Zack Snyder's Superman, Part 2 - "Batman v Superman (2016)"

If in my last piece I said I thought someone would be "hard pressed to make a good faith argument that [Man of Steel's] story is well told," I think there is no possible way one could make that argument for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  None.  This movie is an order of magnitude worse than Man of Steel.

And I don't want to hear any "But but you have to watch the Ultimate edition...' because I did. I fucking did. I watched the theatrical cut and then immediately watched the Ultimate Edition  and WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF?

...

It didn't help and it isn't better.  It fixes none of the many real problems with the film.  Man of Steel has theming problems but it's a mostly coherent story that isn't told all that compellingly, BvS is both incoherent and not compelling.

This movie 100% feels reverse engineered from set pieces or still images from The Dark Knight Returns.  And the set pieces are mostly garbage, except for Batman's warehouse fight.

The weird thing is, I think the first 30 minutes or so, focusing on Batman, are actually pretty good.  I remember in the theater at about this point in the film Eliza and I looked at each other and agreed that "This is fine, what's with the negative buzz?"

We very quickly found out as the movie went off the rails, rolled down a mountain, and fell into the ocean onto a depth charge.

Background Stuff

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a 2016 film directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Dawn of the Dead) and written by David S. Goyer (Dark City, the Blade Trilogy, and the Dark Knight Trilogy) and Chris Terrio (Justice League(s), Argo, Rise of Skywalker).  It's a direct sequel to Man of Steel and serves as a bridge to the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) franchise of interconnected films.  All the principal cast of Man of Steel reprised their roles, with Ben Affleck (Batman), Jesse Eisenberg (Lex Luthor), and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) joining Henry Cavill (Superman) and Amy Adams (Lois).   

It had a huge opening, but was obliterated by critics and if the opening weekend Friday-to-Sunday drop off and historic week 1 to week 2 drop-off are indications (and they are), general audience word of mouth was pretty bad.  (I remember the awful buzz around this film.)  And as  is probably obvious by now, in my opinion both critics and audiences were correct.  This movie is horrible.

It made $870 million on a budget of probably around $300 million, doing a lot better internationally than domestically where it grosses about $330 million.  I've seen it filed as "box office disappointment" and I think it did some real damage to the DCEU brand.

Plot Speedrun

Sigh.  Strap in, this film defies easy summary.

The movie starts with Bruce Wayne recounting a dream of his parents being killed and him being lifted to the light by bats.  The movie proper opens with Bruce Wayne driving into Metropolis during the climax of Man of Steel.  The Wayne Enterprises building collapses during Zod's fight with Superman and Bruce, after saving his employee Wallace from being pinned under rubble and then comforting a now orphaned child, looks up angrily at Superman and Zod flying through the sky.

18 months later Lois Lane and photographer Jimmy Olsen are in Nairomi, Africa to do an interview with the warlord Amajagh.  During the interview Anatoli (Callam Mulvey), leader of the mercenaries protecting the warlord, discover that Jimmy is actually a CIA operative who is broadcasting their position.  The warlord kills Jimmy, grabs Lois, and takes her inside his compound.  The mercenaries then turn and slaughter the warlord's men and some of the villagers.  Superman arrives to save Lois by smashing the warlord through a brick wall.

A Nairomi villager name Kahini (Wunmi Mosaku) testifies before a US Senate committee that Superman killed people in the village.  Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) declares that the committee finds Superman responsible.

In Gotham, Batman beats and brands a human trafficker and later tells Alfred he is looking for someone codenamed the White Portuguese and that his next target is Anatoli.  Clark watches the news and learns about the Batman branding criminals and that the brand is a death sentence in prison.

Lex Luthor meets with Senators Finch and Barrows and tells them he has discovered a small piece of kryptonite and wants an import license to bring in a much larger chunk found in the Indian Ocean to weaponize as a deterrent against Superman.   

Wallace, the man injured in Metropolis and now missing his legs, defaces the Superman statue in Heroes's Park and is arrested.  The Daily Planet people look sad.  Senator Barrows gives Lex access to the crashed Kryptonian scout ship as well as Zod's body. Bruce Wayne infiltrates a fighting ring and clones the data from Anatoli's phone.  He finds a lead connecting Anatoli to Lex.   

At the Planet,  Clark wants to write a story about Batman and his "one man reign of terror."  Lois goes off to investigate a bullet she recovered from the incident in Nairomi after learning it's a military prototype.  Senator Finch tells Lex she's denying his import license.

Lois investigates.  Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent both go to Lex's house for a charity benefit.  Bruce sneaks off to plant a device to copy Lex's computer.  He and Clark meet and spar over Batman and Superman.  Bruce goes to retrieve the device while Clark sneaks off to avert a disaster in Mexico.  Bruce finds his device is gone and sees a mysterious woman (Gal Godot) leave with it.

There's a montage of Superman saving people while pundits debate his place in the world and how accountable he should be.  Lex bails Wallace out of jail and gifts him a fancy wheelchair.  Wallace goes to Senator Finch and asks her to call on Superman to answer for his actions.

Bruce finds the mystery woman and she gives him his device back and says she was looking for a photo Lex had of her.  Bruce decrypts Lex's information and falls asleep.  He has an overly long nightmare in a dystopian future where he is a freedom fighter and Superman is a dictator because Lois was taken from him.   Bruce wakes up, then sees the Flash reaching through time to tell him that "Lois is the key."  Bruce jolts awake again and sees the decrypted data showing the White Portuguese is a ship in Gotham Harbor that is smuggling in the large chunk of Kryptonite.

Batman attempts to intercept the mercenaries at the port and kills a lot of them with the Batmobile before Superman knocks it over.  Superman tells Batman to bury the bat and says "Consider this mercy" before flying off.

Senator Finch calls on Superman to testify before her committee.  Clark talks to his mother who tells him "You don't owe this world a thing. You never did."  Superman goes to the committee meeting at the United States Capitol.  Wallace is in attendance.  Bruce finds out that Wallace has been returning his compensation checks and scrawling taunting messages on them.  (Spoiler: Lex was intercepting the checks and writing the notes.)   Senator Finch gives a speech and then a bomb secretly planted by Lex in Wallace's wheelchair explodes, killing everyone.  Superman flies off.  Batman steals the kryptonite form LexCorp  Lex gains access to the scout ship computer using Zod's DNA and asks it to "teach me."

Lex puts his blood on Zod despite the computers warnings and dips Zod in the genesis liquid.  Everyone wonders where Superman has gone and why he has vanished.   Clark sees a vision of his father who tells him an anecdote.   

Batman arms himself and turns on the Batsignal to await Superman in order to murder him.  Lois is kidnapped and taken to the top of LexCorp tower.  Lex throws her off the roof, knowing it will bring Superman.  Superman catches her and goes up to confront Lex who tells him that he's kidnapped Clark's mother and will kill her in one hour if Superman does not kill Batman.

Clark talks to Lois telling her that he needs to convince Batman to save his mother and that  "No one stays good in this world."   Superman very half-heartedly tries to parlay with Batman and they fight.  Batman defeats him using kryptonite but before the killing blow with a kryptonite spear Superman says "Save Martha" and Batman pauses and shouts "Why did you say that name?" (Batman's mothers name was also Martha.)  Lois arrives and tells Batman that Martha is Clark's mother's name. Batman promises to rescue Ma Kent while Superman goes to see what's causing the scout ship to blast out large amounts of energy.

