by Victor Pryor
So there was a story going around, and it’s possible that it was apocryphal. But the story went that when they announced a (‘Dawn of Justice’ subheading-free) Batman V. Superman at the 2013 Comic Con, just a couple of months after Man Of Steel’s mixed reception… well, the story goes that that decision was literally made about ten minutes before the presenters took the stage.
Again: it may not actually be true, but that sensation you’re currently experiencing of a puzzle clicking into place… well, that kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
As an eternal optimist, I had hoped that Warner Bros ambitious plan to pull a reverse Marvel and spin a bunch of properties off from their next film would actually work. But given everything we know about how studios operate, that seemed… rather unlikely. So I set my sights a little bit lower, and primed myself for a gloriously insane disaster.
The last thing I expected was to be bored.
The theatrical release of Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice was a joyless, ponderous mess of a film. And in retrospect, it seems like the studio already knew that going in, hence the announcement of a director’s cut mere weeks before the film’s release.
Which felt like an unprecedented move. Why would you be pitching a (presumably better and more comprehensive) version of your movie before the first version is even released? And what are you doing conceptually that this version would be rated R?
No movie with Superman should ever be rated R. That is insane.
“I know what you’re all thinking… ‘faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound… but does he fuuuuck?’ Well, don’t worry… our Superman fuuuuucks! In bathtubs!”
At any rate, and in the interest of extending forgiveness beyond all reason, I vowed that when the so-called Ultimate Edition came out, I would endeavor to watch it before I made a final decision on the viability of the franchise they’re trying to build. And as much as I was prepped and ready to pour some dirt on the grave of this three hour misfire, in the end, I have to concede: the Ultimate Edition is a much improved, far more coherent narrative.
Unfortunately, all that means is that it’s the best possible version of an idea that was doomed to failure in the first place.
ON MY PLANET, THE ‘S’ STANDS FOR SPOILERS
What the movie does right is restore some measure of humanity to Superman. In the theatrical version, Big Blue came off as cold, distant, and imperious, with frequent periods of sustained mopeyness. But the extra footage added reveals more layers to Henry Cavill’s performance. Now he’s noble, conflicted, and haunted… with frequent periods of sustained mopeyness.
Even if I can’t get over his weird widow’s peak, there are moments when Cavill actually seems like a decent version of Superman. At any rate, he fares a lot better than the Ultimate Edition version of Batman.
It’s interesting to note that there are almost no extra scenes from the Batman portion of the storyline, which gives you an idea of where the filmmakers’ priorities were. But what’s even more interesting is that the footage restored makes Batman seem SO MUCH MORE WORSE than he comes off in the theatrical cut.
Whereas Clark’s fixation on Batman in the first version seemed weirdly unwarranted, here we actually see Clark doing some leg work, and everything he finds out makes the Batman seem like a straight up psychopath, to the point where a viewer is kind of like, ‘Yeah, that Batman fellow is kind of a problem. You definitely need to take that dude out.’
“But, just to play devil’s advocate… he’s wearing the shit out of that suit, tho….”
If there’s anything that reveals the deep, deep problems this movie has, just from a conceptual standpoint, consider this:
Nearly everything Batman does in this film is in service of a single goal: killing Superman.
Batman and Lex Luthor have the exact same goal for this entire movie.
Chew on that for a moment, won’t you…?
On the other hand… Wonder Woman is also in the movie.
Amy Adams as Lois Lane, still the most inspired casting decision the gang at Warner Bros made, also benefits from the increase in screen time; her investigation subplot finally seems less like wheel spinning and more like an actual component of the film.
(Special Note to all you aspiring editors and filmmakers out there: if you’re writing a mystery, it’s important that you don’t remove the scenes with the clues, because that sort of thing might lead to some slight confusion on the part of the viewers…)
But let’s not kid ourselves: when the best, most interesting character in your Batman Superman movie (that also includes Wonder Woman, who is in the movie) is Perry White… you done errored hard, son.
