Movie: Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

Before anything, I'd just like to take time to address some posts that have been going around social media invalidating any and all forms of criticism against this movie as being made by "people without proper knowledge of the comic books," "people who don't have sufficient background context to make such judgments," and of course because we apparently live in 2008, "Marvel fans." This kind of dismissive attitude toward legitimate criticism pisses me off more than I can express right now (I have had to stop myself from leaving angry comments at various Facebook posts that have littered my newsfeed). So here:

• Newsflash: People can be both Marvel and DC fans at the same time. It's not a mutually exclusive thing. A corollary to this: not everyone is a DC comics fan, just as not everyone is a Marvel fan (which aggressive fans of each side have made clear at every possible opportunity). Invalidating someone's opinions just because they are a fan of another franchise is a logical fallacy I won't even bother discussing in detail.
• Numerous people who are also fans of the comics have expressed disappointment (both passively, aggressively, and passive-aggressively) in the movie. In fact, I expected to like the movie because I wasn't a comic book fan. I thought maybe only comic book fans were really disappointed by the movie, haha. So not only is your "argument" intrinsically unsound, it has also been externally disproven by counterexamples.

To clarify before we begin:

• I am (obviously) a Marvel fan. I have not read any DC comics. I do have some background on DC though, as my brother is a giant DC fan (coincidentally, he hated the movie), and I have been obsessed with Young Justice ever since forever. Nightwing ftw ♥ Also, like anyone who has walked this planet, I have watched the Batman films blablabla. I also watched Man of Steel. It was a mess and it was boring and it was morally all over the place, haha.
• I did not read any reviews beforehand, and I did not have any expectations one way or another for the movie. I wanted to like it, because I liked the trailers well enough. So my thoughts were unprimed - at least, if you're one of the aggressive fans, "as unprimed as a Marvel fan's thoughts can be." (If you actually think this, please stop reading here. Haha.)
• I understand people's need or instinct to compare this movie to a Marvel movie, but personally, while I was watching it, I never thought to compare it to any Marvel movie. I just took it for what it was. Sooo if you're looking to read a review that compares the DCU with the MCU, this is not the place to do that. I'm going to review this only within its own universe's context.

OKAY! Actual review~

General Review

This movie was generally messy and confusing. It had its bright spots, yes, but the fun little details did nothing to make up for the mess the movie was in general. Most of its strengths lay in technical aspects (i.e., pretty visuals) and teases of the expanded DCU (Justice League and featuring Wonder Woman), while most of its weaknesses were really in its content, aka the story itself and the storytelling. I will say I don't think it deserves the 28% rating it got on RottenTomatoes, but it's definitely not as good as some people are making it out to be. It had some major problems that I, as a casual viewer, just couldn't get past.

There were gaping plot holes (which were the type that nagged me even after the movie, as opposed to being fed into my suspension of disbelief), character motivations were vague at best (can anyone tell me why Batman and Superman were even fighting in the first place?), and there were so many unnecessary sequences that not only made the movie more confusing, but really ruined what would have been good pacing or clearer narrative.

In short, as a viewer, I wanted the story. In a movie where, according to the title, a hero fights a hero, the conflict is so important. You don't need a strong conflict for a bad guy to fight a good guy - the easiest example of this is a bad guy wanting to kill everyone, and a good guy protecting people from being killed. Easy enough to delineate. But when a good guy fights another good guy, you're gonna need a strong, clear reason. Why were they fighting? What are the stakes? Who are involved and why are the involved? These are the questions BvS failed to really answer.

What worked?

