The Stone, The Spear, and The Superman, Part 3: Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
No intro. No delay. We intended to do a roundtable. We unleashed a monstrosity.
Ritesh: So, folks. Here we are. The second part and piece of Zack Snyder’s DC Trilogy. It’s the big versus epic. The point of controversy that only exacerbated the prior controversy of Man Of Steel. Let’s kick things off first laying out our initial experiences with the film as it existed and how we experienced it first in 2016, just to set things up. David?
David: I distinctly remember I was driving back home from college - this would’ve been I believe my junior year - to visit my family with the intent of seeing the movie while I was there, stopping at a McDonalds, opening up my cell phone, and seeing the horrified, scandalized review headlines. What a gut punch, even having gone in with doubts I had still been reasonably hyped for the movie that was going to have Superman and Batman in it for the first time ever. Come the theatrical experience I was more numb than anything else, enjoying a few scant moments but mostly beaten into submission by Zimmer and Junkie XL’s booming soundtrack and left adrift by the meandering, faux-intellectual posturing of the version of the movie I was presented. By the time I was explaining Robin’s death (which shocked my mom when I mentioned it later, who didn’t realize that’s what that suit was supposed to be, and given she grew up with Batman ‘66 I’ll say that’s a failure on the movie’s part) and Batman torturing Superman at length to someone else I had no doubts that this was a monstrous misfire, and my grudging respect for the flailing gestures toward ambition it demonstrated couldn’t make up for the sheer tone-deafness with the material and seeming raw incompetence.
Sean: As for me… I never actually saw the film in theaters. My first time watching the movie, if I’m remembering correctly, was when it came to home media. That is to say the theatrical cut of the film, not the three hour version we watched for this article. There were two major factors going into me not actually seeing it in theaters. The first being I was, at the time, somewhat influenced by the tastes of one Cinema Roberto. He was always a basic bitch with regards to my critical tastes and there was a slight degree of mistrust with him (most notably with his take on Metroid: Other M, not to mention failing abysmally to sell “The Amazing Spider-Man 2 destroyed my faith in humanity.” And, of course, his somewhat sympathetic take on eugenics), but it’s useful to have a basic bitch as part of your critical consumption to act as contrast to the actually interesting people.
David: The Bob who Movied! Notably quasi-fashier on main than Zack these days in spite of the latter’s rep, but boy was I too in the tank for the guy once upon a time.
Sean: Same! And Bobby boy had the exact opinion of the film you’d expect of the man. An utter disdain for every single decision the film made. Every discontinuity with how the comics functioned. Every choice when it came to Superman, Batman, Lex Luthor. Just the most fanboy bullshit screed you’d expect such that he made a multi-hour video essay explaining every single reason why Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a terrible, no good, very bad movie that besmirched the good name of DC Comics (a subsidiary of Warner Bros.).
David: I watched it! I remember largely agreeing at the time - hey, I was in my early 20s - and found myself largely agreeing but still finding certain criticisms…off. I thought it was bad, but it joined a pattern where the consensus of why it was bad never quite sounded right to me. I assumed I was just looking for the proper silver bullet rationale so I could put it to bed, and found a few over the years that seemed plausible, but I’d keep coming back to the question looking for it all over again. OH that it were so simple.
Sean: The second reason I ended up not seeing it in theaters was simply that, at the time it came out, I was attending college at the University of Connecticut, Storrs Campus. Said campus is, like a vast majority of Connecticut, in the middle of the woods. The closest movie theater to me was about 30 minutes away via car. I did not have a car at the time.
As such, it wasn’t until I came home for the summer that I was able to actually watch the hot mess of a theatrical cut with my brother for our annual hatewatch. (Other “favorites” include: The Last Airbender, Suicide Squad, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, to which I bailed after 15 minutes to watch on my own in chunks for… reasons.)
It wasn’t until the lead in for Zack Snyder’s Justice League that I watched the Ultimate Edition. But I think I should toss the ball back to you two before sharing my thoughts.
Ritesh: Meanwhile I have never in my life spent any time on a single Cinema Roberto video. I just didn’t even know he existed until a while back. I mostly know him from his horrible twitter takes, and then the folks who did view him filled me in and gave me the lowdown. So I’m afraid he was never a part of my intake.
And as for me? I distinctly remember being excited for this film. That first Comic-Con trailer was like a nigh religious experience for a teenage me. I was very excited by the prospect at the time of the first live-action cinematic meeting between two of my favorite characters. And all the Chris Terrio hype got to me, I think. I had hope, given he’d taken over from Goyer and he was coming off Argo, which I dug.
Sean: I think I have a link to that trailer.
Ritesh: It rules! But yeah, I was into it. But then I remember when the reviews were kicking in pre-release, and it was a real ‘oh dear god’ moment. And in what I can only describe in Morrisonian fashion as a true shamanic moment from the universe, that very day I saw the poor early reviews? Folks, I found a dead bat in my home. It seemed to have come in through an open window and hit the spinning fan and died. We buried it that day. I could only take such a sign as the universe speaking truth to me. The bat was dead. And we buried him. And so was this damn movie.
And then I went into the theater and watched it with my dad. Within the first opening minutes alone, when Thomas Wayne raises his fist, with that Jeffrey Dean-Morgan snarl on his face, to punch Joe Chill, I hated it. I hated this movie. I hated this film and what it implied. They miss the entire point of Batman and Thomas Wayne, I thought. Thomas is not the punchy action man, he’s the calm, compassionate guy trying to talk down this dude. A very gentle and kind man! That informs Batman! And look how badly they missed the point! They just got it wrong! I hate it, I thought! And right next to me was my dad, who’d fallen asleep 5 minutes into the film, not a joke. He was out the whole show. And as the movie progressed, my distaste for it only grew and grew. It remains the singular worst theatrical experience of my life. I hated it. I could not stand this movie, and what I felt it represented. I was out of this whole stupid DCEU business, or so I told myself until I paid up like a chump to watch Suicide Squad and then proceeded to regret my life-choices.
Sean: Wait, you actually paid money to watch Suicide Squad?
Ritesh: Tragically, yes. And I have spent every day regretting it since. I didn’t even walk out. I sat there all the way, thinking ‘Well, I DID spend money on this ticket. So I gotta get my worth here’. And folks, was it worth it? Nay, nay it was not. There was no worth to be found there.
Sean: What’s so hard about walking out of a theater? Sometimes, you just need to accept the L.