Batman saves Martha.  Superman confronts Lex on the scout ship and Doomsday rises out of the genesis chamber.  There's a fight, the mystery woman who is actually Wonder Woman shows up to help.  Yada yada Superman takes the kryptonite spear stabs Doomsday but is also killed.   

Lex is arrested and funerals are had for Superman and Clark.  Bruce tells Wonder Woman that they need to find other meta-humans to fight what is coming.

The End. Jesus.

Theatrical Cut v Ultimate Edition

The first thing to say is that the Ultimate Edition, that defenders use to paint the narrative of a great movie that was wrecked by the theatrical edit, is just as bad and may be worse for being pointlessly longer.  The theatrical cut at 2.5 hours is already long, but moves briskly enough I guess, but at 3 hours the Ultimate Edition is a slog with way worse pacing.

This film has huge structural and character motivation issues which the Ultimate Edition does not fix. Or try too.

For example, it fills out some more details on the Nairomi "set up Superman" sub-plot, but the problem with that sub-plot isn't that the mechanics aren't rigorously spelled out in the theatrical, but that the entire fucking thing is completely superfluous and could be cut completely with almost no effect on the story.

The changes in the Ultimate Edition all told are pretty minor.  There's some scenes that unfold a little differently but not substantively.  It's just longer for no reason.  The extra scenes of Clark investigating Batman, for example, don't add any new information or any motivation he didn't already explicitly have and the new scenes tend to just repeat and restate conflict beats we already know.

The film already has the problem of being needlessly overcomplicated and the Ultimate Edition fleshing out the details of the sub-plots only highlights this.

Snyder Bloat

The Ultimate Edition exhibits what I call Snyder Bloat where stuff is put in to the extended edition (which also came out in 2016) not because it adds anything, but because it was filmed.  There's a small but instructive example at the beginning right after Bruce runs into the destruction of Metropolis.  There's a sequence where he passes a group of schoolchildren being led out of the dust while their teacher says "Buddy hands! Everyone show me!"  It's an insignificant sequence, only lasting like 5 seconds but it adds nothing considering the interaction that immediately follows with the little girl whose mom died in the destruction is far more striking and legitimately emotionally resonant and affecting.  And that's the one where we see Bruce's hatred of Superman crystalize.  The buddy hands scene is completely redundant and was a good cut from a film that is already too long.  Adding it back in does not serve the story, doesn't better support any character development or deliver any necessary plot clarification.

One Potentially Interesting Difference

The Ultimate cut is considerably more critical of the USA than the theatrical cut.  The United States is clearly doing some messed up stuff in Nairomi and this is explicitly (and pretty elegantly) pointed out by the warlord in his interview with Lois.  The military is also shown to be absolutely willing to murder everyone in the village (including Lois, an American) to cover the tracks of their failed op, and they only fail because Superman obliterates the drones and missiles.

It's dangerously close to drawing an actual parallel to the questions the film will endlessly raise about unilateral power against the far less powerful.  Given how dumb most of the film is, i have my doubts that this was on purpose, and any thematic position on the issue would likely have gone just as unresolved as it does for Superman and Batman.

In my Man of Steel piece, I mentioned the military subsidy that film received.  Initially I thought maybe BvS's more cynical take was cut because of DoD script approval, but I couldn't find any indication that BvS had a military subsidy.  (That doesn't surprise me; unlike Man of Steel the military isn't really even in the theatrical cut.)

Filmmaking et al

The Look

I think this movie looks considerably worse than Man of Steel which I thought looked pretty good.  Zack Snyder's cinematography ticks that YouTube film critic Patrick Willems mentioned were mostly absent in Man of Steel are in full force in BvS.  There's so much slow motion throughout the entire film and it often feels unmotivated other than "this looks cool in the moment."  It becomes so distracting as the film goes on and is overused to the point that it becomes meaningless as a signifier of importance.

A lot of BvS does look handheld like Man of Steel, but its less noticeable until it suddenly is really noticeable, like with the incredibly disorienting shaky cam that happens when Bruce...arrives at a party.  Happily I didn't notice any of the crash zooming that started to become a little irritating in Man of Steel, but unhappily that may have just been because there were so many worse things to focus on.

Snyder seems absolutely fixated on close ups of things falling to the floor, often in slow motion.  There's an extreme, moody closeup of Lois's bath tub faucet dripping.  It looks like a horror film shot and it's not, like, a significant environmental detail but in isolation it's a neat shot.   In the same scene when Clark gets in the bathtub with her, there's another extreme closeup of his glasses hitting the ground.  And several times when someone fires a gun there's a slow motion close up of the shell hitting the ground.  Like so many of the stylish choices in the film (or most Snyder films, really) they don't reinforce anything or mean anything and they happen so often that the cool factor wears off through repetition. There's no particular significance to any of them and once you notice them it's hard to not get distracted by them.  So, you're welcome.

Also a lot of the set pieces turn into CGI-nowhere-mush.  The final battle with Doomsday in particular looks like a video game cut scene and for a film that's theoretically going for a grounded aesthetic it really sucks.

The Batman versus Superman fight looks really fake with the two combatants rag-dolling each other around in what sometimes almost seems like a zero g environment. The physics which Snyder paid attention to in Man of Steel are really broken in this fight.  And especially given Batman's whole thing is that he's a superpowerless human, it really hurts the suspension of disbelief to see him tank damage that should have given him a lacerated spleen and a grade, like, 7 concussion.

There are some shots in the film that I really like.  The scene of the Wayne Enterprises employee Jack talking on the phone with Bruce in the foreground while Superman and Zod come rocketing towards the camera and into the floors below him is really cool.  (Jack's a fucking idiot though, which I'll get to, but that's not relevant here.)

And the scene of Bruce running into the collapsing building debris past all the people running away is legitimately awesome.  It looks great and it really sells the danger and shows Bruce's heroic bravery in a striking way.

The Acting

Like Man of Steel, this movie is well cast and the acting is good even though, again, lots of good actors don't have a lot to do.  I remember the popular outcry when Affleck was cast as Batman and then the popular bewilderment when he was pretty good, actually.  I'd say most of the Batman stuff is easily my favorite part of this movie and I think Affleck did a great job.  Early on, Alfred (Jeremy Irons) has the trailer ready line "That's how it starts. The fever.  The powerlessness that turns good men cruel" and Affleck's performance captures that idea really well.  He has this barely sublimated rage that is both compelling and not over the top.  I also really liked Irons as Alfred.  (Has there been a bad Alfred?)

Cavill and Adams, again, are fine but don't have much to do.  Gal Gadot gets a lot of crap about her acting but I think she's perfectly acceptable, here, in pretty limited screen time.  I do like that Wonder Woman almost seems like she's enjoying herself against Doomsday.  Like she has this slight thrill of battle thing going on.

Oh, and I really like Laurence Fishburne as Perry White.  He's kind of perfect with that very Perry blend of dismissiveness, hard-ass-ness, and genuine affection.  He can be a dick but he will help his people with no hesitation when the chips are down.

Plot Construction

Oh boy, this plot is fucked.  Like holistically, structurally, fucked.

Contrivance and Irrelevance

This film's go to move is contrivance and people have to act like space aliens to make the plot go.   

