Soooo...Does It Live Up to the Hype? A Review of Batman v. Superman (mild spoilers)

directed by Zack Snyder
written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer

Well this is an interesting pickle, isn't it? Having seen the long-awaited, massively-hyped superhero epic Batman vs. Superman I find myself about to write a review following a rash of really harsh reviews from critics around the world. If I write an overly negative review, I could come across like I'm just joining the crowd (or more appropriately, the dogpile) and if I go against the grain, I could come across as insufferably contrarian. As it turns out, I didn't like the movie either, and while I cannot entirely dismiss the notion that reading several of those bad reviews (some of which felt somewhat mean-spirited) might have played some part in how I felt, I do feel I gave the movie a fair shot.

Simply put, the film pits the two title characters against one another. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), also known in this movie as the Bat of Gotham, is angry at Superman (Henry Cavill) because several of his employees were killed during the Kryptonian attack that took place in the closing minutes of Man of Steel, because he's convinced Superman has the potential to destroy or enslave the world, while Superman takes issue with the crimefighting methods of "the Bat" who brands his collars, usually sex offenders or sex traffickers, which has resulted in their being killed in prison. Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) is also angry at Superman, for reasons that are never entirely clear, though they might have to do with his anger towards the notion of God, and towards his father, and engineers a scheme, using Kryptonite (or to the uninitiated, a mineral from Superman's home planet of Krypton) to have the Bat fight and kill Superman. He has a backup plan, too, involving the corpse of General Zod (Michael Shannon) and the genesis chamber from the crashed Kryptonian ship. One particular wild card in all of this is the mysterious Miss Prince (Gal Gadot) who has a specific interest in an old photograph of hers in Luthor's possession. There's also a subplot about a mass shooting in the desert for which the U.S. Congress conducts an investigation, headed by Senator Finch (Holly Hunter), seeking to hold Superman accountable, as well as a side-plot involving Lex's obsession with "meta-humans" or super-powered individuals, as evidenced by videos of a number of them that he keeps on file, but in the end it really is all about the showdown between two of the most well-known superheroes of all.

In reviewing this film I will do my best to steer clear of the hyperbole and nastiness that have characterized many of the reviews that have been written of this film, but I think it's quite fair to say I was quite displeased with this movie.

My first objection to this film was the two-and-a-half hour running time. That's actually par for the course for most blockbusters these days, and Snyder spends most of the running time setting up the film's big throwdown. What extends the running time, however, is Snyder's devotion to the "desert shooting" plotline, which to my mind was a somewhat pointless exercise. Superman is being accused of shooting people dead? From the trailers I had thought that the Congressional inquiry had to do with the destruction of Metropolis in Man of Steel, but having seen that this wasn't the case I honestly wondered why Snyder spent as much time on this plot thread as he did, and it basically ended up contributing nothing to the plot except an explosion. As a result of what I felt was a poor use of an extended running time, I must confess that I found this movie quite boring for the most part. This also ties into my dislike of how the villain, Lex Luthor was portrayed. I get that Eisenberg was somehow trying to channel a mixture of his take on Mark Zuckerberg and Heath Ledger's Joker, but he basically came up flat. He irritated all throughout his performance, and not the way a good villain does, but the way a mosquito buzzing around one's ear does, and his motivations were unbelievably muddled. What exactly did he have against Superman again? He hates God? It just isn't well-presented. Ledger's Joker was shrouded in mystery but even his motivations were well-articulated.

Speaking of motivations, while I get that there was a need to establish hostility between the two lead characters at the outset, I wasn't entirely convinced by how it was executed. The opening sequence with Bruce Wayne amidst the destruction of Metropolis was, to my mind, quite well-done as it established right off the bat (pardon the pun), his beef with the Man of Steel, but the follow-through felt lackadaisical, and honestly, in view of his sincere, albeit misplaced, belief that Superman could (and would) destroy all of humanity, his reason for staying his hand at the moment of truth, is, in a word, silly. Superman's motivation for hostility against Batman feels considerably less well-thought out than Batman's all-consuming rage.

The fight scene with Doomsday (also known as the inevitable team-up following the misunderstanding between good guys) was not, to me at least, very well done, with an overdose of computer-generated imagery and very little coherence. I quite appreciated Wonder Woman's appearance, though (and I'll touch on that more later).

Also, I was not at all a fan of how the other members of the Justice League, whose movie this film is meant to set up, were introduced, which was via e-mail attachments, and in the case of one of them, via a strange hybrid of dream sequence and time-travel.

That was another problem I had with the film: the proliferation of dream sequences. Personally I am a fan of dream sequences, but here I felt they were used a little too much, which tended to blunt their narrative impact (and, again, extend the running time).

Finally, this film's Superman just seems to be the antithesis of the symbol of hope he's supposed to be. I get that the story is perpetually beating him down (and like I said, I took issue with that whole desert shooting thing), but really, this guy spends the entire film moping. Batman's dourness is something that fits his character, but what they've done to Supes is unacceptable.

And then there's the whole pseudo-religious aspect of the story, which I despised, but which I'll discuss in a separate blog post.

The film isn't the complete disaster that most paid critics have made it out to be, though.

Ben Affleck's rendition of Batman, though he may have hobbled with a poor script and poorly-realized motivations, still actually comes across a very engaging take on the character. Also, he fights better than any live-action version of the character ever has. I'd be happy to watch a solo Batman movie with a better script, especially if Affleck, whose work on Argo and The Town I quite enjoyed, were to direct it. While it's true Batman's parents' death was done for the third time, I feel it was artfully done and didn't add too much additional baggage to the story.