Visuals

Like I said, the film was technically really good. It had nice visuals and I thought it was shot very well. It looked a lot like a comic book, which I liked. People complain that it was "dark" or that it was monochromatic, but I thought that really added to the overall aesthetic of the movie. The DCU is not a happy-happy, light-hearted place, and the movies don't try to be that way - and they communicated that well through their visuals. I really liked their establishing shots, the action-packed fight scenes (they lacked narrative strength in terms of what fight scenes can do for story-building vs fight scenes for the sake of fight scenes, but they weren't inherently bad fight scenes), the big explosions (so many explosions!), and there were so many shots that kind of stay in your mind subconsciously. For example, the blurred zoom-in shot of Superman flying through the sky during the Metropolis attack that was shot through Bruce's POV, Wonder Woman flying through the air at Doomsday, etc.

ALSO: I love a good team fight scene, and this didn't disappoint. Yay!

Acting

Not all the acting, but some really stood out. I liked Ben Affleck as Batman, though I don't have enough knowledge of comic!Bruce Wayne to judge whether he is the best Bruce Wayne in any Batman movie or not. Batfleck was likable - smart without being arrogant, charming without being schmoozy, and charismatic enough that you wouldn't doubt he was rich and comfortable being in his own skin. 

Jeremy Irons was also a great Alfred. Loved all the scenes with him in it because he brought the sass, which served to ground the film a little when it was getting too into itself, but also made me appreciate Alfred's military background too. I wish they took more time to flesh out his character and make us more invested in him, but in a movie struggling to balance countless subplots, I can't fault them for not focusing on a character that isn't inherently important to the plot.

And, of course, Gal Gadot improves the movie by a remarkable factor of ... infinity. She literally made everything so much better. When she comes out in her Wonder Woman outfit, my 2/10 score for the movie almost immediately jumped to 10/10, and then down to 5/10 when I came back to my rational thinking. I'm not sure yet if I love Wonder Woman because Gal portrays her so well, or if I just like the idea of Wonder Woman in general. Haha. In any case, yes, thank you for her presence in this movie.

Justice League

I liked the (extremely blatant) build up to Justice League. The idea of shared of universes made me so excited, and this didn't disappoint. We got to see shots of the three other members of the JL(A?), and yes, that is the stuff I do like! I'm excited to see Ezra Miller as The Flash, though I am going to reserve my judgment on Jason Momoa as Aquaman because that's at least 70% more testosterone than I was ready for.

But, again, I am a lover of team fights and the idea of teaming up, so loving this aspect of the movie was really a no-brainer. The integration could have been a lot smoother, but it wasn't awful. Not sure if I'll like any of the other heroes, but I like the idea of them well enough. Hopefully their movies will be injected with just a bit more joy and life in them though. 

What didn't work?

Plot

Between balancing Batman's backstory, Superman's backstory, and Mark Zuckerberg Lex Luthor's backstory, the film perpetually trips over itself trying to do way too much. Precisely because it's trying to do so much, what would have been an interesting conflict becomes muddled, the stakes diluted, and both are lost to trying hard ~edgy imagery and, in Filipino, mapalabok na pagsasalita. It's flowery speech without the meat of the content, and is far too unnecessarily complicated for its own good.

Basically: for a film whose selling point is the titular battle between Batman and Superman, its main conflict is more effectively embodied by Lex Luthor's desire to preemptively dispose of Superman and his innate godliness. It's the same thing Batman wanted to do, but without the moral ambiguity that watered down the stakes and intensity between the two sides. This isn't to say that Lex Luthor was a good villain, though, because he really wasn't.

Character Motivations

This was the biggest problem with the movie. It's a basic question: why are characters doing whatever it is they're doing? 

Why were Batman and Superman even fighting? I actually thought the conflict was clear in the first scene where Batman angrily looks at Superman as he flies through the sky during the Metropolis attack. I thought, oh, he hates him because he killed a lot of people. Except this is really the peak of the narrative quality in the movie.

Put simply, Batman has hated Superman for 2-3 years, and with the explosion at his hearing, now has the reasonable doubt to kill Superman. Superman doesn't ascribe to Batman's take-no-prisoners approach to serving justice, and is then literally blackmailed into killing Batman. It's all well and good, except... why is Batman so concerned about killing when he kills without, excuse the pun, batting an eyelash? That's literally his style of justice? It's the kind of paradox that makes you question whether the conflict is really a conflict.

