The New Batman and Superman are Terrible Superheroes
For Zack Snyder’s latest CGI cage-match, combat isn’t just a way of resolving disagreements and kicking along the plot, it’s a way of life. As self-important as it is tedious, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice features one of the great tropes of the comic book universe — getting two big heroes to fight each other — but treats it with such seriousness that the filmmakers don’t seem to realize that they’re stooping to one of the genre’s most tired tropes. It ranks right up there with having an alien power menace Metropolis (wait, that happened in Man of Steel), or randomly creating a well-nigh unkillable supermonster who multiple superheroes must come together to fight (wait, they do that in this one, too).
As you may have surmised from the title, everything in this film is about getting Batman (Ben Affleck, gruff, square-jawed, and dull) and Superman (Henry Cavill, barely there) to beat the tar out of each other. That’s even though logic would dictate that they would unite against the obvious threat of Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, so giggly with villainy he should just have “BAD GUY” tattooed on his forehead). Once the long-hyped death match arrives, it drags on long enough that you could walk out at a leisurely pace, use the bathroom, make some calls, get a popcorn refill, check in on what’s playing in the next theater, come back, and find that it’s still grinding on.
It didn’t have to be this way. The first section of the film hints at larger issues, particularly the impossibility of superheroes like Batman and Superman fitting into the world. The scenes that revisit the climactic battle from Man of Steel, where Superman and General Zod smash the city to pieces while Bruce Wayne tears around town trying to save innocents, make for a compelling and provocative start. Even with the all the apocalyptic devastation unleashed on movie screens these days, the resulting collateral damage is almost always safely off-screen. Here, it’s used as the potential kickoff to a tough-minded allegorical story about superpowers (Superman as America or any other world power) whose right-thinking crusades often have painful and unforeseen consequences. That’s why co-writer Chris Terrio was referencing Umberto Eco and other intellectual heavy-hitters while working on the screenplay. At least, that’s what you would think.
What Batman v Superman really comes down to, unfortunately, is watching two characters — one quite blank (Superman) and the other entirely unsympathetic (Batman) — get clumsily manhandled into smashing each other over the head with stuff. As shown in this film’s even more dreary predecessor Man of Steel, Snyder still seems to feel uncomfortable with the idea of Superman. Drawn as ever to slo-mo combat and brooding pseudo-seriousness, Snyder’s aesthetic is a poor fit for a straight-arrow do-gooder like the Man of Steel. Superman’s alien nature is so heavily emphasized that his relationship with an ever-imperiled human Lois Lane (Amy Adams), what is normally the heart of Superman’s story, has all the dramatic resiliency of wet cardboard.
Terrio and co-writer David S. Goyer find themselves faced with the inevitable problem that Eco pointed out in “The Myth of Superman”:
Superman, by definition the character whom nothing can impede, finds himself in the worrisome narrative situation of being a hero without an adversary and therefore without the possibility of any development.
Possibly for that reason, the screenplay briefly pushes the idea of Superman as deity, worshiped by a frightened humanity in a way that gets under the skin of the far more human Batman. But that theme is, like the all the others not involving combat, quickly shelved.
For his part, the Dark Knight of Gotham doesn’t seem to fight crime that much anymore (speaking of which, neither does Superman). He grumps around the Batcave with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) and grouses about the awfulness of humanity before setting his sights on Metropolis’s gleaming extraterrestrial Boy Scout. Batman’s reasoning derives mostly from an overblown dream where he fights a platoon of stormtroopers with the Superman “S” emblazoned on their Wehrmacht uniforms. That leads him to the Dick Cheney-esque utterance that if there’s even a one percent chance Superman could turn into a genocidal monster, he needs to be annihilated.
The tortured logic, plus a ludicrously over-complicated subplot involving Luthor and his unresolved father issues, that leads Batman and Superman to their big showdown, reveals something very telling about the film: These are horrible superheroes. Batman has long been a tortured soul, of course. But he’s nearly always kept that drive to protect Gotham at the heart of everything he did. Here, he comes off as more a bored rageaholic billionaire than anything else. For his part, Superman nods occasionally towards doing the right thing, but for the most part he just furrows his brow while trying to avoid whoever’s next coming at him with Kryptonite.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates told the New York Times about the Black Panther series he’s writing, the biggest rules in superhero stories is “People have to hit each other.” Fair enough. But that can’t be all there is. Otherwise, it’s just Wrestlemania with a bigger ring.
Title: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer
Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Callan Mulvey, Tao Okamoto
Studio: Warner Bros.
Year of release: 2016
Rating: PG-13
Web site: http://batmanvsuperman.dccomics.com/