Wonder Woman's appearance was also the subject of much hype, and if I had any complaint about it at all it would be that her appearance was far too brief, though of all the teasers for the upcoming DC Movie Universe movies, hers had the most intriguing set-up. I would love to see the period film that her solo movie, out next year, promises to be. Here, I will readily join the mass of reviewers who praise her appearance, however fleeting it may be, saying that she brings some much needed joy and verve to an otherwise unrelentingly bleak narrative.

Weighing the good against the bad, though, there's just too much the filmmakers got wrong in my opinion for me to give this a thumbs-up. Too much was riding on this film, particularly considering that it's meant to usher in the Justice League film franchise, and Snyder, Terrio and Goyer really dropped the ball, though I blame Goyer more for this misbegotten script; Terrio was responsible for Argo, so I know he can write well. Goyer was the guy behind the highly-flawed Man of Steel, and a lot of that carried over into this movie.

Also, loath though I may be to join the bandwagon, I think the criticism that the movie is devoid of fun is a valid one, especially considering Terrio's writing credentials. This was a man who successfully managed to inject levity into something as grim as the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran; surely he could have brought some chuckles to a superhero movie. It doesn't help that Hans Zimmer's and Junkie XL's music score is downright oppressive, though the electric guitar that plays when Wonder Woman shows up is genuinely entertaining. It declares in the most blatant way possible: Wonder Woman rocks! Indeed, she does. Too bad the same can't be said for most of this movie.

Considering how much movies cost these days I'm actually hard-pressed to recommend this movie to anyone still on the fence about seeing it, but given that this an event movie the people who read this review are probably going to go see it anyway. With that in mind--(and I honestly never thought I'd be saying this after Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy)--to anyone off to see this movie I recommend dialing down expectations. Though he is credited as an executive producer, I would strongly advise against expecting the caliber of a Nolan-Dark Knight movie. Now, walk in expecting something akin to a Michael Bay movie, particularly the Transformers movies, and this movie may be more palatable.

5/10

Why Zootopia is Walt Disney Pictures' Most Important Movie To Date (Spoilers)

I may need to brush up on my cinematic history at some point, but to the best of my knowledge it was Walt Disney who ushered feature-length animated films to movie screens many, many years ago. Whether or not that's true, for many years, Walt Disney animated films were once the standard by which all other animated films used to be measured. That hegemony was never really challenged until the mid-1990s, Pixar Studios, whose films Disney only distributed at first, changed the rules of the game forever, not only by introducing computer generated animation, which would eventually become the standard, but by telling stories that the Disney films of old were a tad too timid to tell. They told stories about insecure, scheming, neurotic people like Woody the Cowboy, narcissistic middle-aged has-beens like Mr. Incredible, and overprotective fathers like Marlin the Clownfish to name but a few. They made their first princess movie, Brave, seventeen years after the release of their inaugural release, Toy Story, and there wasn't a Prince Charming in sight.

Disney's bread and butter has been whimsical movies about princesses and their happily-ever-afters, with a few exceptions here and there. In the 1990s, the Disney princess evolved considerably from the stereotypical damsel-in-distress to the independent-minded Belle of Beauty and the Beast to the feisty Jasmine of Aladdin, to the brave and noble Mulan of, well, Mulan. Still, even in those more recent years, the stories the films told were still just a variation on more or less the same set of tropes.

Wreck-It-Ralph, released back in 2012, constituted arguably the biggest departure from that norm when it told its story from the point of view of a video game bad guy, but as it turned out, Disney were just getting warmed up for the film that, if early reviews are to be believed, should reestablish them as the king of the hill in the feature-length animated film department: Zootopia.

Sure, Frozen defied some conventions by making a love story about sisterly love rather than the usual romantic relationship between a man and a woman, but succumbed only too willingly to another convention by having one of the leads fall in love and end up with a male character whom she had only known for a few days by the end of the film. Big Hero 6 may have scored some points for diversity considering its Asian lead character, but didn't really have that much to say about the human condition other than that anime and superheroes rock.

Zootopia could have easily fit into that mold; its early marketing sold it as a movie about following one's dreams and being anything one wanted to be, and truth be told Disney could probably have stuck with that and made a respectable amount of money and even earned good reviews in the process. The film works as a feel-good family movie packed with laughs for kids of all ages, and could have been nice and safe. But that's not what they did.

This film's protagonist, Judy Hopps, however, is a first for Disney and for animated films in general: she is a closet racist, modeled after millions of people the world over who fancy themselves as open-minded and cosmopolitan but who, when push comes to shove, are only too willing to believe in the evil of "the Other," whether that "Other" is a Muslim, a Latin American immigrant, or an inner-city black kid. The moment when she realizes her own bigotry against "predators" in the film is one of the most powerful I've ever seen in a Disney film, one that I suspect will resonate with millions of Americans this weekend as the film opens in the United States, two weeks after many "Others" have seen it. After all, this is a society that wholeheartedly embraced a film that lionized a racist in American Sniper less than two years ago, and one that, even worse, may well elect as its President one of the most blatant bigots ever to run for the office, at least after the Civil War. Judy Hopps is a life-sized mirror held up to America to show how ugly it's become.

Sure, Hopps is yet another Disney avatar for feminism in the mold of recent heroines like Frozen's Elsa, and Brave's Merida, but its her glaring character flaw, her all-too-human frailty that sets her apart from any sympathetic character, let alone any lead character, ever to come out of the Mouse House. It is utterly gratifying that they're finally using their brand for something other than selling toys and home videos; I would argue that this is one of the ballsiest things they have ever done.

In a year when all Pixar can offer is yet another sequel to one of its most beloved movies, Disney's gone back to its familiar role of showing everyone how feature-film animation storytelling SHOULD be done.