Ritesh: It is my achilles heel, Sean. But in any case, BvS, I was not about it. I instead was all about Civil War as being the far superior ‘versus’ movie of 2016, as echoed by most people around me then. I adored Black Panther in it, and the whole enterprise seemed to appeal to me at that point in time. BvS was broken dreams and hollow promises and disappointment, whereas Civil War back then felt like an adequate meal that did what it said on the tin.
David: Civil War! A fun movie I have no particular need to see again, and the commercial fulfillment of BvS’s promise. We got actual fights, we got Evans and Downey getting to do big Acting at each other, and hey, that ain’t nothing when it comes to entertainment.
Sean: And it was the follow up to what was, at the time, considered to be one of the best Superhero movies ever made, Captain America: Winter Soldier. A spy thriller about the government being infected with fascists directed by the directors of the best episodes of Community.
Ritesh: What a time. It’s all fascinating to look back upon. Now then, shall we get into how we feel and felt about this damn Batman V Superman movie post-rewatch here?
Sean: Having watched the Ultimate Edition of the film (which, if we’re being honest, is the right way to watch the film), it’s… fine. It’s a perfectly fine movie with a ton of interesting elements that, with another draft or two, could have been a great movie. What’s interesting in contrasting it now with how we viewed it back then is that the strengths and weaknesses of the film aren’t the same. Back then, the issues were stuff like Batman being uber-violent or people questioning Superman as a political/God object while the parts people liked were the big fight with Doomsday at the end where Batman and Superman are buddies. Now, those first two parts are the strongest elements of the film, while the Doomsday fight is a weak retread of the end of Man of Steel, but with a lot more cowardice.
Ritesh: So the funny thing is, I hated the film for years. Until amidst all the Snyder Cut anticipation, I decided, fuck it, I’m gonna watch the prior two movies in order to be ‘ready’ for whatever hot mess lay in that Snyder Cut, because it had just been years. I had only faded remnants, no real memories of those films. And I’d never seen the Ultimate Edition before. And so I did that watch, and I came out really appreciating both films. BvS in particular I LOVED. And this revisiting really reminded me why. I don’t think I loved it as much as that initial viewing of the Ultimate Edition, but it still really hits for me.
It is the kind of bizarre and audacious hot mess of an enterprise and the kind of big swing I am still shocked exists. I do not know how the WB execs okayed this of all things as their competitor for the MCU and its money-making machine. It’s madness to me. But yeah, I truly love it, I think. It’s one of my favorite things. Not because it is lacking in flaws or problems, no, it’s got plenty, but underneath all that, it just really sings for me. There’s just a lot there, which we’ll dig into as we go on.
David: Trepidatiously booting up the Ultimate Edition for this - hearing how transformative those additional 30 minutes were, but let’s get fuckin’ real - I tweeted to my eventual humiliation that even in the first 20 minutes I could see how radically it was recontextualizing things, but that I probably still wouldn’t love it.
To be fair, I still don’t love it. But my corruption is now complete: after all these years, I like Batman V Superman. It was never going to be an MCU-killer and it was lunacy to shape and market it as such. But years away from its horrifying ‘this is what Superman and Batman are in movies now’ status and presented with its structure intact as an isolated object, this is a sharp, largely solid, thematically taut weirdo symbolic drama of The American Dream in Superman vs. The American (K)Nightmare in Batman, and easily one of DC’s best efforts of the last decade. I can, at last, say without caveat that Batman only has good movies, and hey, Superman has one now too.
Sean: Wait, I don’t think I’ve ever heard your take on the Donner films (which I’ve never seen).
David: ‘78 I vaguely recall as a fun time but less a ‘movie’ than an extended sizzle reel for the basic concept of Superman, and II I absolutely hate. III I’ve never seen but might be fun! IV I also have not seen but feel pretty confident sucks. Returns has a couple of my favorite rescue scenes in any superhero movie but is otherwise a stone-cold snooze. MoS we’ve just covered. But BvS with all of his actual Clark Kent screentime reinserted is at last the successful version of the ‘Superman just doesn’t know if being Superman is really all that good an idea’ story DC has been trying to put over for decades, even if Cavill understandably, but I think mistakenly, underplays it at a few key moments.
Ritesh: The Cavill performance is understated but really strong for me. There’s an unshakeable air of ‘definitive Superman’ to his very visual, as there always has been. And moving from Amir Mokri to Larry Fong as the cinematographer on this film, uniting Snyder with his Watchmen collaborator, the film looks spectacular. It looks like a proper epic DC superhero venture in a way that the concrete-creased Russo Marvel never quite does for me, I think.
David: Cavill’s definitely great in here, especially as Clark; it’s just that while I get why he keeps restrained during the capitol bombing and balcony conversation with Lois as an acting choice, it’s one that went on to bite him in the ass HARD and solidify the reptuation of his Superman as a dud. And Larry Fong’s aces here (even as the aspect ratio shift between certain scenes is VERY noticeable, even to a philistine like me); personally I think I preferred Mokri’s hyper-charged presentation as more distinct, but Fong gives everything here this really regal, stately, classic feel that deeply suits the material here as what’s for most of the movie a pretty straight politically-flavored drama about two guys learning to hate each other to avoid questioning themselves.
Ritesh: This is my favorite type of movie. It’s my favorite kind of story. It’s why I love RRR or Kamen Rider or a great deal of other things. This film is…A Heated Drama Between Men. It is a film about the grandiose expression of that ‘With great power, there must also come great consequences’ idea of Snyder’s vision that we talked about. It plays out on numerous levels here. It’s a film about two people who would likely get on nicely being put in circumstances where they are forced to go up against one another. And there’s a thrill to that.
Sean: In many regards, the film is at its strongest when it’s playing with these toys as figures of grandeur and monstrosity. The montage where the talking heads (Hi Neil) are debating the merits of Superman as a thing within the world might be my favorite scene in an American Superhero movie. Senator Finch’s response to “Must there be a Superman?” with a simple, matter of fact “There is.” is such… chef’s kiss
I honestly would’ve loved an entire film of just Senator Finch being a respectable person dealing with a mad universe that, under the hands of a lesser filmmaker, would’ve framed her unsympathetically. And yet, Snyder (alongside writers David S Goyer and Chris Terrio) instead make her the secret co-lead of the first two acts of the film. She gets the scenes you would expect Superman or Batman to get. She gets to challenge Lex Luthor’s claims about Superman without actually making the case for the Man of Steel. And Holly Hunter is phenomenal in the part, showing the humanity often ignored in worlds of Gods and Monsters, save for those that raise them. I wish there was a scene where she chin wags with Bruce Wayne.