Why are Jack and all the WayneTech employees just sitting at their desks waiting for Bruce to call while Zod's world engine is destroying the city like 2000 feet away?  Because they need to so they can die so Bruce can be mad at Superman.

Why is vigilante Superman so offended by vigilante Batman?  Because he needs to be to build up conflict.  Conflict that doesn't matter because it isn't even the reason he fights Batman.  (And I'll fucking get to that.)

When Superman first comes face to face with Batman why does he say (paraphrased) "I don't want to catch you out here again" despite having just seen him kill a shit ton of people? And in what reality would he not have scanned him with X-ray vision and said "Do we have an understanding, Bruce?"  Because it's too early in the film for their final confrontation and the filmmakers also can't risk Superman saying something that might actually back Batman off.

In their fight why does Superman seem to be deliberately trying to not tell Batman what's going on despite having explicitly said earlier he needs to convince Batman to help him?

Why does Wonder Woman want a digital copy of a photograph back and how did she know Bruce was planting a device to steal Lex's computer files and therefore know when to go and borrow it from the server room?  Because we need them to meet and give her a reason to watch the trailers for the upcoming DCEU movies.

When Doomsday is on the abandoned Stryker's Island, why doesn't Batman go back to Gotham to get the spear instead of leading the monster back to the city?  Because Lois needs to be there.

The entire creation of Doomsday is insane and doesn't really fit with any of the nested plans Lex apparently has going, but we need Doomsday because we're doing Death of Superman.  And what was the plan if Doomsday hadn't died?  Or if Batman had managed to kill Superman?

It's madness.  And this isn't nitpicking, this is foundational "what is the cause and effect here and why are the characters doing what they are doing?"

Occam's Razor, Cul-de-sacs, and 8 Dimensional Chess

If Occam's Razor as a principle basically means you should use a mental razor to excise extraneous elements and use the simplest explanations that get you were you're going, Batman v Superman needs Occam's chainsaw.

The Nairomi Debacle

Let me attempt to run down Lex's plan with regards to the Nairomi subplot.  So Lex somehow arranges for Lois to get an interview with the warlord Amajagh without either of them knowing he was behind it.  He also either gets her usual photographer re-assigned and arranges for CIA operative Jimmy Olsen, working directly with the US military, to take their place, or is aware that the US government is going intervene and replace the photographer with Jimmy.  He has also hired Anatoli's mercenaries to provide security for Amajagh who then out Jimmy as CIA, murder the villagers and burn their bodies to make it seem like they died from Superman's heat vision. Everyone involved then has to hope no one investigating finds any of the bullets.  Lex is also hoping Amajagh takes Lois hostage so Superman will show up to rescue her.  And in the Ultimate Edition he's counting on Superman to also prevent the military from drone striking everyone, which would destroy any evidence he's trying to plant, but simultaneously counting on Superman not apprehending any of the mercenaries.  Lex then arranges for Kahini to testify to Congress that Superman killed the villagers.  Checkmate, Superman, I guess.

This plan is insane, even if you've headcannoned that Anatoli just happened to head off a coincidental CIA plot, and was intending to trigger a Lois hostage situation some other way without getting caught by Superman.  The film's portrayal of Lex Luthor, super manipulator, and the absence of any indication that Anatoli was just improvising and got really lucky makes this headcannon unlikely.  The film just doesn't really posit this as an alternative explanation and even if it did, it just makes Lex look like the luckiest bastard on Earth.

It's fun to laugh at the needless complexity of this scene, but it's even more hilarious when you realize that Lex framing Superman is completely irrelevant to the rest of the plot.  The pivotal culmination of The People v Superman is the Congressional bombing which, both in plot terms and audience engagement, is connected to Wallace, the man we saw lose his legs in Metropolis. Wallace is a character whose damage the film has spent a lot of time establishing, and his pain is way more impactful than any amorphous frame-up because film is a visual medium and we saw it happen on screen to a specific person.  And Wallace has nothing to do with Nairomi.  Lex talks to him, it's his wheelchair that explodes.  He's the crux of this.

Batman doesn't give a shit about Nairomi either.  It has no effect on his motives as he's been planning to kill Superman for 18 months before Nairomi even happened.  The destruction of Metropolis is the actual the inciting incident for all the real conflict and the film went to great (and effective) lengths to show us this and use Wallace as the representative of its consequences.  Even the faux deep moral questions that Kahini brings up aren't particularly relevant to any payoff or get answered any more than Wallace's light paraphrases of the same ideas do.

This whole Nairomi sequence is a cul-de-sac.  It sort of gives Lois something to look into but that doesn't matter because we the audience already know the frame-job is not true and the public never even finds out the results of her investigation.  She proves it to herself and Swanwick, but is then kidnapped and thrown off a building by Lex just before Doomsday attacks and Superman gets a hero's funeral.  Lex is definitely going to jail for attempted murder, for unleashing Doomsday, and blowing up Congress.   Framing Superman is "whatever" by comparison.

And for a bonus nested cul-de-sac, the Ultimate Edition has Kahini admit to Senator Finch that she lied about Superman which also doesn't matter because 3 minutes later Finch explodes.  And once Congress blows up and Superman vanishes no one gives a hot shit about the attempted frame job.

Extra bonus nonsense: During the Nairomi debacle, there are other US agents in the area who want to call off the drone strike and go on horseback to rescue Lois.  They don't even get close before Superman knocks out the drones and resolves the conflict. They are never seen from again.  So...why include these extra characters who do not matter to a subplot that already does not matter? Well, Snyder Bloat is why.

Also, Lex. Buddy.  If you're going to send mercenaries to do a secret Rube Goldberg frame job, maybe don't give them prototype LexCorp bullets they could have only gotten from you and then ask them to spray shoot them around a village.  You look like an idiot.

Lex's Love Notes

Two other complications that read as a dumb person's idea of what a criminal mastermind would do are the news clippings of Batman branding criminals that Lex sends to Clark and Wallace's uncashed compensation checks that Lex intercepts and sends back to Bruce after scrawling taunts like "You let your family die!" Neither of these actions serve any purpose.

Clark already knows about and is gunning for Batman over the branding.  Even if Lex didn't know that and just coincidentally decided to send the clippings, they change nothing because Clark being mad at Batman for his tactics is not the reason they fight.  They fight because Lex kidnaps Martha.

In universe, why would Lex bother because "I'm going to kill your mom" is way more of a motive to fight than some theoretical objection to vigilantism.  And what if the notes succeeded too well and caused Superman to just grab Batman and find a police station willing to arrest him for all the murders he had just committed at the docks before he had kryptonite to defend himself with?  The screenwriter knows Batman is going to end up with kryptonite, but Lex doesn't.  Why would he set the two heroes at each other's throats while also trying to hold on to the one thing that would give Batman a chance?  Or what if Clark dug up and published evidence that even Gotham PD couldn't ignore and got Batman arrested?  Or figured out Batman's identity and got him arrested?

More importantly, from a filmmaking perspective why waste time with this plot point if it doesn't matter to the plot.  This goes especially for the Ultimate Edition that shows scenes of Clark investigating Batman's latest branding victim which only gets Clark information that he, and the viewer, already knows.

