A Study in Super Heroes: Part One -- Batman vs Superman (review)

Yeah, so, fine, I'm a bit late with this, but I've been busy and only just now got around to seeing it. That's kind of okay, though, because it moved to the cheap theater last week, and I got to go see it for $3.50, about all it's worth. However, it was actually worth that, unlike the last Superman movie or, say, the Green Lantern movie (I saw Green Lantern for free and still felt ripped off).

I'm not going to go through the movie the way I usually do with these things. Let's just say the story was... flimsy. Like a balsa wood airplane, the kind you get at the supermarket for... I was going to say for $0.99, but I bet those planes cost more than that, now. They're great for the first half a dozen or so throws, then things start falling off, then they start refusing to go back into their assigned places, right before they start splintering. Basically, you get one good afternoon of play with one before it goes into the trash. This movie is like that, good for one afternoon of play before the plot falls apart and you begin to wonder what actually happened.

Of course, what actually happened was a contrived scenario to get Batman and Superman to fight. Um... yeah... That's all I'm going to say about that.

Let's do this:

The Good:
Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne. In fact, you could say that was the awesome. Definitely the best part of the movie. Affleck should have always been Batman. Or, I should say, Bruce. He's great as Batman, too, but, face it, that's the easy part. The part every previous star of the Batman movies since Burton's Batman came out has failed at has been portraying a convincing Bruce Wayne. [Okay, well, Clooney was a good Wayne, but the Batman fail in that one was so epic (no fault of Clooney's (seriously? nipples on the suit?)) that it has discolored everything about it.]

The Bad:
The opening sequence giving Batman's origin. Again.
The dream sequence Batman has of the future where Superman has taken over the world. It was long and added nothing to the movie. I get that they were trying to... I don't know... incorporate more of Miller's Dark Knight, but that sequence was gratuitous and pointless.
Wayne as an alcoholic. No, it's not stated, but it's certainly implicit. And dumb.

The Good:
Surprisingly, Henry Cavill as Superman. I don't think much of Cavill just on a general basis. I thought he was adequate in Man of Steel and horrible in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., although, to be fair, it was a pretty awful movie, so it may not have been his fault. However, he pulled off a fairly convincing portrayal of a brooding Superman, unsure of himself and his place in the world.

The Bad:
Basically everything to do with Lois Lane.
Look, I like Amy Adams. I think she's a great actress. But Lois is supposed to be a strong, forceful personality, and Adams doesn't bring that to the table. She's just too tentative. Plus, in this, she's often Lois ex machina, showing up at opportune moments to deliver vital information. Or whatever.

The Good:
Jesse Eisenberg as the Joker. Oh, wait, he wasn't the Joker? Well, he gave a great performance as whoever it was he was supposed to be.

The Bad:
Lex Luthor. Or Alexander Luthor, Jr. The character played by Eisenberg. The character is completely inexplicable. He's a perfect example of how DC or Warner Brothers or whoever has written themselves into a hole they can't get out of because they continue to do everything from a pantsing standpoint. They killed Lex and they killed the Joker, so they just make up a new character with the same name as the villain they want to use and tack a Jr. onto it. Lame.

The Good:
Gal Godot as Wonder Woman. I don't really understand all the fanboy rage over Godot in this role. She looked good as Wonder Woman and pulled off the character more than adequately.

The Bad:
Wonder Woman. Why is she even in this film? It would have been just as plausible and, possibly, more believable, if she'd just shown up for the fight sequence. That's really the only believable moment for her being in the movie, anyway. They just need her in the movie because she's part of the Holy Trinity of super heroes and, if Warner Brothers wants to pull off a Justice League movie, they have to center it around all three of those heroes: Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.

The Bad:
Perry White. There are no words for how poorly they have translated White into this movie, and Fishburne does nothing to help the character out.
Jeremy Irons as Alfred.
Doomsday. Everything about Doomsday. There's nothing about the character or his origin in the movie that rises above stupid. Mostly, it's moronic.