David: Senator Finch’s role alongside Lois’s are huge here because of what you two have both just been talking about: this is an anti-Dudes Rock piece of cinema. This is a movie about guys being dudes nearly killing us all because they would rather, as they say, go to war with god than get therapy. In that regard, it truly is an incredibly direct descendant of Excalibur, as all those big ideals go absolutely to shit once everybody starts rolling with the pigs, and it’s up to Lois and June and Diana and Martha to get these squabbling punks back on track.
Ritesh: I’m glad you brought up the idea of humanity and Gods and Monsters here, Sean. We previously talked about how those Watchmen-inspired scenes of Perry, Jenny, and Lombard in the rubble of a broken Metropolis have weight. They have tension. They work. They show the consequences of what happens when gods do battle. It’s real, and it hits.
And Snyder in opening this film once again returns us to that. Instead, it’s not Perry, Jenny, or Lombard. It is Bruce Wayne. It is him having that Watchmen-esque moment. It is him being that powerless mortal amidst the rubble. And it feels so raw and visceral. That entire sequence, opening on the great white card of MANKIND IS INTRODUCED TO THE SUPERMAN as though to appease Jonathan Hickman’s soul? It’s genuinely powerful. You can’t look away. And once you watch it, the entire film and Bruce’s character and journey make sense.
All he wanted was to save people. It’s what he kept desperately trying to do. But it proved futile. Pointless. For what can one man do when faced with such devastation, death, and horrific loss? He feels small, he feels powerless, he feels once again like that little boy in Crime Alley, and he sees those boys in every little child he encounters amidst the rubble. It’s no longer just one boy in an alley. It’s legions of children in an entire city. When the poor girl he saves and assures points to a burning building when he asks her where her mother is? It is genuinely heartbreaking.
If Man Of Steel is a film that ends on a disaster movie utilizing 9/11 imagery and iconography for its devastation, this movie posits The Superman Event as basically Batman’s personal 9/11. He’s no longer the same. And he doesn’t see Superman as a person, or even a god. He sees Superman as an Other, an inhumane Other. And his purpose of ‘save/rescue people’ becomes secondary, because what’s even the point? The goal should be to stop this shit before it even happens because once it does it’s unstoppable. Which means go on the offense, on the attack, punish and take down The Bad Guy. That’s priority one, even over saving people. His hate overwhelms him.
Sean: Perhaps tellingly is Batman’s line that “if we believe there's even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty.” is a Dick Cheney quote.
David: The 9/11 comparison is really driven home by a note from the World Engine playing over his (Lancelot as hell) dream of visiting his parent’s graves, and hell, the reverse of that with I GUARANTEE the idea that from Bruce’s POV the ‘meteor shower’ made up his own satellite falling across the sky looked like pearls, and Superman/Zod the bullet. All this Batman shit was for nothing and didn’t save one life in Metropolis, saving lives doesn’t count as “productive” anymore, he’s this hopeless sloppy bastard washing down painkillers with wine after waking up next to a faceless woman and resenting any time he has to spend as Bruce instead of Batman. And when it comes to Superman, he’s desperate to frame this to himself as a grand calling and moral necessity when it’s clear his vindictiveness has less to do with even seeing Superman as evil so much as emasculating. It’s why he gets the ridiculous macho training scene, he needs to prove to himself Batman can do fucking anything because if he can’t then his life meant nothing.
Sean: This leads to an issue I have with the film, mainly… there isn’t really that good of a case for Batman. The film spends a good portion of its run time exploring every single aspect of why Batman is a bad idea from his frequent targeting of the poor to the brutal, cruel tactics he’s begun to use (HE BRANDS PEOPLE! AND HE DOESN’T CARE THAT THE CONSEQUENCE FOR BRANDING IS THAT PEOPLE ARE BEING MURDERED!) to basically just being a massive bastard who refuses to listen to anyone while putting the blame of his failings onto everyone else.
This is in marked contrast to the film’s approach to Superman criticism, which is given weight and sympathy while also providing the case for Superman. Mainly by highlighting that he has tried to do the right thing, to help where he can. It demonstrates the limitations of a man working outside the system, without checks and balances. Whereas Batman’s most sympathetic trait is… the police like him. Which… oh boy.
David: The police liking him is a bad fucking thing though in the text, Clark sees the grody as hell political cartoon to make clear why the cops aren’t helping him look into a dude getting shanked in prison.
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Sean: Yes, but the thing is… that’s the only case made for Batman. The film opts to let the audience go “Batman should be a hero” because there are Batman movies by the dozens. What case is there for this take on Batman being pulled out of the path he’s walking down? For him to say the line “Men are still good” without the audience laughing in his face?
David: The key to me here is that unlike the comics, where the Wayne family made its fortune a bit nebulously, here it’s from “railroads, real estate, and oil”. He’s the Great American Man out to kill the Other to avoid facing himself, and as such he’s a full-fledged villain for most of the movie. As for his redeemability…well, Snyder’s DCU isn’t overly concerned with the ethics of killing beyond ‘if you gotta, fine, premeditated is sketchy though,’ which was never gonna fly post-Dark Knight with general audiences. There’s a lot of this movie that weighs on the side of easy forgiveness in spite of the bodies stacked up so long as you really for real mean it, and you can ride with that takeaway or you can’t.
Ritesh: I think the goodness of men is largely what the movie is wrestling with. It is why while it is Batman v Superman, the actual fundamental key mirror to Batman is not Superman. It is Lex Luthor. It is the other very-mortal and emasculated capitalist and scientific genius who operates in illicit ways and responds to The Superman Event in the ways he does. It doesn’t just want to say ‘People can be good’. It wants to first deeply acknowledge how fucking bad and horrible people can be and have been, and then go ‘Well what then? Can we still learn? Can we be better?’ Heroism isn’t heroism to Snyder in abstract, if it’s untested and unexposed to the horrors of humanity. It can only truly be heroic to him if it is able to confront that.
Sean: It grapples with the idea, sure. But I think my problem is that it doesn’t do it enough. It’s there, like all the elements of the film are there. But it’s not there enough. I think this is going back to what I said earlier about wanting a scene where Bruce and Senator Finch meet up. He’s the only principal character who never has a scene with her, and it feels lacking. He’s challenged by the masculine of Alfred, Clark, and Lex, but not the feminine. The closest is Gal Gadot playing a largely silent femme fatale who turns out to be Wonder Woman, but Gal is… eh.