FUCKING LUTHORS, HOW DO THEY WORK?
What’s interesting is that the Ultimate Edition goes a long way towards making Lex Luthor’s actions seem almost… explicable. Thanks to Lois (and Jena Malone, pointless but always welcome), we discover that Lex actually IS behind everything. The cuts in the theatrical version left some ambiguity as to certain aspects of his plan, which proved to be hours of fun for story sticklers such as myself. But restoring them gives the plotline far more cohesion overall, even if it winds up doing nothing for its needlessly convoluted nature.
Really, it’s not until the third act that everything falls apart, in which the need for a big stupid fight and franchise building overtakes the need for a story to make sense and come to a logical conclusion. Indeed, for all the scorn he accrued, Jesse Eisenberg’s performance more or less works up until the point when the script stops providing him with anything to do, but still gives him twenty minutes worth of scenes to do it in.
(By the way: okay, yes… he’s Lex Luthor! Of course he’s behind everything. But you’re not allowed to take that shit for granted, filmmakers; you have to show your work!)
AND NOW, AN OPEN LETTER TO THE FICTIONAL CHARACTER OF LEX LUTHOR AS PORTRAYED BY JESSE EISENBERG IN BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE:
Dear Max Landis,
As stupid as it was to make both your super awesome mega bullets and your wheelchair bomb out of a prototype metal that only your company makes, and as stupid as it is to let the reporter who uncovers all of this live, ensuring your inevitable arrest, as much as I don’t understand how you just knew Batman and Superman’s secret identities, or why you blew up your loyal assistant, or how you got that jar of piss into the Senate Hearing… all of that pales in comparison to how little I understand what your endgame was with Doomsday.
‘If man can’t kill God, the devil will do it!’
That doesn’t actually mean anything, you spazzy fuck…
Superman’s Pal,
Victor Pryor
P.S. For future reference, you probably shouldn’t put your superhero YouTube videos on an encoded disc. Next time, just use Snapchat or something.
But, hell, who am I to judge? After all, it fucking works, doesn’t it?
I mean, when you get right down to it, Lex Luthor wins.
The creators behind BvS painted themselves into a corner when they decided to pit the two biggest heroes in the world against one another. They made pawns of our protagonists, and then doubled down when they decided that the only way to redeem Superman was for him to sacrifice himself.
So… yeah. The bad guy wins.
Also, Wonder Woman was in the movie.
WELL, ON OUR PLANET, THE ‘S’ STANDS FOR SNYDER… OR, AS SOME PEOPLE REFER TO IT, THE OPPOSITE OF HOPE
People tend to lay the failures of this film at the feet of director Zack Snyder, and…I mean, yeah. As well they should.
Look, I actually like Snyder. He’s a peerless pop visual stylist (the film is loaded with images that would make amazing pin-ups, which is more than you can say for any Marvel film), and he’s got a knack for clear, kinetic action that most other directors can only dream of.
(Hell, he made a kids’ movie about owls one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen; that’s not nothin’…)
But… there’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: I’m pretty sure Zack Snyder is kind of a dumb-dumb.
To wit: any intelligent fellow might very well be concerned about the fetishization of young girls, and the American tendency to endorse mindless violence in our entertainment while demonizing any displays of sexuality, particularly female displays of such.
But only a real dummy would turn those concerns into a movie like Sucker Punch.
The fact is, Snyder wants the credit for thoughtfully exploring the nature of heroism and its consequences, but steadfastly refuses to put the work in. If he had any actual desire to explore the issues he seems to want to raise, he would have let Superman speak at the Senate hearings. It would have been the perfect opportunity for Superman to give an inspiring speech, or at the very least, defend his actions and define his outlook (which, lest we forget, boils down to rescuing people all over the world).
Instead, they just blow everyone up.