And Wallace's checks are even more baffling.  It's not clear why those messages would push Batman to hate Superman any more than he already does, and Bruce only saw them while the Congressional hearing was happening when he asked why Wallace wasn't getting the checks.  His employee says Wallace had been returning them for months.  If any Wayne employee had happened to mentioned this to Bruce in the previous 18 months, Lex's plan falls apart here, because Wallace wouldn't have been destitute and no doubt Bruce would suspect something and start monitoring Wallace too closely for Lex to give him the bomb laden wheelchair.  Again, the screenwriter knows Bruce will only see these checks when it's too late to do anything about them but Lex doesn't.

Just like The Nairomi Debacle, this is all needlessly complicated and doesn't have any kind of retroactive continuity.  No one would plan this way unless.... did Lex read the script?

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman could be excised entirely and very little would change.  The trend of taking up screen time to set up future films at the expense of the one you're making is really annoying.  Please tell the story you are telling and ONLY that one please.  This movie is already too long.

(Wonder Woman's theme music does rule, though.)

Sledgehammers and Faux Philosophy

I critiqued Man of Steel both for a tendency to have its characters bluntly reiterate vague thematic ideas and also for having them occasionally say things that sound kind of deep but don't make a lot of sense for them to say in the moment.  Batman v Superman is so much worse with regards to both of these issues.    

Blunt Objects and Mealy Mouths

If Man of Steel didn't tie up all its thematic ideas or sometimes dealt with them in the wrong order, BvS doesn't even try to address the questions it keeps raising.

One of these questions, restated over and over again, is "Who should the powerful answer to?"

In her first speech, Senator Finch says "The world has been so caught up with what Superman can do that no one has asked what he should do" and later says that Superman should not act unilaterally.  Before the Congressional bombing she reiterates:

In a democracy, good is a conversation, not a unilateral decision. So I urge Superman to come to this Hill of the People tomorrow to see those who have suffered. ... How far will he take his power? Does he act by our will or by his own?

Both Kahini and Amajagh state this as well, saying respectively:

[Superman will] never answer to you. He answers to no one. Not even, I think, to God.

Men with power obey neither policy or principle Miss Lane.  No one is different no one is neutral.

So where does the movie ultimately land on this question?  Um.... go fish?

One of the reasons this gets muddy is Clark's fixation on Batman being a bad guy because he's a vigilante.  Clark says that Batman "thinks he's above the law" and that "civil liberties are being trampled" and therefore the Bat must be stopped.  In the Ultimate Edition, when Clark interviews Adriana Santos, the girlfriend of one of Batman's branding victims, his resolve seems steeled by her saying:

The Bat's the judge. One man decides who lives. How is that justice?

Those are the same questions that have been lobbed at Superman and they cause no reflection on Clark's part.  When Clark criticizes Batman to Bruce at the charity event, Bruce correctly points out the hypocrisy of one of Superman's Daily Planet boosters condemning Batman for acting without oversight.  Clark has no response.

And even worse, Adriana's final line in Clark's interview is this:

A man like [Batman], words don't stop him. You know what stops him? A fist.

Clark does not disagree.

So is the film positing that vigilantism is ok only if you're stopping someone else's vigilantism?  (This is not what Superman is being criticized for, of course.)  Or is the film saying Lex and Bruce are right to want a fist to stop Superman, who will not be stopped by words?

A smarter movie would have used Adriana's line as a de-escalating factor for Superman, like he could see that he's not that different from Batman in concept.  As it stands, when characters directly or indirectly point out Clark's hypocrisy, the film has no response because...they're right.

None of these real world scenarios or questions are dealt with or resolved because they are completely preempted by Lex kidnapping Martha and then summoning a Kryptonian Ninja Turtle, both of which are non-sequiturs from the conflicts the film keeps saying it's about.  And there's no grappling or reckoning with any of this from anyone in the aftermath, heroes or normies, and the question of the justice of unilateral power is just left hanging.

For a theme that's delivered so constantly and with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to just be abandoned is really weird.  The closest thing this film has to a thesis statement is near the very end when Bruce says this:

Men are still good. We fight. We kill. We betray one another. But we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.

That statement, in addition to being not particularly earned for his character, has absolutely nothing to do with the allegedly deep moral questions this film cannot shut up about.

There Are Definitely More Things in Heaven and Earth Than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy, Horatio

This film is lousy with deep sounding but ultimately pretty meaningless pablum.  The worst and most obvious practitioner of this is Lex.  Here's just one example because I think it's both representative and unintentionally funny:

I figured out way back, if God is all-powerful, he cannot be all-good.  And if he is all-good, then he cannot be all-powerful.  And neither can you be.

Woah.  That's like, so deep, man.  Except that, um, Lex... Superman obviously isn't all powerful and I don't think anyone in this film literally thinks he is.  His first public appearance showed the world he definitely is not.  There, solved that for you, Lex.  You're welcome.

Honestly, this aspect of Lex, like a lot of stuff about him (his stupid overcomplicated plans, his inability to account for basic contingencies etc) could have been an interesting take if the movie treated him like he actually was kind of an idiot.  A rich, exhausting, nepo-baby in over his head and making impulsive decisions because he isn't nearly as clever as he presumes to be.  (Sort of similar to how early seasons of Game of Thrones treated Cersei; she was a forceful and intelligent person who got herself into trouble because she was, to paraphrase Tywin, not as smart as she thought she was.)

But a framing like that is not present.  The filmmakers seem to think they've created a mad genius rather than a sub-Freshman level philosopher.

Also when referring to Superman he is constantly mixing his metaphors, referring to him both as a god and a devil, sometimes in the same conversation in a way that doesn't seem like it was meant to be a character error or ambivalence.  It seems like the writers were just writing cool lines in isolation.

Ma and Pa Say Knock You Out

Both Ma and Pa Kent manage, in their brief appearances, to say lines that sound either edgy (Martha) or wise (Jonathan) but have some (probably) unintended and unfortunate implications.

Before Superman decides to testify before Congress he visits his mother in Smallville.  She says

People hate what they don't understand.  But they see what you do, and they know who you are.  You're not a killer, a threat.  I never wanted this world to have you.  Be their hero, Clark. Be their monument.  Be their angel. Be anything they need you to be.  Or be none of it.  You don't owe this world a thing.  You never did.

This is the entirety of what she says in the scene and it is kind of all over the place.  There's no predicate conversation either, the scene just starts with this.  Martha's first line isn't really relevant to anything in this film as the central questions of BvS, like who should power be accountable to and can power stay benevolent, don't have much to do with hatred because of fear.  They're especially not relevant because they are immediately contradicted by her next two lines.  Apparently people know him and understand him already.

"I never wanted this world to have you" is a really weird line.  It's like she knows she's talking about a theme but this also isn't related to anything going on.  The next bit sounds like her saying that it's ok whether he chooses to keep being Superman or not, a conflict that we don't know he's struggling with.  So far he just has looked sort of pouty that he's being criticized; he has never articulated wanting to hang up the cape and if he's considering it because people are finally starting to question him after an 18 month "love affair" as Perry called it...then he's kind of a dick.   

A bigger problem for me is that there is nothing in this speech that would seem to inform his decision to go testify before Congress.  Clark doesn't even respond before the scene changes.  This scene could have gone anywhere in this movie and had the same non-influence on events.    

Also, "You don't owe this world a thing. You never did" is a horseshit edgelord thing to say.  Seriously, wtf Martha.  He absolutely does owe this world a lot.  His life, his parents, Lois, the more than a year of adulation that the movie assures us he got.  He's the one who chose to be Superman (well, Jor-El told him to, but still) and according to to Lois in Man of Steel, not helping people is not an option.  Is this going to lead to a "Sorry Ma, you were wrong" moment before he proudly protects the world with newfound conviction, like he never had with Pa?   