Bringing up Lex, I fucking love Jessie Eisenberg’s take on the character. He’s very much like Excalibur’s Mordred in that he’s a petulant child giggling through cruelty and evil. He is having a blast forcing a US Senator to eat a Jolly Rancher. The monologue about the painting! THE BLACK SABBATH BLOOD SACRIFICE THAT IS THE SOLE THING JUSTIFYING DOOMSDAY! Leaving a jar of piss marked “Granny’s Peach Tea” to show that he’s going to kill you is just an amazing power move unseen outside of Italian Giallo films.
David: I love this Lex for the first two acts or so; even his weirdness feels like another layer of social power, everybody’s gotta listen to his bullshit. Once he’s unleashed though they want so bad for him to be the kind of Nicol Williamson Merlin figure who’s a tonal wild card (I see what you mean but I think Doomsday’s at least as much the Mordred here, a bonding of the villain’s blood with the enemy in order to bring about his doom), but for me at least it’s absurdly tryhard and doesn’t play at all. I think part of the issue is a lot of Lex Luthor’s classic motivations and thematic concerns are offloaded onto Batman in the process of making them parallels (though they do keep him as a conniving bastard and mad scientist), so while everyone around him is a clear translation of the source material, he ends up this whole different figure with a similar but markedly different set of philosophical issues with Superman from almost anything classically ‘Lex Luthor’ in order to fit the themes in play here.
Ritesh: Yeah. To me Doomsday is the Mordred and Lex is…the Morgana La Fey. The absolutely absurd, petty supervillain. And on this note, I want to note something. Zack Snyder does not have Nerd Energy. He has Jock Energy, even as he is a massive nerd, which breaks the minds of folks like Cinema Roberto, who hate him. And this is a film that effectively is like The Virgin Lex Luthor vs The Chad Superman and Batman. It’s about these beefy hunks who can lift up any weight who are then pit against one another by one neurotic nerd asshole who acts like Max Landis.
David: I think the idea that Snyder made BvS as a gotcha to people who complained about MoS is nonsense. But he sure did make the main villain a guy whose brain is broken by it being impossible for Superman to be perfect so therefore he must die, plus when Superman punches Doomsday into space he gets nuked so even then there’s STILL technically collateral damage.
Sean: To make my case, while I concede that there is a lot of Morgana to Lex, I’d argue that Doomsday is more the Dragon than anything else: “a beast of such power that if you were to see it whole, in a single glance, it would burn you to cinders.” Lex, by contrast, is an utter madman who takes a perverse glee in his actions while Excalibur’s Morgana has a degree to which she’s civil. In this regard, perhaps it’s more accurate to claim he’s what would happen if Mordred had to take his mother’s role in the narrative. And, all things considered, he does a spectacular job at it.
Moving outside of Arthuria, Lex is one of countless tech billionaires who holds themselves as “not like the other nerds.” He’s Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel rolled into one. Mad men who hold the world hostage because they lack something deep within. Husks of men who think that they can live forever if they stitch enough teenagers to their flesh or are confused by the idea that their guards might shoot them when money becomes useless and the end times have come.
From the outside, it looks like madness. But the dominant culture often looks the other way at such men because they’re rich, so they must be doing something right.
David: Yeah the presentation grates but CONCEPTUALLY this is a AAA+ modernization of Lex Luthor, and getting Eisenberg to play him would be so obvious as to be grating by itself if not for that they were actually initially scouting him to play the Jimmy Olsen cameo.
Sean: Whereas I thought Smallville’s Grant Gabriel did a decent job with such a thankless role.
Ritesh: I’d also like to note something I think is vital at this juncture, as we discuss what is one of the most over-the-top and weird figures in the work. Much has been said about these films as being Realistic. A good deal from even the creatives themselves. But listen, you sit down and you watch Snyder’s DC trilogy? I would not say it is realistic. It is revealed rather neatly in the opening of the film here. That scene wherein Kid Bruce Wayne falls down into the pit, and then rises out of it with Bats surrounding him? That is not Realistic, baby. None of that opening is ‘realism.’
What it instead truly is?
It’s operatic. It’s extremely operatic work. The kind you’d see at an opera or a theatre play. Like, when Kid Bruce is floating up, you can practically imagine the strings pulling him upwards on a stage show. It’s that kind of ridiculous, over the top performative text. Snyder’s work here operates primarily on Emotional Logic. That is its key driver. It’s why it is so deliberately over the top. And the Hans Zimmer/Junkie XL score reflects that spirit.
David: Oh JESUS this isn’t even a little realistic, one thing that I didn’t notice until this time is the pearl from Martha’s necklace falls from her neck and lands the bat-filled well next to Bruce to drive the point home. And once he becomes Batman he’s wearing the full-on comics costume (which makes Cavill’s Super-suit really ugly as hell by comparison without a ton of other stuff built off that aesthetic to justify it; the new square buckle doesn’t help), and is basically framed as a merger of Bale’s iconography and thematic concerns with Keaton’s lived-in veteran crimefighter vibe and general bastardry. That he deliberately screams Classic Batman while being a deliberately broken version of the character - and one whose brokenness in Snyder’s eyes bears no relation to what anyone else will think is the problem, he doesn’t care about that - illustrates the dichotomy here that was always going to doom it for general audiences. Yes, there are the overtures towards verisimilitude such as presenting the other Justice Leaguers as essentially cryptids, and a realistically shitty-looking Gotham, but it operates on symbolic logic and ultimately goes as far as it cares to. Superman’ll flinch at bullets, but there’ll also be headlines about him shifting tectonic plates and recreating the Action Comics #1 cover, and later he’ll shake off a nuke because it’s friggin’ cool.
Sean: In many regards, this is Snyder moving away from the Nolan influence of Man of Steel to do his own thing. The man has a maximalist tendency that pushes everything over the top. From the BATDEMON bursting out of the Wayne Crypt to the way the shots slow down at the right moment to give us a striking image of Clark pushing Doomsday’s bone fist through his chest so the Kryptonite spear can go all the way through the beast. There are times where it doesn’t work in Snyder’s favor (flashing back at the end to the Wayne murders is a bit too “the audience is dumb”), but when it does, it’s amazing.