There were some hints at Superman's internal conflict. I liked the cuts of news anchors talking about him (though I do think it ran a bit long), in particular when one asks: should there be a Superman? Because that's literally what Clark Kent goes through in Man of Steel. It wasn't resolved very well in that movie, and while it hinted at it in this movie, again, they're doing so much, there's just no space to let the conflict and characters breathe.

That aside, the ideological conflict itself remains unclear, with either side's stands not clashing perfectly with one another enough for the viewer to really get a hold of the stakes. So what if Batman kills Superman, like Lex Luthor wants? You'd have a pissed off Bruce Wayne who knows too much about LexCorp for him not to be a problem. People would glorify him as saving them from Superman after the hearing, so there'd likely be no public backlash. If Superman kills Batman, you'd still have a very pissed of Superman since a) you pushed his girlfriend off a building, and b) you kidnapped his mom to blackmail him into killing someone.

Lex Luthor, apparently upon realizing this, does the genetic splicing thing with Zod's dead body... which is still a bad plan. Yes, let's introduce a new alien with godly mortality and strength, one we can't even control. Not a great plan.

So, as a viewer, I was really left asking, so what now??? What are the stakes again??  It just all becomes a mess of subplots trying very hard to be balanced (and failing).

In relation to this, their motivation for eventually joining forces is flimsy at best. They worked together because... their moms had the same name?? You could make a whole dramatic thing of it here, of how Batman, for the first time, sees Superman as a human being instead of a "god" he despises, but that's really a stretch. There was little to no time to process things happening between here and there, no emotional investment or buildup in Batman's mindset to really make this work as an emotional climax of sorts. And there wasn't even any talk about deeper ideologies, about how the common denominator between their "conflict" is they both want to save people. Nope, it was just Superman uttering his mom's name. (I know I said no Marvel comparison, but damn, I wish Maria Stark and Sarah Rogers had the same name. Civil War would be over quicker.)

And, finally, once Superman dies, why does Batman feel so strongly about avenging the death of a guy he's hated for so long? Why so much so that he wants to take on the daunting task of forming a team?

Why is Lex Luthor evil? Looking past Jesse Eisenberg's uncanny impression of Mark Zuckerberg doing an impression of Lex Luthor (which, unpopular opinion: I kind of liked?), he says he wants to have a fail-safe - a way to defeat Superman in case he ever goes rogue. This kind of thinking isn't inherently villainous, and probably a lot of other civilians (read: Metropolis incident) feel the same way. Hell, Batman feels the same way. But Luthorberg's goal obviously isn't to protect people, it's just to defeat Superman. But... why? Did he lose someone to the Metropolis incident? Does it have to do with his abusive father? And if he's such a genius, why didn't he just kill Superman for good with the metric ton of kryptonite he had at the start of the movie instead of making a monster he couldn't even hope to control? 

(I will add: say what you will about Lex Luthor, but the man's obviously a very gifted marketer. He came up with logos for the Justice League characters and everything.)

Why does Lois Lane do what she does? Seriously, why? She was one of the more annoying characters in Man of Steel, and she's still annoying now. The writing for her character reads like someone trying in vain to be ~edgy and ~feminist, but they can't seem to fight the urge to make her make stupid decisions (e.g., the terrorist interview at the beginning, making her company pay for a damn chopper so she could... do what exactly? Identify Martha as Clark's mom?, throwing the krytonite spear into some abyss, diving after said spear, among others), and eventually be in need of rescue. Sigh.

Unnecessary/Confusing Scenes

These scenes included, above everything else, all of Batman's weird dream sequences. There were so many. I could maybe accept the one where The Flash warns him about something in the future, because that's probably a set-up for something, but even that scene comes out so far from left field, it's not even in the same stadium (ha! Sports metaphor). Looking past the need for smoother integration, the other two dream sequences just didn't do anything to drive the plot or any sort of character development forward. They seemed to be there for shock value or to further the ~dark aesthetic of the movie.

