I walked into the theater knowing that everyone hated it. I had seen the headlines scrolling down my newsfeed, and they looked brutal. Still, there was no way I wasn't going to see Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on opening weekend.

At 34 years old, I'm a three-star comic book kid. Two stars short of the real deal: I never had subscriptions to monthly titles, my parents never let me buy comics on a regular basis, and I didn't continue reading as an adult. But the comics I did manage to acquire as a child—dozens of issues of various Batman and X-Men titles—had an indelible, formative imprint on my sense of possibility. My attraction to comics was never about fun, but rather the format's capacity for deadly seriousness—a gravity that I couldn't find in other children's media. I may have been 12 years old, but comic books respected my capacity to handle heavy themes of philosophy, politics, desire, and betrayal. I was empowered by that respect, and so the imagery and format of comic books has stuck with me even though I no longer read them.

This is all just to say: Screw you, I fucking loved Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I am completely baffled by the nearly universal accusation that the movie was boring, or that its philosophizing was vapid or pointless. I was immediately caught up in its themes of accountability, privilege, power, and cooperation. While many have cited the clear 9/11 references in the film's opening sequences, Batman v Superman made me reflect more generally on the entire history of United States foreign policy.

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Early in the movie, Superman saves Lois Lane from a violent situation in Africa, and as a result many people are killed. For this and other reasons, regular humans (Batman among them) question how they can allow this to continue. Through the guise of this superhero action movie, we are asked to consider what it means to take unilateral action around the world without a clear understanding of the consequences. Did I not hear a similar conversation in recent debates between Democratic presidential candidates? Is this not the defining question of the United States' role in the world?

People complain about Christopher Nolan's Batman movies because they were too philosophical, but at least Batman v Superman philosophizes about something that matters: our nation's responsibility to the other people of the planet. In that sense, this movie dares to be far more politically relevant than the giant's share of corporate entertainment.

In a media landscape where most big-budget blockbusters are about nothing at all, is it really so terrible that this monster of a movie decided to tackle something that's actually pertinent to our lives and to the world? Even if we think the film ultimately fails, why do we feel the need to condemn it for trying? Wouldn't we rather live in a world where filmmakers are encouraged to make attempts like this, and where genres like "superhero movie" are expanded rather than constantly reduced to their simplest components?

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After all, Batman v Superman is like no superhero movie I have ever seen. It is almost entirely imagistic, practically non-narrative, and told in episodic format like a graphic novel. Moreover—and this is really weird—there is no protagonist. Superman hardly has any lines, and Batman, while more narratively dominant, doesn't really carry things along. Rather, the protagonists of the movie are ideas and emotions, which unfold together more like a meditation than a story. If anything, Batman v Superman has more in common with experimental comic books like Neil Gaiman's Sandman than with any existing superhero movies. And, as with Gaiman's work, it's the ideas and images that reign supreme.

Critics have been citing this unconventional structural approach as the movie's major flaw, but I think it's what makes it so engaging and surprising. Maybe it's easier for me to see this because these are the things that lured me into the world of comic books in the first place: ideas, allegories, broad expressions of twisted emotions, all told in odd, undulating bursts of story and tableau. Maybe I was just ready for a movie like this. And maybe that's why the other people I know who share my excitement have a similar relationship to the form.

Also, for the record, I'm a huge homosexual, and I was able to write this entire defense of Batman v Superman without having to talk about Wonder Woman, and how she is everything. Rather, I'll conclude by praising the most powerful feminine energy in the movie: Holly Hunter's deeply felt performance as a U.S. Senator who waxes movingly about cooperation and democracy. While Gal Godot was a ferocious vision as Wonder Woman, it was Hunter's embodiment of the central themes of the movie that felt most faithful to the form of a comic book and most worthy of a true super-heroine.

In the end, if you didn't like Batman v Superman, maybe it just wasn't for you. And that doesn't mean it's a disaster. If anything, it marks an unprecedented and successful redistribution of entertainment resources: it used a mass-market budget to create a luscious film for a niche audience of weird little comic book nerds like me who love superheroes for a very specific reason.

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