Ritesh: While I dig the ‘Batman v Superman’ of it all, it’s the whole ‘Dawn Of Justice’ aspect of it all that really struggles for me. It just feels overstuffed and distracting. You can see the points wherein the task of this needing to build out a shared cinematic universe hurt it more than helping it. And it results in what I can only describe as a Wonder Woman Reaction Video, like one of those dull YouTube Reactors, wherein you just see her watch clips of the other Justice League heroes. The whole ‘Metahuman Thesis’ stuff CAN be interesting. It just is not given the room here to be interesting. It feels like an add-on to an already loaded film that’s packed.
If you’ll remember that one brief FAKE rumor from way back when, wherein folks said BvS would actually be split into two films: Enter The Knight and Dawn Of Justice. A part of me ALMOST wishes that had indeed been the case, just to not let this be so overloaded. But I get it, I suppose.
Sean: Not helping matters is that… Gal kinda sucks. She’s not a good actress. And she’s crap here. She’s not asked to do much, but watching her makes you wish literally anyone else was here.
In many regards what you’re getting at is my main issue with the film. At the time Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman movie came out, El Sandifer noted that Batman v Superman “needed to be an hour shorter or two hours longer and a TV series.” I tend to agree with her on this point as… I want Batman v Superman to be a TV mini series like Twin Peaks: The Return. I want to wander in its depths, its implications. I want to explore the full depths of what it means to live in a post-Superman world. I want an entire episode of Bruce Wayne wandering the ruins of Metropolis. More than one scene between Lex and Bruce that’s an actual conversation rather than “Hey, I facilitated this meeting! Oh ho ho, I’m up to no good!” The full machinations of Lex’s twisted, horrific worldview and how he discovered who Superman is.
Also, Metahuman is a lame terminology. Just call them supers, you cowards.
David: Like I said, I liked the cryptid framing, and the glazed-over suggestion that Kryptonite would be a universal superpeople-killer is interesting, but it’s pure fat on what’s otherwise a lean meal. Striking to me that the whole B vs. S of BvS in question is tightly wound around the singular point of Excalibur’s battle between Arthur and Lancelot, but with Doomsday and Wonder Woman he starts dipping more broadly into parallels with Doomsday as the Mordred and Diana herself evoking Lancelot with her departure from her mission upon growing weary of man. It feels to me personally like him scrambling for ways to contextualize these elements foisted upon him in ways that maintain his interest, and it’ll be interesting in turn to rewatch Justice League as he tries to carry all of those aspects in particular forward.
Do wanna note though that since it’s played over the reveal of Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg, the implication to me is that rather than being Wonder Woman’s specifically, that big soaring rock track that’d go on to be primarily associated with her was actually intended to be a broader DC Universe theme, and I do like it in that regard too even if I’m glad it ended up being her getting her own iconic post-Lynda Carter tune.
Ritesh: The key thing here, and what makes Snyder such a figure of controversy, is Snyder’s open willingness to actively problematize his heroes and make them figures of discomfort. Usually Big Two superheroes are figures of comfort, of assurance. They evoke positive feelings and are Truly Heroic, they smile and say the right things, the nice things, and they ‘inspire’ you. They’re The Goodest, The Bestest, The Ideals. They make you feel good, essentially. They’re a warm blanket of comfort.
Snyder essentially rips up that blanket of comfort and is actively willing to inject discomfort in there. He problematizes these figures. Like, that entire Nairobi scene is so telling. Lois says “The United States has declared its neutrality in your country’s civil war both in policy and in principle”, and the general she’s speaking to laughs in her face and responds “These pious American fictions, spoken like truth. Men with power obey neither policy nor principle, Miss Lane. No one is different. No one is neutral.”
And then IMMEDIATELY we fucking learn that the bloody CIA is running an op and is involved and how what Lois said IS naive American nonsense. And while they’re doing their imperialist country-meddling shit, while the American Empire stretches its power while making pretense of neutrality, they also play pretend at the idea of ‘negotiating’ with this man. THEN we find out the CIA is totally willing to fucking NUKE these people, and willing to do so with one of their own innocent citizens there- Lois.
THAT frames the entire movie, as much as the Batman opening or anything else.
As Lex asks Senator Finch once in his study, and then later again at the Capitol:
“Do you know the oldest lie in America, Senator? It’s that power can be innocent.”
Sean: It’s certainly hard hitting and angry material. But it also feels lacking in some regard. There’s not really much of a punchline to the idea that America is a horrible, awful, imperialistic monster that allows an organization to exist whose best quality is that it lets Carl Barks get a bit more recognition. The role of the military outside of the opening is as a support to Superman. They, with great hesitancy, launch a nuke at the man of steel to kill Doomsday (which fails). The general from the previous movie (who, again, is Martian Manhunter) is a supportive figure to Lois’ investigation (despite initially being apprehensive about it).
But perhaps the most damning part of this film’s half cocked approach to the US Military is the portrayal of soldiers. As is the case with many a text critiquing US interventionist practices, there’s a tendency to treat the soldier as a mere cog in the machine. Good men trying their best to deal with a fucked situation. While some might be psychopathic monsters who will destroy the ‘Other’ for fun and pleasure, there are some soldiers who are nice.
In the case of BvS’s opening scene, we are given two sets of soldiers: Jimmy Olsen and the nameless ones (please let me know if I’m wrong). Jimmy is, of course, an active CIA agent placed with Lois to make a deal with the rebels on behalf of the US government. But there’s a degree to which he tries to make the best of the situation, always noting that Lois had nothing to do with the actions of the CIA. That she was blameless. And then he gets shot in the face.
Meanwhile, the Nameless soldiers are actively pissed that the Government is sending in drones to do what a man should (funny considering Chris Terrio’s quote about Superman essentially being a drone). We’re meant to, on some level, empathize with their dismay at the mechanization of warfare.
And there’s the simple fact to be noted that, at the end of the day, it’s Lex Luthor who’s saying Power can’t be innocent. Lex Luthor, the madman son of a gun who is proven wrong about Batman and Superman’s inherent nature. Who believes that “If God is all Powerful, then He can’t be all Good.” And is proven wrong.
It’s easy to make the case that this is critiquing American Imperialism. But it’s also easy to consider that maybe Zack feels about this the way he does Batman killing.
David: I would like to note that when the one soldier bravely gives the finger to the drone for messily completing the op he set up so we know he’s a good guy, I thought “It was nice of them to give Tom King a cameo.”