Nope.

The scene where he climbs a mountain and encounters a vision of his father is similarly disconnected.  They have this exchange:

Jonathan

I remember one season the water came bad. I couldn't have been 12.  Dad had out the shovels and we went at it all night. We worked till, I think, I fainted. But we managed to stop the water. We saved the farm. Your grandma baked me a cake. Said I was a hero. Later that day we found out we blocked the water all right. We sent it upstream. The whole Lang farm washed away. While I ate my hero cake, their horses were drowning. I used to hear them wailing in my sleep.

Clark

Did the nightmares ever stop?

Jonathan

Yeah. When I met your mother. She gave me faith that there's good in this world. She was my world. I miss you, son.

The anecdote is pretty striking but the message actually seems to be that trying to be a hero is an illusion and people get hurt when you do.  Which doesn't seem like the right message to convince Superman to return to the world.  It might at least be more relevant if we saw Clark actually grapple with nightmares of the people he either couldn't save or accidentally hurt (like perhaps the thousands of people that died in his fight with Zod) but we don't.

The conversation ends on a note that reinforces an aspect of this Superman that I absolutely hate that I call his Lois Centered Morality, but more on that later.  So this conversation, framed as pivotal, does not really work as an inflection point that spurs Clark to decide to return, unless it motivates him to come back just to have Lois give him faith that there's good in this world, an explanation that is severely undercut by having Clark almost immediately tell her that "No one stays good in this world."

Like with Ma Kent, the causal relationship of this scene to anything around it is tenuous, to put it far too generously.

Superman

I was relatively easy on Superman as a character in Man of Steel because it was his first week on the job but, alas, that time is over.  This is not a good or even an interesting Superman but before I get into it, I'm going to talk about some moments with him that I liked.

I liked Clark's first apartment scene with Lois.  He smiles when he walks in and I really liked the  moment when he gets in the bathtub with her fully clothed to cheer her up.  It was cute and felt very "Superman" and it's pretty much the only interaction in BvS where they feel like a couple who know and like each other.

And...um.... Hmm....

Yeah that's pretty much it.

Even more so than in Man of Steel, we do not know this Superman.  For a movie that so desperately wants to use Superman's relationship to the world as source of drama and conflict, it seems allergic to having him actually interact with said world.

Really, the only people Superman talks to as Superman are Lois, Lex, and Batman, and the latter only very briefly.  There is only one scene that shows four quick sequences of him Superman-ing out in the world.  He saves a girl from a fire in Mexico then wordlessly looks up and over his shoulder while people reach out for him in slow motion, he pulls a capsized ship by the anchor over ice, he catches a capsule from a rocket that exploded on a launch pad, and he floats towards a group of crying people huddled on their roofs during a flood.  He interacts with no one; two of the sequences have no people in them at all and Superman's face isn't even visible in the last when the woman on the roof reaches for out for him from about 30 feet away.  None of these sequences are the sort of fraught "state level interventions" Senator Finch is concerned about and are all the most uncomplicated, apolitical "get a cat out of tree" type good deeds imaginable.

We get almost nothing from Superman about what he thinks of any of the events in the film. We get to hear what the TV thinks: pundits opine on what his presence means, Senators weigh in on accountability, Kahini and Wallace get to make grand statements about heroism (Yeah, I read The Dark Knight Returns too guys) but Superman is largely inscrutable.

Like in Man of Steel, he's really hard to track emotionally. He often frowns at the talking heads but what is this conveying?  Is he upset he's being criticized?  Is he sad because he feels like he's not doing enough either to help people or win them over?  Is he thinking "screw these ungrateful bastards?"

The scene in front of Congress seems to be setting up an opportunity for him to directly respond to the questions the world and, meta-textually, the film has for him.  But he doesn't get to say anything before the bombing and then he wordlessly leaves for... reasons.  It's hard to even know in the moment what Cavill has been directed to convey while Superman stands in the flames among all the recently incinerated people.  He doesn't look horrified or even all that surprised.  He honestly has kind of a "I'm going to get blamed for this, aren't I?" look on his face.

(This scene also shows how poorly constructed this film is as an event of this magnitude, e.g. a massive terrorist attack on the Legislative branch of the US Government, has absolutely no effect on the rest of the plot.  It might as well have been the bombing of an Elk's Lodge toastmasters club that Superman was speaking at for all it matters to the film's endgame.)

The closest we get to Superman reflecting in the aftermath is this speech to Lois:

I didn't see it, Lo. I was standing right there and I didn't see it. ... I'm afraid I didn't see it because I wasn't looking.  All this time I've been living my life the way my father saw it.  Righting wrongs for a ghost.  Thinking I'm here to do good.  Superman was never real.  Just the dream of a farmer from Kansas. 

This may be the immediate sentiment that leads him to abandon the world but in the arc of the character, what does it mean and where did it come from?  Like a lot of this film's "character" dialog this sounds deep but there's a lot of problems with it in context especially since it's so damned vague.  I'm not sure what "I'm afraid I didn't see it because I wasn't looking" means when it's followed up with a non-sequitur about his father.  It's not "I'm afraid I wasn't looking because I was angry at them" or "I'm afraid I wasn't looking because I was distracted by the suffering of everyone around me that I hear all the time."  Just "I'm afraid I wasn't looking."  (Don't worry the Ultimate Edition immediately gets him off the hook by revealing the wheelchair was lined with lead.)   

And how does him "trying to right wrongs for a ghost" relate to him not being careful enough, or whatever he was saying?  Is he saying he shouldn't have tried to help people?  What about the bombing of Congress, or really any of the films events, made him think any of this?  This is the first moment of reflection he's had and it, like Ma and Pa's speeches, doesn't seem to be the payoff for any emotional beats that have been set up.

Also, what he says about Jonathan doesn't really fit with the unsure and fearful Jonathan of Man of Steel.  Superman wasn't that Jonathan's dream, and Clark isn't talking about Jor-El because he wasn't a farmer from Kansas so, as written, I don't really know what Clark means, here.

So I don't like this version of Superman as a character and it's not because it's subversive or it's not the take I wanted, it's just that it mostly isn't a take on the character at all.  He just sort of frowns at things while master manipulators [citation needed] pull his strings until he heroically sacrifices himself in a nonsense climax.  No idea is actually debated, no conclusions are arrived at, no opinions are changed.   (Except Batman's but I'll fucking get to that.)

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

We are told throughout BvS that Superman is loved.  His statue in Heroes' Square is described by the news as a "beloved monument," and when it is defaced Perry dictates the headline "End of Love Affair with the Man in the Sky?"  This implies that public perception of him has been pretty good for the last 18 months. Later, Lois assures him that "he gives people hope" and Martha tells him that "they see what you do and they know who you are. You're not a killer [or] a threat" which, um... [citations needed.]

This all reinforces how the film frames Wallace and Kahini as the first dissenting public voices, which beggars belief, given that Bruce confirms thousands died in Metropolis.  I have a hard time believing there aren't way, way more Wallaces out there, but the movie treats him like an outlier, so I'll just take the film's word for it.  And if this, all told, pretty mild and consequence free criticism is all it takes for Superman to give up, then he's kind of an immature and petty jerk.  I don't think he's supposed to be, I just think the filmmakers don't realize how they've framed this.