(At least in the Ultimate Edition, they add a scene of him helping rescue people from the exploded Capitol building. In a situation where one of the biggest complaints was how little rescuing of citizens Superman did, this is a deeply bizarre omission; sure enough, in the original cut, he seems like a monster in this moment.)
But his ethos reveals itself in two lines, either of which could easily be interpreted as the film’s mission statement. One is Batman’s question to Alfred, “How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?”; while the other is Superman’s third act lament to Lois, “No one stays good in this world.”
SUPERMAN. SAID. THAT.
There’s a very basic disconnect between how Synder sees the world and how a superhero movie needs to function. He’s gone on in interviews about how Watchmen opened his eyes to the flaws of superheroes, and how he was interested in the idea that anybody trying to do good would be compromised by everyone else’s agendas and politics.
(Watchmen, by the way, remains a singular achievement: an entirely accurate adaptation that entirely misses the point of the whole story. That right there is a hell of a feat…)
Snyder has an appreciation for the aesthetics of fantasy, but an ideological aversion to its lack of psychological realism. He wants to humanize our gods, to ground them. ‘What is the point of a fantasy if no one bleeds?’ seems to be the implication. And, to be fair, in a modern society that has seen these stories time and time again, this is not necessarily a bad instinct. But his idea of “humanization” is… troubling.
It’s fear. It’s self-doubt. It’s anger. It’s alienation. Which basically means that his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the very idea of Superman.
He posits multiple times in multiple interviews that there’s no such thing as heroism without consequences. That trying to do good in the world is always going to be complicated by the agendas of others, and that there will always be negative consequences to any act of decency.
Which, you know, is literally the opposite of how Superman functions in the first place.
I’ve gone into this other places before, but the gist is that Superman is a power fantasy from a time when that didn’t mean scrawny nerds dreaming of junk punching their bullies into oblivion; it was a dream that a person with the power to lift up a generation of people in distress would use that power dutifully and responsibly. Regardless of any opposing forces, he would always do the right thing.
That’s the most basic trait about him, which is why it’s usually the first thing comic writers get rid of whenever they try to tell a story of how a Superman-type figure might work in a more ‘realistic’ (read: cynical) world.
Which is all well and good for your off-brand, ‘shit gets real’ Superman expy. But, when you apply that thought process to the ACTUAL Superman… yeah, you’re definitely going to get some pushback.
And when you make that particular characterization the baseline for your entire movie universe… that’s going to be a problem.
I mean, you can definitely do it.
Just don’t expect to make a billion fucking dollars off of it.
If anyone wants the timestamp on exactly when I decided to become a nihilist, it’s was the moment I read that a movie that made over $800,000,000 was still considered to be a failure…
ACTION (COMICS) IS FASTER THAN REACTION
Say what you will about Man Of Steel, it made bold choices in redefining Superman for cinema. But it’s easy to forget that the DC Cinematic Universe (or whatever they plan on calling it) was not in the cards back then. It was just intended as a standalone superhero movie. Their wildly optimistic slate wasn’t announced until a phone conference in October of 2014, almost a year and a half after the Comic Con reveal of Batman Vs. Superman.
And this, ultimately, is what has proven to be the Achilles heel of this franchise: the studio is trying to build an empire on a reactionary foundation.
As a singular vision, Man of Steel is a perfectly acceptable alternative interpretation of the Superman mythos (which, er… may not be the majority opinion). But when it is forced into the role of fulcrum for an entire cycle of films… well, turns out that’s a huge problem.
Which becomes very apparent when you watch either version of Batman V. Superman.
Because what happened next is just plain bizarre; instead of taking the criticism of the initial film into consideration and moving on from there, Snyder decided to turn his follow-up into a referendum on the previous movie. The backlash becomes text, and in the end, this proves to be a mind bogglingly poor choice.
Now you’re playing your film on defense, and have to spend half your time apologizing for/defending your previous choices while still doing what you have to do to set up the next five or six movies you need to launch in order to service your IP.