Ritesh: The key Sean, you must remember, is that this is still an American blockbuster movie. So there was no way it was ever really going to be an anti-imperialist text. The film is willing to confront the realities associated with America, but it is not a radical text, and was never going to be. The prior film for instance was deeply tied to the American Military, with them as the stand-ins for humanity who have an arc beyond Lois herself. And this film is bound to that. The difference between this and the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Zack Snyder’s vision is that one is a much more upbeat ‘hurray’ lens of reality, militarism, America and heroism, while the other is very much actively willing to problematize and acknowledge the fucked nature of things. But the key is, and this is the point, it is still heroic to Snyder.
Snyder’s heroes are all ‘failures’. Batman is one. Superman is one. The film lays those out clearly. Even Wonder Woman is one, having literally given up and thought humanity wasn’t worth saving anymore for a literal century. All of these would make ‘bad heroes’ in the MCU if they were the main figures. And the MCU heroes are not meant to be figures of discomfort, by and large. What Snyder is doing, for me, is in his centristy, non-radical positioning, outlining a more honest truth, a more real truth about this stuff. The nature of American myth itself. The MCU hides and cleans up and polishes. Snyder doesn’t. He keeps the blood and mess and goes ‘Well, they try to be heroic! Doesn’t that count? That’s the point, right? That means something!’ and damnit, he just believes in the Dream of America and what American myths can be, despite their realities. He is, in a very real sense, far more optimistic than anything or anyone in the MCU. There’s a sort of sincerity here.
David: So you’re saying Zack Snyder is hopepu- (God punches down from Heaven to leave me a thin red smear on the concrete)
Ritesh: That’s why this is worth noting, I think. That’s what makes this interesting. There’s truth here. It might not be a comforting truth, but it’s truth. Snyder is largely a politically confused filmmaker, but I think those misdiagnosing his truth and honesty for cynicism are getting it wrong. He’s optimistic. Just not in the same way as the cleaned up Disney kids. Snyder is the kind of guy who could play Iron Man as heroic, with potential for heroism, but would lean WAY harder into him being a fucked up war criminal in ways I doubt Disney would dare to now. One likes to cover the shit up with a rug. The other openly displays it, and then goes ‘Well, there must be hope’, and that sort of idealistic, optimistic current is why you still have Jimmy being reasonable and clearing up Lois’ name or why the American President and military are genuinely remorseful to nuke Superman. One could say the movie tries to have its cake and eat it too, and sure, but this is its design. And the design is one meant to be truthful in a way the MCU fare would rather not?
Sean: At the same time, it’s worth noting that… Zack Snyder made 300. That’s not nothing. Yes, we can see a truth within his films. We can see the maggots on Jesus’ flesh. But does Zack? He problematizes his heroes, makes them flawed, cruel, downright monstrous. But is that enough? I’m looking at this not through the lens of the MCU and their bollocks, but rather from the wider lens of cinema. From Gore Verbinski’s trilogy of pirates movies about the evils of capital and imperialism to James Cameron’s usage of colonialism as a mechanism to critique colonialism. From the 70s works like WUSA, The Stepford Wives, and The Parallax View to modern works like No Sudden Move, Captive State, and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, American cinema is full of texts that have limitations to their critiques of America.
I’m not disagree that these elements aren’t here. They most certainly are. But are they here enough? Are they here to speak to a greater truth or as medicine to swallow bigger lies. Yes, the MCU acts as if the world is all sunshine and lollipops, where power truly can be innocent. It embraces the Military Entertainment Complex wholeheartedly as much as Snyder does. And, perhaps, Snyder’s approach is more honest about it. But does that mean it’s actually good? Is it actually good to be told you’re eating rat poison and that the only thing one can eat is rat poison? Is being truthful worth it if it’s simply the salt on a rat poison buffet?
Ritesh: You’re right to ask that question! Absolutely! But perhaps this is a case of perspective, wherein, this is an American blockbuster of the modern era and it is explicitly Corporate IP Art at that. It’s not independent art. It’s studio IP Farm art for the age of The Cinematic Universe. And my expectations going in are nothing actually radical or close to leftist, but rather American Liberal. And I’ll illustrate my perspective like this- I prefer Tom King as an artist to Tom Taylor. I respect King as a person almost not at all and I respect Taylor as a person a great deal more. But as artists? I consider King the far better artist, because while Taylor largely prefers a ‘cleaned up’ realm of platitude-spewing comfort and heroism (that makes really dull attempts to be Political), King’s work in all its deeply fucked up and troubling, problematic nature reveals a truth.
I don’t need the artist’s politics to be agreeable with mine, god knows I wouldn’t touch Frank Miller, Clint Eastwood or hell, most fucking American art in general. So to me the ‘worthwhile’ here isn’t defined by its moral or ideological positioning and how I find myself in relation to it, as much as ‘Well is it truthful and is what it’s saying honest and well done?’ and through its narrow lens, I think, like a Tom King, it is.
Is there then, in that sense, a propagandist aspect to such a thing? From King’s Soldierfic to this? Sure, but at least like a Top Gun, it’s up front and blatant and front and center. It’s looking me in the eye while doing it, rather than putting on a smiley face mask like Boss Smiley in Prez to bullshit me in Disneyland.
All that said, 300 tho can fuck all the way off, and Snyder cannot be absolved of that evil shit show.
Sean: In some regards, before we get to the big MCU comparison we set up in the beginning of this, there’s parallels between BvS and the last MCU film to not be distributed by Disney: Iron Man 3. The film, much like BvS, takes a limited but truthful aim at the American imperialist fantasy. It utterly destroys the base fantasy of Iron Man as a human drone who can shoot the brown people as being a cog in the Military Industrialist Complex machine. Its main antagonist is a smarmy nerd who cleans up nice while hiding his true psychopathy through a thin veneer. It condemns the lead’s masculine pride and forces him to change.
But where the film turns is in how it presents itself. It’s a Shane Black movie, so it’s a buddy comedy set during Christmas with wisecracks, gags, and inventive action sequences. In many regards it’s a better movie than any of Snyder’s attempts at superhero fiction. But it’s also a much more evil movie. It’s a movie whose emotional core is Tony Stark getting over his PTSD after nearly dying in The Avengers. But it doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that TONY STARK COMMITTED MASS GENOCIDE. Rather, it views the main thing giving Tony PTSD to be the fact that he survived space.