And I am absolutely bewildered by the creators' decision to not have Superman help after the Congress bombing in the theatrical cut.  Admittedly, he does do a little bit in the Ultimate Edition, but that the filmmakers decided they should leave this very short sequence on the cutting room floor gives a hint that they didn't prioritize the empathy and first responder instinct that is a really important part of Superman's character, or they didn't even notice it was important.  They do seem to prize iconographic shots over anything else.  But this makes a Superman that's already hard to connect with into a massive asshole and that fact that it appears to be by accident is almost worse than if it were a deliberate choice.

(The film made time to have Wonder Woman watch trailers for the upcoming Justice League, though.)

An Actually Interesting Moral Quandary

In an interview, Kahini poses the question of how Superman "decides which lives count and which ones do not."  Which doesn't sound all that much like the question someone who thinks Superman attacked and burned people in her village would say.  It sounds like the question someone who ended up on the wrong side of a trolley problem would say.  I know that in the Ultimate Edition she's lying but it's still the wrong question for what the emphasis of her narrative is.  It's not relevant to the Congress bombing, the theoretical culmination of the "is superman bad actually" question, and Superman's never presented onscreen with a trolley problem style dilemma where he had to let someone die.

How does he decide who to save isn't an interesting or relevant question in this film anyway because we don't really see him have any angst over people he doesn't save.

BUT.  In Kahini's first appearance, she has an almost offhand line about how after Superman's intervention the Nairomi government attacked and had "no mercy in the villages."  Putting this line against her "Superman killed everyone" makes it feel like a throwaway; we saw Anatoli's mercenaries kill everyone and we saw Superman arrive, and the visual weight sets the expectation that "Superman is being thought of as a murderer" is the important part of this dialog.

But the follow up government attack, a massacre that Superman definitely didn't stop, is a way better example of her later question about how he decides whose life matters than anything the film gave actual weight to.  Asking "did he kill those people to save Lois" when we definitely know he didn't is way less pertinent than "did he let all those people die to save Lois" when we know he definitely did.

But it's a moral quandary that isn't easy to answer without putting the real screws to the characters and this movie isn't actually interested in doing that.  We can't risk actually examining Superman's stupid Lois Centered Morality.  Again, I'm not sure the filmmakers even realized they accidentally set up the perfect scenario to explore their amorphous and "deep" philosophical question.

(I am assuming the government massacre actually happened because it isn't something that could be faked by paying one person to lie.)

Batman

So right up top, I like the idea of this version of Batman.  This Batman has survived in the vigilante game way longer than he ever expected to, and the suffering he's seen and experienced (even past his founding myth) have pushed him over the edge.  As I mentioned earlier, I think Affleck conveys this more broken, near alcoholic Batman really well, mixing his simmering rage with an almost nihilistic hollowness  due to the futility of his quest in the world he lives in.  To quote the man himself: "Criminals are like weeds, Alfred. Pull one up, another grows in its place."

He feels so adrift and I love his response to Alfred warning him that taking on Superman is suicide: "I'm older now than my father ever was."  Bruce never expected to live this long, to get old, and he's not sure it was worth it.  He almost seems comforted by the possibility of the end.

Affleck's performance really embodies Alfred's early, and correct, assessment of the state of things:

Everything's changed.  Men fall from the sky. The gods hurl thunderbolts. Innocents die. That's how it starts, sir. The fever. The rage. The feeling of powerlessness. It turns good men cruel.

The opening set-piece centered on Bruce during the Metropolis attack is a good recontextualization of the climax of Man of Steel, and I believe that this version of Batman, would absolutely break bad after being powerless to stop any of the destruction.  And the uptick of his brutality has been noticed, as a Gothamite says this about him: "There's a new kind of mean in him.  He is angry.  And he's hunting."

This is all good setup and I really like it.  The problem is that there's not much payoff and Batman doesn't seem learn very much or change, particularly.  The film seems to be trying to set up a redemption arc for Batman, that he'll realize he's gone too far and ease up, but it doesn't come.  He ends the film approximately the same character he started as.

Batman murders a bunch of people when trying to get the kryptonite from the dock before he meets Superman and after the two men "reconcile"... he kills some more people in the (admittedly awesome) warehouse fight.  He also brings his bat brand to Lex's prison cell at the end, and in the Ultimate Edition he has gotten Lex transferred to Arkham where Batman "still has friends" that are "expecting" him which is hard to read as anything other than a death sentence, assuring us that Batman has learned nothing.  He's just sad that he tried to kill Superman, now.

(Also, why he doesn't actually brand Lex was a little unclear to me; the way the scene is shot it didn't seem like Batman was just trying to scare the guy.)

I honestly don't care that much that he kills people, but like with what I said about Superman killing Zod in Man of Steel, that kind of departure from an otherwise pretty conventional take on the character should be a springboard for some kind of change in said character.  I've seen an interview with Zack Snyder where he seems to think that Batman shooting a car engine and then the driver dying when the engine explodes doesn't count as Batman killing someone, which doesn't fill me with hope that the filmmakers understood that redemption was the seed they were planting.

But the film does plant it, so Batman should have had a recognition and some sort of contrition.  If only there was a character that could show him that he's gone too far, and show him a better way. To inspire him maybe with a symbol of hope. If only there was a character like that in this film....

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Nonsense

It's probably not surprising that in a movie that feels mostly reverse engineered from iconic visuals, the most reverse engineered is the titular conflict between Batman and Superman.

BvS is hyping this impending brawl for the entire film (it is the title after all) but there's a "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" quality to the build up, especially with regards to Superman.  The film spends a not insignificant amount of time trying to gin up Superman's antipathy towards Batman via mostly repackaged reiteration in the theatrical cut and a full on investigation in the Ultimate Edition.

But at the end of the day is there really a conflict of worldview between Superman and Batman?  Clark always frames it as an idealogical issue; he objects to Batman's lack of accountability and willingness to violate civil liberties, but how do those ideas not apply to himself? As I mentioned earlier, when this hypocrisy comes up, he has no answer.

This maybe could work if the film had Superman's problem with Batman be an issue of method and result rather than legality, like if Superman thought that terrorizing and hurting people is bad and also ultimately self-defeating, something Bruce might already know on some level given his statement to Alfred about criminals and weeds.

Though between what happened in the climax of Man of Steel and what Superman did to Amajagh (there's no way that guy lived), Superman is the same kind of violent vigilante that he criticizes Batman for being.  And since we don't see any acts of heroism that aren't like catching stuff or literally lifting people up, there's not enough contrast between what Superman does to violent people and what Batman does.  Maybe it would be different if Superman de-escalated situations, or grabbed violent people by the scruff of their necks and disarmed them without hurting them, or appealed to the better angels of people's natures to defuse conflicts and created more lasting change?

The Superman comic book American Alien has a young Dick Grayson articulate something similar to Clark during a discussion of Batman:

It's a smart move to become a fairy tale monster to scare crooks, but I don't know if it's ultimately a good idea. ...he's all fear.  It's been show that -- like, dogs and whatever -- they don't always respond to fear to train them... sometimes they just get meaner.  So I think Batman needs a counterpoint... Darkness needs light.  Fear needs hope.

