Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice response by Chris Cabin



Where exactly does one begin with this…thing? I honestly have no idea, just as I would not know what end to begin eating from when consuming a burrito filled with a healthy mix of dog, horse, cat, and cow shit.

Batman does Crossfit in this movie. Were you wondering just how Bruce Wayne got in shape before he went out and battled the Joker? I wasn’t, and I’m relatively certain that the legions of Batman fans that have been reading the comics for years didn’t either. The only person who really cared was Zack Snyder, because he does Crossfit and he likes people who do Crossfit. He definitely cares about their opinion a whole lot more than people who love either of these characters.

There’s so many more problems: action scenes cut out so that we instead only see the aftermath; poor, poor Jesse Eisenberg being made into hipster rich-boy Lex Luthor, who clearly doesn’t do Crossfit and who only seeks knowledge to be evil; the rampant misogyny that is supposedly excused by Wonder Woman kicking a tiny bit of ass at the end; Alfred talking about how he’ll never have a (symbolic) grandson; the stupid Justice League set-up (Computer files?! Really?!); the absolutely ridiculous Darkseid set-up; the meaningless, convoluted Lois Lane storyline with the bullet; secret Jimmy Olsen being a CIA agent who gets capped after two lines. That leaves Holly Hunter and Laurence Fishburne, who have nothing to do but who show up and give zing to their lines despite being drowned out by Snyder’s loud, repugnant movie.

All this nonsense feeds into this grim, self-serious production that refuses to be funny or fun in any resonant way. Even in his “dark” take on these characters, Snyder is never even half as artful as Christopher Nolan, who he is clearly chasing after. Hell, he isn’t even as artful as Michael Bay. My thinking is that Snyder thought he was making a meaningful and entertaining movie on his own terms, and that he honestly didn’t really give a fuck about the characters histories in comics or anywhere else really. There’s some bravery to that, but his endgame wasn’t to inspire anyone, wasn’t to give us a sense of wonder, which he admittedly did (intermittently) in Man of Steel. His view of the world is that it’s an awful, horrible place filled mostly with people who want to kill God, which has never been the perspective of the comics or the characters from my experience.

As bad as movies like X-Men: The Last Stand, Green Lantern, and Spider-Man 3 are…their ultimate goal isn’t to condemn and shit on the world of man (and I say “man” because clearly this movie only cares about men), but rather to expand it, to see some little splinter of hope in the world and society at large. I never felt anything like that for a moment of this 150-minute fiasco, which I honestly hope I can get through the rest of my life without seeing again.