In this regard, we reveal the insidious nature of the MCU’s approach. Not simply that it portrays America, heroes, and all that as pure and simple good. But that it can use that to feed poisons that there are simply some people who need to die.
In my experience, leftist blockbusters tend to sneak under the radar, often by accident. (Starship Troopers being the famous example.)
David: Look, I’m not gonna stand by Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice: Ultimate Edition neé Son of Sun and Knight of Night as broadly espousing a moral and political outlook I’m fully down for; if nothing else it pretty much attests that you can fuck over as many Black and Brown folks as you please so long as you’re willing to form the Justice League later, and there’s a gag about the namby-pamby liberal notion of psychiatric healing at the end in favor of shipping Lex off to Arkham.
Ritesh: The movie also literally has a Crisis Actor in the African Black woman, who was paid and threatened by Luthor to attest to the council about this interventionist terror.
David: And even if it’s meant to portray the notion as something bad, there sure is a big White God shot of Superman at one point. There’s still so much in this I can point to and go ‘that ain’t it, Zachary.’ Coming from a creator who as I alluded to in our previous discussion doesn’t seem to see much of a line between awe and horror, navigating everything in play in a sensitive, nuanced fashion was probably never on the table, especially given the limitations on this kind of corporate IP even given the kind of slack this was.
But this is a movie I can tell was made by a human being with things he wanted to express. When I watch the restored take on Clark Kent’s arc here of trying to be the perfect dude, the perfect boyfriend, the justified strange visitor, the shining ethical figure as a journalist and an unwilling messiah he feels compelled to be because if he can’t be God they’ll make him the Devil, and instead lost in the morass of the layers of corruption, indifference, and consequence surrounding him until he’s smothered by his self-doubt? Longing for a situation he can do uncomplicated Superman stuff at so that at least something in the world will be fine again, watching everything turned upside down, and finally finding his anchor in love? There’s a potent emotional reality being expressed through these characters way more powerful than any number of more traditional takes on them content to play the hits. I may not agree with everything this has to say, morally or in terms of it being ‘my’ Superman, but it’s a human voice instead of elevator music. And yes, that’s the low bar to clear when discussing contemporary superhero movies, but it’s what makes a Movie instead of a content dispensary. Even if it means that say Superman dying at the end was never gonna be the kind of cultural moment that Iron Man biting it a few years later was, because that would be banking on a We Love Our Daddy thing that’s a valid mode to operate in with the character done right, but this is a story that is willing to tackle human beings in all their conditional messiness and thwarted ideals and the small, arguably selfish personal drives that ultimately compel them to try all over again. As a political parable, it’s…well, it’s something next to its peers, at least. As a story of a bunch of folks’ basest drives taking them to their worst places, and finding even simpler things still that remind them of what they should be? Watching this as it was meant to be watched, I found myself a bit touched.
Ritesh: A line I think is telling is Lois speaking to Clark in the bath-tub: “I'm saying thank you for saving my life. I'm saying there's a cost.” It’s echoed once again in the Pa Kent vision quest scene, wherein Pa talks about how he believed/thought he was a hero who’d saved the farm. He was eating his hero cake. But his ‘heroism’ had the unintentional effect of causing death and destruction elsewhere. The water he redirected to protect his land and home destroyed the Langs’. That feels like the whole movie’s essential struggle in a nutshell. This is a movie where people look at the prospect of putting on their super-persona as a monstrous act with grave consequences and horrifying end results, both for others and ultimately themselves. Where they agonize over it.
But also, it must be noted, for it is vital: SUPERMAN FUCKS!
Sean: That’s another thing the Snyder films have over the MCU: They’re horny. Freed from Nolan’s, for want of a better term, asexual approach to superheroes, Snyder can just go all in on Superman fucking Lois Lane, Batman waking up in bed with a woman, and Batman being naked in the shower. Zack knows that these are fetishes and he is having fun with them. He wants you to want to fuck Superman as much as Lois does. Lex Luthor’s villain is highlighted in that he has massive Virgin energy to go alongside his Jock energy.
David: This movie has sex AND violence folks, all part of a balanced diet. And the contrast between Clark making steamy wet love to his girlfriend vs. Bruce Wayne waking up screaming after his drunk anonymous hookup by itself tells you so much about where these two dudes stand in terms of their emotional health. I was gonna say before that even when I hated BvS I liked the hero cake bit so many made fun of, but I’d also like to note that at the time I respected this movie for on every level taking the bold, nigh-unprecedented but deeply truthful stance of The Virgin Batman vs. The Chad Superman. Fact of the matter is Bruce Wayne is nearly always rocking between volcel, incel, and fucks but feels terrible about it, whereas Superman was constantly getting down with mermaid princesses and alien warriors before setting down into marriage with a woman he’s ecstatically happy playing second fiddle to. And that energy extends naturally outwards to Batman being the straight-up emotionally constipated villain Superman and Lois have to redeem, in the sharpest turn imaginable from the last 30 years of stories about those two characters.
(While on the topic: Lavender Jack creator Dan Schkade? Gets it.)
Ritesh: Batman can fuck, but Superman makes sweet, passionate love. He’s a good lover.
Sean: Batman has to have character arcs to learn to fuck again. Superman just goes ‘What, like it’s hard? I mean, I certainly am.’
Ritesh: Looping back to Lex though, a point I do wanna make is, the whole ‘critical stuff assigned to Lex The Villain Who Is Wrong’ stuff. It’s a criticism that applies wider to a great many things, including and esp the MCU stuff. And I understand. But I think one thing that gets lost in all that noise is this:
It is dramatically compelling for your antagonists, no matter how bad, to actually have Points, so that the lead characters can then synthesize a greater truth from the events that go down. It’s just basic drama. Thesis. Anti-Thesis. Synthesis. It’s why even The Joker, who many compared this Lex take to, traditionally tends to have some truth or valid points granted to him amidst all his insanity and absurdity. The villainy I think doesn’t erase that truth, nor is it intended to be a ‘nope, wrong!’ thing. It’s just part of basic dramaturgy. The antagonist says a lot of bullshit that is draped around some kernel of truth, which is how a lot of real monstrous people operate and how they get their rhetoric going. So fundamentally, while the executions of that can be discussed case-by-case, the overall broad sweeping harshness towards The Villain With A Point isn’t an inherent problem for me. It just depends. Here Lex does make valid points and insane points. And that’s what makes compelling characters, right? That’s how I see it, at least.