This would not only make Superman's criticism of Batman not seem completely hypocritical, it could also be the inspiration for Batman's redemptive arc.   A cleverer movie might have made Superman's weird fixation on Batman-bad-because-vigilante be projection, where he's going hard on Batman as a subconscious grapple with the valid criticisms he himself is getting.  But that would require a moment of reflection and change from Clark, and we can't have that.

But the biggest issue is that none of this matters for Superman.  He fights Batman not  because of ideological issues but because Lex forced him to by kidnapping Martha.  So in addition to the ideological conflict not really adding up, it was all wasted screen time.  It changes nothing and is dropped the second the fight is over.

The Fight

The title fight is awful and is blocked and contrived very weirdly.  Neither character acts like a person would in the situation.  There are so many moments when they knock each other over, then patiently waiting for their opponent to get back up; it's like watching a turn-based RPG.  Superman seems to be actively avoiding explaining anything to Batman.  At the start he very slowly says "We don't have time for this" before knocking Batman 30 feet away and the not saying what he needs to before Batman gets back up.  Later there's a moment where he circles a prone Batman for like 4 seconds without saying anything.  Fuck's sake man, you told Lois you needed to convince him to help, why are you not even trying?

And there's a few spots where Batman doesn't seem to be actually trying to kill Superman.  After weakening him with kryptonite and beating him into the ground, he just stops until Superman has a chance to recover and then resumes his attack.

Also Batman is super lucky that when Superman crashed him through a nearby building, it happened to be the one the kryptonite spear was in.  (And Clark, buddy, if you need this guys help, maybe don't throw him through buildings.  That likely kills any non-CGI man.)   

I'm really curious to see how this was described in the script.  Was it explicit about all this nonsense or was it more like a Shakespearean "They fight" direction and the director, choreographer, and director of photography "figured out" the details?

"Save Martha"

Anyone who has seen this movie or seen any criticism of it knew this paragraph was coming but I'm not going to belabor how dumb and artificial this moment is.  (Though it is very much both of those things.)  When I saw it in the theater I thought that it was stupid but that maybe it was gesturing at something cogent, like hearing Superman say Martha made Batman confront Superman's humanity for the first time.  It's still clumsy; Clark wouldn't have phrased it like that, and this Batman kills people so it still doesn't work, but I thought maybe it was more failure to execute than complete fiasco.

But on a rewatch, I noticed that just before this Batman says to Superman "I bet your parents taught you that you mean something.  That you're here for a reason."   ... So Batman knows he has parents.  Never mind, I guess the name Martha was just a spell that altered Batman's entire motivation.  His heel turn to being Superman's friend is actually really funny.

I could probably write 4000 words just on all the problems with this scene but I'm going to resist the urge.   

But I am going to add one more thing: the long slow-motion flashback to Martha dying and Thomas Wayne saying her name after Superman says "Save Martha" was interminable.  For fucks sake.  WE KNOW.  This flashback is a direct repetition of the first scene of the film and we've also seen Martha's gravestone several times.  Her first name is firmly established.

I already don't ever want to see Batman's parents die again on film; I certainly don't want it twice in the same bad movie.

Bonus Dumb Thing

Clark and Bruce's first meeting at Lex's charity event is really stupid if you think about it for too long.  Lex knows both of their secret identities and specifically requested Clark Kent to cover the event that he also invited Bruce to.  But, like, why?  Just to meet Bruce Wayne?  What for?

Why would he have invited a man he knows has super senses and x-ray vision and also the man who is the World's Greatest Detective into his house?  Admittedly, both heroes are made to look pretty stupid when neither thinks its strange that Lex is making such a big show of introducing a reporter no one has heard of and that he's clearly never met before to Bruce Wayne.  And then he says "I would not pick a fight with this person" after shaking Clark's hand.

Lex is acting very weird even by his standards and is risking drawing the attention of two very dangerous adversaries for basically no reason.  This is just another scene contrived to get Clark and Bruce in a room together and generate lines for the trailer but it's really clunky and in universe it makes no sense for Lex to do any of this.

Clark and Bruce do have a disagreement over Batman but there's no way Lex could have been planning for that or engineered this entire meeting just for that token bit of conflict which, as I've said many times, doesn't matter anyway.  And if either Clark or Bruce had known the other's true identity, Lex would probably have given the game away by trying to stir up shit.

(Also, how does Clark not already know who Bruce Wayne is?  Gotham's right across the bay and he's a damn reporter.  Instead of saying "Who's that?" to the valet he could have said "I'm surprised to see Bruce Wayne at a charity event."  Or he could have said nothing because the audience knows who he is and Lex introduces them later. Sigh)

Lex Luthor

Jesse Eisenberg's Lux Luthor has gotten a lot of criticism.  Personally, I think it's fine.  The pop opinion right after this movie came out was that he was trying too hard to be Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight (2008).  I can see that argument but it never bothered me and in 2025, almost 20 years after Ledger's Joker, the cultural link has weakened considerably.

He's not playing a "standard" Lex Luthor but in universe he's the son of the Luthor who created LexCorp so he may not even be intended to be the standard version.  This doesn't matter to me and I don't really care that he's different; I only care that he's well realized and a good foil for Superman.   And he's a mixed bag by those metrics.

He's all over the place with his juvenile philosophizing but, as I said earlier, the film doesn't really frame him like we're supposed to think he's an idiot.  He's reads like a pretentious buffoon as written by people who don't think he's a pretentious buffoon.

It's a very twitchy and kind of annoying performance, but I do think that it works for this version of the character.  Lex reveals, almost in passing, how his father named the company after himself, but told everyone it was named after our Lex as a cynical PR stunt.  He also tells Superman that he was a victim of his father's "fist and abominations."  This Lex is a man still in the shadow of a powerful and domineering dad, the man whose name he carries and has to see everyday as he goes to work in a company he had no part in building.

This is also reinforced by how most of the other characters don't take him all that seriously and sometimes seem annoyed to be stuck dealing with the lamest Luthor.   

This is a Lex obsessed with his own feelings of powerlessness and this powerlessness is a pretty compelling motivation for him to hate Superman.  This is all handled uncharacteristically subtly for such a blunt, dumb movie and it absolutely works to explain Lex's manic, puppy-who-is-scared-he's-about-to-get-kicked performance.  And it ties nicely back to Alfred's line about "The powerlessness that turns good men cruel."  Lex wasn't born like this.

But though I think there is a good idea in here and some well supported character stuff, Lex gets fumbled hard in execution.  His plans are stupid and his third act motivations are unclear at best and nonsensical at worst.  Why he wants to destroy Superman is pretty deftly established and mostly subtextual but how he wants to destroy Superman is ... stupid.

On the rooftop after his faux-Kierkegaardian "God cannot be all powerful and all good" thing, he tells Superman that humanity "need[s] to see the fraud you are.  With their eyes.  The blood on your hands" and then tells him to bring him the head of Batman or he'll kill Ma Kent.

...

Why would Superman killing Batman show him to be a fraud?  The world has already seen blood on his hands.  He killed Zod.  Thousands died in Metropolis in Man of Steel, he couldn't or didn't stop Congress from exploding, and then he vanished without out helping very much, or at all in the theatrical cut.  And apparently some people already think he murderred the villagers in Nairomi and we the audience saw him almost certainly kill Amajagh.

Why would killing a violent vigilante change anyone's opinion?  Why would this be a tipping point, especially when the media is debating his complicity in the destruction of 1/3 of the US fucking Government?

