TW: DCEU film mentioned
I walked out of Batman V Superman completely fucking wrecked. I don't think it's awful, but I didn't want to watch any more movies after that. It took about 4 or 5 days for me to try to watch something else. It sounds like I'm being an exaggerative comic book media obsessed psycho- I guess I am. I wanted to enjoy it, I occasionally did, but mostly I felt completely deflated, struggling to understand what kind of plot ZS & co were presenting- and which side of the political spectrum the film was on (it explicitly was trying- I'm not reading too much into it). The music was overwhelmingly pulsating and while I love Hans Zimmer (he's up there with Williams for me) it just was unrelenting. The visuals were occasionally beautiful and ZS uses CGI as a genuine art form, but the screen is smeared with muddy dark brown template making me struggle to focus on the screen. At its core- it's meant to be a comic book film for children. What a depressing feeling to be a parent if you had to watch the film with your kid who was genuinely excited for these silly characters to be onscreen together.
Can anyone articulate why it was that much of an atrocity? You watch some scenes on youtube and it's decent-ish, but I don't think I could put myself through that again.
It's a poorly edited, poorly characterised, and poorly themed movie about nothing.
Your brain spends time thinking about how one scene would logically connect to the other but they don't.
The movie spends several scenes setting up the ideological differences between Batman and Superman. You see, Batman uses violence to stop crime and so does Superman... Oh. Well, Batman is way too violent for Superman because, unlike Batman, Superman would never... smash a human being through several brick walls at Mach 2, as seen right at the beginning of the movie.
The movie is constantly fighting itself, using prior comic book knowledge to set up an ideological contrast while also completely changing these established characters for the sake of the film.
Then, even if the ideological stuff did work it doesn't even pay off because the only reason Superman fights Batman is because Lex Luthor says that he'll kill his mother if he doesn't.
The fight then stops because they both have a mother named Martha. Nerds will tell me that it's actually Batman realising he's basically become just as bad as the person who killed his parents which would work if he didn't go straight back to murdering people in the next scene. Batman also already knew about his human parents so that angle doesn't work either. Sorry losers, the fight stopped cos their mums got the same names.
Then they fight a giant monster and Wonder Woman is there and Superman dies for no reason, the end.
Shocking that the man who made Man of Steel would be capable of creating something that's a thematic and structural mess. 🤔