To sit through this — and there’s a lot to sit through (Senate hearings, newsroom slapstick, Scoot McNairy doing Lieutenant Dan from “Forrest Gump”) — is to see both rage and piety hit a wall. “Batman v Superman” features the latest in a handful of live-action incarnations of Batman since 1989 and Superman since 1978. Putting Gotham City across the river from Metropolis just combines two sites of “been there done that.” Insisting on the holiness of it all lands in the tiny crack between “duh” and “you just told me this.”

The director is Zack Snyder, the maker of “300,” “Watchmen,” “Sucker Punch,” and “Man of Steel.” Piety is the only mode he’s got. It’s the only mode most of these comic-book movies have had: suffering, oppression, misunderstanding, apocalypse. For a decade and a half, from the first wave of “X-Men” movies to Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, terroristic disaster is now the ultimate signifier of seriousness.

The quest for topical immediacy turns queasy fast. Fifteen years ago, people talked about the Sept. 11 attacks as something that seemed out of the movies. Now that day culminates in movies, over and over, until you’re appalled or inured — which is, of course, appalling.

We’ve seen the movies attempt to refract the world as the great comic books do, but often without their un-self-conscious power and with a sense of burden. The “Avengers” series, for instance, has to top not only its spinoffs but also itself.

Directors as different as Jon Favreau (the first two “Iron Man” movies), Shane Black (the last one) and Kenneth Branagh (“Thor”) have tried to install levity and classicism. The “Avengers” movies, including spinoffs built around Captain America, dramatize the country’s civil-liberty and national-security skirmishes. They also bury those political fights to wage a war whose visual language evokes real-world destruction in a way that cheapens the extant impact of its “source material.”

So burden, in these movies, is often all you feel. The burden has been lucrative, it’s true. So “if ain’t broke …” and all of that. But the genre’s rhythms and tropes, its politics, allegories and story arcs have become so familiar — Hark: Here’s a character at the very end of a movie, staring into the distance, speaking to another character about how they’ll have to get together and do this again, in a sequel — that you have to laugh at that, too.