And where does Doomsday, whose creation he as already set in motion, fit into this?  This Batman v Superman fight isn't portrayed or revealed later to have just been a way to distract Superman so Lex could create Doomsday, but even if it was, what was the plan?  Have Doomsday kill Superman (assuming Batman didn't already) and then....?  Um...profit?

Dawn of Injustice

Bruce's nightmare / vision of a future with a fascist Superman adds nothing to the actual narrative of Batman v Superman and removing it entirely would have no effect.  It just feels like 5 minutes of wasted screen time in a movie that already has too much going on and an underwritten title character in Superman.

(This scene is referred to as the "Knightmare" but I refuse to call it that.)

This is a tease for a future movie that seems like it's adapting the Injustice storyline.  Injustice is a 2013 fighting game where Superman has turned dictator after Lois dies and the other characters take some sort of pill to allow them to fight Superman.  It's a video game plot, so whatever.  It's an excuse to have fun being different superheroes and mashing action figures together.

Injustice was also adapted into a comic book series written by Tom Taylor and Brian Buccelato and I've heard it's handled about as well as it could be, but I absolutely hate this premise.  For me, it boils down to this: If you can make Superman into a dictator after one person dies, even if it's his fault, he's a bad Superman.  Superman sees people die all the time and he's an incredibly empathetic character.  I absolutely refuse to believe that a standard Superman would ever say "Now that this happened to me personally, I will now stop all violence by force."

This is the Lois Centered Morality I mentioned earlier that I absolutely despise and given Superman's "She was my world and you took her from me!" line in Bruce's nightmare, I don't have high hopes that the Snyderverse would have handled this deftly.  (The DCEU is over so we'll never actually know, now.  Good.)

In general, just stop trying to make Evil Superman happen.  We already have one.  It's Zod and Snyder's Superman already killed him.

Gallimaufry

• There's some left handed stuff in this film.  Joe Chill, the man who kills Batman's parents, is left handed.  And Superman's hair is parted the way it would be if he were left handed.  In Superman (1978), when Christopher Reeve was Clark, he had a left handed part in his hair, but it switches to a right handed one when he's Superman.   Does this mean anything?  Is it a  subtle visual signal that Superman is going to be a villain?  Or is it just a coincidence?   Shrug.  But, like, a left handed one.

• I didn't mention this but it should be obvious that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a terrible title.

• Kahini is played by Wunmi Mosaku, who was Annie in Sinners (2025). (And she was really good in it.)  I'm glad she found her way to a better film.

• I did really like Lois's reaction when Superman shows up to save her in Nairomi.  Amajagh is using her as a human shield and she's trying to tear his arm away from her.  But when Superman arrives, she just slowly smiles and let's go of his arm.  It's got a "You are so screwed now" vibe that I quite liked.

• Twice Lex asks Senator Finch if she knows what the oldest lie in America is and the answer is different both times.  I wonder if this was Goyer trying to recapture a bit of The Dark Knight's Joker, who gives two wildly different origin stories after saying "Do you want to know how I got my scars?"  This is way harder to catch in BvS as I think there's more than an hour between the two lines so I don't know if it was intentional or a mistake by the writers.

• I probably should have mentioned this in my Man of Steel piece, but I do really like composer Hans Zimmer's theme for Superman.

• The image in the opening dream of young Bruce being lifted into the light by bats was cool, but i'm not sure what it has to do thematically with anything.

• A user review on imdb.com says that the Ultimate Edition "manages to  fix all the problems with the Theatrical version.  31 extra minutes makes a huge difference!"  Um...strong disagree.

• After the Congress bombing, there's an irony if Superman's supposed to be thinking "I brought this on them, they'd be alive if I wasn't here" (which I'm not sure the filmmakers meant for him to convey. I'm meeting them way more than halfway, here.)  Because he didn't angst over Metropolis which is the same issue but like a thousand times worse from a human cost perspective.

• I think it's a nice touch that Lex's right hand person Mercy Graves (Tao Okamoto) dies in the Congressional bombing.  It subtly shows what an evil bastard Lex is; he sent her to her death despite her loyalty to him.

• Lois is bad at interviews.  Her lead question to Amajagh is "Are you a terrorist, General?"  I thought for sure this was going to be different in the Ultimate Edition but, nope.

• Kevin Costner sounds REALLY different than he did in Man of Steel.  He's putting on a weird affect after just sounding like Kevin Costner in the previous film.  That's not a criticism, necessarily, it's just really weird.

• The Kryptonian scout ship computer's line about Doomsday is kind of cool if a bit too turgidly editorialized for a computer:

It has been decreed by the Council of Krypton that none will ever again give life to a deformity so hateful to sight and memory.  The desecration without name.

What I like about it is that it is very fitting for a rigid Kryptonian society that has the strict genetic caste system laid out in Man of Steel to consider "foreign genetic material" a desecration.  I don't know this tie was intentional, but I'm a Death of the Author guy, so good job writers.

• The news chyron describes Wallace spraying "False God" on Superman's statue as a "Hate Crime."   Which is pretty....strident.  This is the kind of subtle (from a filmmaking perspective) framing thing that trains the audience to think the whole world loves Superman.  A framing the film then undercuts by making Superman potentially a dour asshole.

• The in universe populace revering Superman even when the film has given them very little reason too is kind of fitting considering how many people in the real world almost homo-erotically worship Cavill’s Superman despite him (the character, not the actor) being a bad Superman.  I saw an extremely funny post on Facebook once that was a photo of Cavill as Superman with a caption to the effect of: "This is my Superman.  Sure, his movies weren't good and he was written badly and he didn't get to show much character but he was the perfect Superman."  Um...so he looks like him, then.  Great.  That's obviously more important than the character writing.

• Superman just refuses to talk to people other than named characters.  I thought it was particularly funny in the Ultimate Edition when he's about to climb up the mountain where he'll see Pa Kent and two men address him and he just completely ignores them.

• I've seen people call BvS a deconstruction but I think it's too dumb to pose any real criticisms of the characters or deconstruct the idea of Superheroes.  It goes through great lengths to get any complexity off the table because the only people actually criticizing Superman were paid off or tricked by Lex.  This wasn't intentional but it has uncomfortable reminders of the go-to real world tactic of dismissing any potentially valid and good faith criticism as the work of outside agitators and paid protesters.  Or conspiracy of critics just trying to hurt this film on Rotten Tomatoes because they hate DC.

Conclusion

This film is a disaster that I can't recommend to anyone but honestly it was kind of a fun watch.  I actually forensically enjoyed the Theatrical cut and appreciate that its mind-boggling horribleness gave me so much to think about (and laugh at).   Screw the Ultimate Edition though.  That was the worst Idea i've ever had.

If it were a little bit shorter, I think the Theatrical cut of this film would almost be in the "so bad it's good" territory and worth occasionally watching with a bunch of friends.

This is not a mature real world movie for adults that asks complex moral questions.  That is a bullshit take and speaks very poorly for either the good faith motives or the media literacy of the people who say it.  Like I said in my Man of Steel review, I generally fall into the "like whatever you like camp" but please be honest with yourself and don't try to trick others into seeing a dogshit film on false pretenses.

I've got more essays coming in my Superman series but, happily, Batman v Superman is the absolute nadir, so it's all looking up from here.

Make sure to Save Martha.

-m