And as a result, you have to build an entire universe around your vision of a world where the greatest hero, the one that inspires all the rest (which tends to be Superman’s default setting), is feared and demonized. And to this you add a tortured, rage-filled version of a fan favorite character who literally wants to kill the main character.
I’m just sayin’: This all feels very unwise to me.
In the end, all Warner Bros wants is a franchise that will make billions and billions of dollars and generate a cavalcade of spin-off properties. Which is a pretty difficult thing to do when the man you’ve placed at the head of the table is questioning your protagonist’s ethics, morality, and effectiveness.
To be fair, though: Wonder Woman.
SPECIAL FEATURES
There are over two hours of special features on this thing, and if nothing else, they make me feel kind of guilty about talking shit about Zack Snyder. The amount of detail and care these things show behind the scenes indicate that this wasn’t some cash gig for Zack Snyder; he is genuinely interesting in building this world, and getting it right.
Which, in some ways, kind of makes things worse…
UNITING THE WORLD’S FINEST — Promotion for the future Justice League movie, where Ezra Miller uses a lot of really big words.
GODS AND MEN: A MEETING OF GIANTS — A puff piece about the legendary first big screen meeting between Batman and Superman.
THE WARRIOR, THE MYTH, THE WONDER — A brief history of Wonder Woman, as told by assorted comic book nerds and feminist authors. Kind of interesting, if you’ve never heard of Camille Paglia.
ACCELERATING DEISGN: THE NEW BATMOBILE — A look at the design and construction of the film’s (fully functional) Batmobile, which somehow lasts about four times as long as the Batmobile is actually onscreen. Hosted by X-Games host Sal Masekela, who lives every ten year old boy’s dream and drives the friggin’ Batmobile.
SUPERMAN: COMPLEXITY AND TRUTH — In which we discover that the entirety of Superman’s armor is embroidered with a thematically appropriate Joseph Campbell quote written in Kryptonian script. Which… Jesus, priorities, Synder. Also, B-roll footage of Henry Cavill just standing around between takes makes him seem so much more charming and endearing a Clark Kent than anything we see in the film.
BATMAN: AUSTERITY AND RAGE — A look at how they conceptualized this particular version of the Dark Knight; mostly this means getting Ben Affleck disquietingly ripped…
WONDER WOMAN: GRACE AND POWER — Hey, guys, did you know Wonder Woman was in this movie?
BATCAVE: LEGACY OF THE LAIR — More than anything, these behind the scenes features are worthy for highlighting the amazing work of production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, who not only made sure Affleck and Clark Kent were dressed sharp as fuck, but also designed a Batcave that ranks among the very best versions in any media. The amount of detail that we never even pay attention to is staggering and brilliant.
THE MIGHT AND THE POWER OF A PUNCH — A comprehensive scientific breakdown of the actual Batman/Superman fight, involving what I can only assume are arbitrary calculations of kinetic force. It’s… well, you know. Like, whatever, dude.
THE EMPIRE OF LUTHOR — Zack Synder and an endearingly overwhelmed Jessie Eisenberg detail the process they went through in redefining Lex Luthor in a way that will resonate for weeks, if not months, to come. Two things about this: one, there are outtakes from Luthor’s gala speech which do a hell of a job actually outlining his motivations, which are inexplicably chopped up and backgrounded in the actual film, which really wound up damaging Eisenberg’s performance. Two, in outtakes from the scene where Lex gets his head shaved, there’s just a dude in his underwear, standing in the background.
SAVE THE BATS — Bats are dying like crazy because of fungus, so the family of crew members got together with the stars who didn’t have anything better to do, to build and paint bat houses out of repurposed set materials. And no, Ben Affleck does not show, but provides a rousing appeal for help, which, judging from his line delivery, was filmed with a gun aimed at his temple just off camera.
If you’re concerned for the future of the rapidly decreasing population of the evening bat and want to help, please go to savebats.org.
If you’d like to save Superman, I’m sure there’s a petition for that or something…
KISS! KISS! KISS!
