, ideally, should surprise us. Instead, there is no more surprise — just acceptance of the sequels to come. And wouldn’t you know it, “Captain America: Civil War” is right around the corner. C