So...
It's not a horrible movie. That's really the best thing that can be said about it. And I'd rather watch it again than to ever think about seeing, say, The Revenant again. Or Green Lantern. It's probably even worth it to see it on the big screen. But it's not a good movie. It's not even brain candy. At best, it's a piece of that hard candy your grandmother kept in a dish on the end table under the lamp, but it's all melted together, and you can't get any of it out without getting a knife or something and, then, once you have the broken piece you finally pry out of the reef-like structure, you can't tell what it's supposed to taste like, because you have parts of three or four different pieces of candy all stuck together. You try to suck on it but you end spitting it out into the metal trashcan next to the table where it sticks to the bottom and you try in vain to pretend that it wasn't you who spit it in there. [Not based on any actual event that ever happened to me.]

Bait and Switch

Back in the summer of 1989, I was walking out of the most ginormous superhero movie ever made. Actually, it was the most ginormous movie release ever, at the time, bringing in $40 million its opening weekend. All of my friends were ecstatic and cheering, and my cousin wouldn't shut up about how the Joker had pulled that three feet long pistol out of his pants and shot down the Batwing, a moment I'd thought was especially stupid, and I wasn't really happy.

Yeah, I know. I hear all of you out there being oh so shocked.

But, see, the thing I kept thinking, the thing I still think today, was, "Maybe, if Burton had just been honest and called the movie The Joker, I would have liked it." [And I could go into a whole thing of all of the things wrong with having Burton make that movie to begin with and how the Joker was the only character he found interesting and how he didn't (and doesn't) like the movie nor, even, the idea of making it--he just wanted to be a part of what he expected to be a vast pop culture phenomenon. But all of that is for some other time.]

And that's how I feel about Man of Steel. If Nolan wanted to make a movie about General Zod, he should have just called it General Zod. As it is, I'm left with feelings of dissatisfaction because Superman was only included as what amounts to an afterthought. He's the guy that's going to defeat Zod, and there's only just enough information in the movie to let us know who he is.

Which brings me to what I think is the biggest issue with Man of Steel, which includes Nolan's abuse of the title (and let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this was not Nolan's movie, even if Snyder directed it. The story and style was Nolan's, which makes it his). Nolan exploits our outside knowledge of who and what Superman is to skimp on the origin, which he then changes. It's sloppy storytelling. Worse than sloppy. And I don't like feeling exploited. The truth is, if I didn't already know Superman's background, I would have had a difficult time with the movie.

For instance, my sister-in-law is a Marvel girl, so she doesn't really know about Superman, not the details, anyway. Her entire exposure to Superman was the godawful Superman Returns, so there were parts of Man of Steel that she didn't get. Like why we should care about Perry White. Within the context of the movie, the fact that we spend so much time watching Perry and friends run away from falling buildings makes no sense. We have no reason to care about that character UNLESS we already know about who he is from the comics (or previous movies or whatever). And she didn't feel any real connection to Clark because the whole reason we care about Clark is we know the Kents took him in and raised him as their own. They accepted him. But what we get from the movie is Jonathan Kent constantly telling Clark what an outsider he is. And don't get me started on the ridiculousness of Jonathan sacrificing himself to the tornado to "protect" Clark's secret. All of this includes the lack of context for calling the movie Man of Steel, which does not come from the movie. Unless you know that Superman is called the man of steel, there's no reason to understand the title, so, again, outside knowledge. Also, the name the "Man of Steel" was given to Superman when humans thought Superman was actually human. They never think that in the movie, so that particular moniker becomes inappropriate, so, in effect, it's a stupid title for the movie and something only chosen to distinguish it from the other Superman movies. He should have just gone with Superman or, even better, General Zod.