The first was the bloody graves, which, really, was there need for that jumpscare? What was it for? The only positive thing it did was to force parents to evacuate noisy children from the theater because of the nightmares the scene will induce until they're teenagers. (And even then, it's just sad that a movie about two iconic superheroes is unwatchable by young kids!) The second was the one where Batman's in a trench coat in the middle of the desert. What was that? Was it there to remind us that Batman thinks Superman can build a terrorist army and chain him up so he can kill him? Is this some weird Fifty Shades of Grey scenario and the dream just ended too soon? (Haha, I had to make the joke, I'm not sorry.)

Superman's weird dad-collecting-wood-in-the-alps scene was also very strange. It appears at a stage in the film where there's really no buildup to Superman actually taking his internal conflict to heart. You don't feel that he needs to see his dad to work through things, so when he appears, it's not in keeping pace with the film. I actually found it kind of jarring? I definitely could have done without it.

The whole scene in the beginning, to me, was also kind of unnecessary, or at least it shouldn't have been the opening scene. What did it do to help establish the story? That Bruce... loved his parents and his mom was named Martha? That Bruce can control bats and they lifted him out of some hole in the ground?? The scene doesn't adequately even explain Bruce's penchant for violence and no-mercy style of justice. Really, if they had shown the Metropolis/glaring Batman scene first and cut to the title, that would have been a much better beginning.

Additionally hilarious: buildings and places that ~happened to be uninhabited, Lois Lane and her relationship with the kryptonite spear, the very dedicated citizens of Metropolis who literally will not evacuate their glass wall offices even if there's an alien invasion outside, and Lex Luthor singing randomly.

Questions

Aside from the ones I've already mentioned, here are some more:

• How did Lex Luthor know of their secret identities?
• How did Diana Prince know to get Bruce Wayne's hard drive thing?
• How did Superman know Batman's secret identity?
• Nitpicky, but if Batman kills his enemies, why are so many of them alive in Suicide Squad?

Clark Kent/Superman

I will add that while I have no strong opinions about other actors, I really dislike Henry Cavill as Superman. All his lines are delivered with the same emotionless baritone. I get that the movie is Serious, but, dude, come on, inject some life? Please? Kahit konti lang. I mean, I will agree that the script didn't do him any favors, but even his romance with Lois Lane read as flat. He has the physique and looks that can pass as Superman but otherwise...

Also, it's just sad to me that where Superman is usually representative of joy and life and all that happy boy scout stuff, this Superman is just lifeless, sad, and vastly unlikable. Even Bruce Wayne managed to be likable in this movie, and he's the one that kills people for serve justice. :( This Superman doesn't even really do anything, he just reacts to stuff. He shows up where he's summoned, whether it's by a kidnapping or subpoena, he allows himself to be manipulated in doing something he doesn't agree with (and fails to interrupt Bruce to just get it out there that hey, by the way, I don't want to do this, they kidnapped my mom), and he's just... there.

To summarize, there was a lot of things not going for this movie. It had a weak narrative, it tried to be too many things all at once, and its main conflict, which was literally its selling point in the title, was flimsy to begin with, with its resolution being even flimsier. It felt like DC rushed into this without the proper set-up, so they tried to punch in all the set-up in the movie, so what they really had was... like, 8 movies in one movie.

Still, it had great visuals, fight scenes, and features some great performances, especially by Gal Gadot (though I do wish we had a standalone Wonder Woman movie so everyone could understand the little things, like her gold necklace and the sword thing in the box and all that - those were given too much screentime to really be easter eggs).

In its entirety, the movie works better as something like a trailer for the Justice League (or even Wonder Woman) as opposed to a stand-alone film. I don't think it's worse than Man of Steel though, and I'd rather watch this again rather than that.

Also, some things to look forward to: an inevitable HISHE clip and Honest Trailer! Hahaha.