So, with all of that in mind, no, I did not like the middle of the movie. I thought the origin part of the origin story of Superman was very poorly handled. We have no idea of who this new guy is, no idea of the strength of his character, no idea of why we should trust him. Other than, well, he says we should, and that after trashing Metropolis (at least, I suppose it's Metropolis--the movie wasn't explicit with that). What we do know is that, when he was a kid, he saved a busload of kids and got in trouble for it. Later, after having a fight with his dad, he allowed his dad to be killed by a tornado.

Also, the idea of Clark having spent 15 years as a drifter while looking for his origins is... well, it's dumb. Why didn't he ever stick that key into the spaceship in the barn? The technology should have been exactly the same. Or is it that the spaceship was "broken"? I'm just not buying that explanation. And why would he even expect to find anything else on Earth from wherever it was he was from? There's no good logic for any of that. It's just a contrived way to bring Lois into contact with Clark and not a very good one at that. And I have nothing to say about the "symbolism" of having Clark be 33 when Zod comes to Earth. That, also, was just dumb. As was Clark learning to fly, basically, because daddy left him a super suit. For which, by the way, there is no good reason for it to have been on a spaceship buried under arctic ice for 20,000 years.

The beginning of the movie, though, I liked. Mostly. It was good to have a back story for Zod beyond "space criminal." The swimming scene and the codex being a skull, though, was, again, dumb. As was depositing the codex within the body of baby Kal-El. The rest was pretty cool, even if it was rather like watching Star Wars what with the big battleships while Jor-El flew around on some kind of giant insect. Yes, I'm overlooking the part where, basically, the entire population of Krypton chooses to stay on Krypton and die rather than evacuate despite having the technology to do so. [I'm also overlooking the fact that, evidently, every single Kryptonian colony failed despite having huge world engine terraforming machines.]

So... we open the move with Zod, and we end the movie with Zod. It was a movie about Zod. And the end of the movie just went on and on and the destruction was beyond my ability to accept. See, here's the thing, we, as viewers, accept that Superman is a good guy, because, well, we know he's a good guy. We have 75 years of prior knowledge that tells us he's a good guy. But the people of Earth in the movie have no such prior knowledge. They don't know who Superman is any more than they know who Zod is. What they do know is that two aliens showed up and destroyed a major city and tried to destroy the world. But, yet, they just accept that Superman is a "good guy," and Nolan gets away with it because he bases that on our knowledge of the character, not what's revealed of the character in the movie (who, remember, allowed his human father to die because of an argument).

But how was Zod? So much of the focus is on him, so how was he? Michael Shannon was, actually, very excellent as Zod. If you've seen him in Boardwalk Empire, it's apparent why he was chose, and it was a good call. He brings just the right amount of zeal to the role to make it believable.

Russel Crowe, whom I generally dislike, was pretty good in his role as Jor-El. Well, except for the hide-and-seek bit in the spaceship, but that was hardly his fault. Seriously? The virtual Jor-El is going to play hide-and-seek with his son upon being uploaded? Another bit of contrivance to get Clark out of the way so that Lois could injured. [And, um, just why didn't Clark hear her coming down  the tunnel? It's not like she was being quiet. Or that that should have mattered at all.]

Henry Cavill was adequate as Superman, although I think he really got the part due to his resemblance to Tom Welling from Smallville. They have the same "farm-boyish" grin. I liked Costner as Jonathan, even if I didn't like the part, much, as it was written. I don't have, however, have strong positive feelings for Diane Lane as Martha. I also thought Amy Adams was good in her role. The rest were non-spectacular.

The final result is that I have a lot of mixed feelings about this newest Superman, which is a far cry better than how I felt about the last Superman. This new one is just too much Nolan for me, who seems to be more concerned on an ongoing basis with what seems cool rather than what makes a good story. Seriously, I didn't need more of the Inception-type building collapses. I am interested to see where Nolan is going to take the story, unless this just ends up being a setup for the JLA movie that DC and Warner Brothers are still trying to get off the ground, at which point, I will decide that DC needs to scrap all the previous movie history it's developed and start over, just like they keep doing with their comic book world. Maybe, someday, they'll get it right.