Sean: On the note of the film’s villain, it’s worth looking at the moment of redemption for Batman: Superman says Martha. In the discourse surrounding the film’s release, this was the largest nail on the coffin. Even now, shows like the only good version of the Teen Titans mock this moment. I can certainly see what they were going for here: Batman isn’t sparing Superman because they have moms with the same first name. Rather, he’s doing it because it’s the same moment as his father’s death. He’s realizing he’s become the man who killed his parents. It’s a trigger for Batman to push him back from the brink.
The problem isn’t that Clark says Martha. But rather he says “You have to… save Martha.” The moment in both the scene itself and the parallelism with the opening would’ve been stronger had Clark simply said “Martha.” (That, and cutting out the flashback in that moment, which, as I’ve noted, is Snyder’s maximalist tendencies going too far.)
David: It’s a brilliantly-constructed scene that no one is going to take seriously because it’s led off with a sentence no human being would actually utter and it yanks everybody riiiiiiiight out of there.
Ritesh: I do genuinely love how disgusted Bruce is with himself in that moment, once the realization hits him. How he’s finally become the very thing he’s hated, the very horror and monster that gave birth to him. How the violence he inflicts is now no different than that, and just how far he’s veered off from his actual purpose, which is rescuing, helping, and saving people. It’s why he throws away that Spear in such disgust. It’s why he looks Clark in the eye and tells him “I’ll make you a promise. Martha won’t die tonight.” And in that moment Clark nods and trusts this man. He chooses to go to the ship rather than for his mum. He places the life and safety of his mum in the hands of this stranger who almost killed him. This man who hates/hated him. And in turn, Batman has to put his faith in Superman, believe him, and help him. In a lot of ways, that’s the crux of the film. Faith in people, even those people who you believe are beyond you, whom you hate and loathe and might demonize.
Sean: Given we’ve been doing Excalibur parallels, the Spear is the titular sword itself. Cast aside into the lake from once it came only to be returned via super(man)natural means. Am I reaching?
David: It’s the sword, salvation and destruction in one - it even glows green the same way! - that’s at the center of the moment the hero nearly gives in to rage, AND Mordred’s spear that kills Arthur at the end. Lois is the Lady in the Lake that gives it to Superman to save the world because she’s his strength (the treatment of Lois in here…isn’t great given she’s gotta be saved 3 separate times and her final role in here is trying and failing to pass someone else the way to save the day, but she was the saving grace of the theatrical experience by doing investigation that could provide SOME coherent momentum).
Ritesh: Oh Lois is my biggest gripe with not just this movie, but the entire trilogy. She’s done so dirty. Amy Adams is such an incredible actor and she gets so little to do, and the intended future plans only make things more damning for me in this regard. She deserves and deserved just so much more than what she got.
David: (Said future plans with hindsight being foreshadowed here MULTIPLE times with Alfred’s gripes about the next generation of Waynes and his mocking suggestion that “some young lady from Metropolis will make you honest.”)
Sean: The film’s treatment of its female characters, while giving them more agency and weight, is still kinda crap. Of the five principle female characters (Lois, Martha, Finch, Mercy, and Diana), two are peril monkeys, two are unceremoneously murdered by the baddie (I don’t think Mercy even gets a line, which is kinda fucked considering they cast Hannibal’s Tao Okamoto in the role), and the last is rather flat even without Gal’s weak acting.
Yes, Lois gets stuff to do in this movie. In many regards, we should be following her more often than Clark. Investigating the conspiracy that will lead Batman to versus Superman. But she spends the film flirting between the edges of what’s going on, just missing the chance to make a difference right until she has to explain who Martha is to Batman. Her limited screen presence deflates the film’s larger claims of critiquing toxic masculinity. It can not approach its female characters with anything save awe, pity, or disgust. It can only be toxic towards them.
Ritesh: Yeah. It’s not great! And looping back to it- The Spear is a condensation of the whole enterprise here. Found in tragedy, forged from hatred, an instrument of death, ultimately used in the act of protection. Safety rather than vengeance. It is used to slay a mythic monster, with Superman like a knight of old. And I do wanna talk about that monster for a bit here.
Early on Lex tells Senator Finch: “You don't have to use a silver bullet. But if you forge one, well then, we don't have to depend on the kindness of monsters.”
That framing feels key here. Lex sees himself as human. And then he views this wave of supposed ‘Metahumanity’, meta meaning quite literally ‘beyond’, so ‘beyond humanity’ as something heretical. As something unnatural, abnormal and monstrous. It’s something not meant to occur and outside of the social order and system, the way of things, for him. And in this regard, he is much like Zod in the film. If Zod was the byproduct of his Casteist kryptonian culture and world, then Lex is just as much a product of his capitalist-colonialist western Earth context. He has strict, rigid ideas and ideas of things, and will do whatever it takes to ensure their enforcement. And so the act of creating Doomsday here is given a very specific meaning. What Lex is doing is literally ‘blending’ the dead corpse of this ‘abnormal’ and ‘alien’ intrusion with ‘humanity’. It’s why he gives it his blood. And so what forms from the meeting of these two things? An abomination. A monstrosity. A horror that should not be. And that’s really his point. It’s the illustration of his fundamental viewpoint here.
‘Do you not see? This is what this Metahumanity is. It’s a vile, repulsive, abnormality. A corrupt creature not meant to be’. It’s reinforced to us again with the whole ‘This was barred in Kryptonian culture/civilization as well’. It’s the fundamental point and purpose with the invocation of it as The Devil, the satanic. Lex loathes both God and the Devil. He only loves mankind.
Sean: i.e. himself.
Ritesh: Yes. He blows up even his secretary Mercy Graves with zero hesitation. Humanity is himself. He’s a narcissistic monster, absolutely.
David: Yeah, the Doomsday climax sucks, it feels like it’s supposed to be this bombastic final number to the opera that is BvS and absolutely is not, nor does it have the invention or kinetic power of the last movie’s fights, but conceptually it’s about as solid as you can make Doomsday as a traditional monster. Worth noting as well as I know others have over the years that while he’s Doomsday, this is also basically Bizarro, a Frankenstien monster of Luthor’s as he ironically unleashes onto the world all his paranoid fears of Superman in an effort to stop him. I’m also struck by his seeming sympathy for Zod; I suppose in death and as a clearly flawed figure, he just doesn’t represent the same kind of ‘paradox’ Superman does.
Sean: At some point, game has to recognize game.
As I mentioned earlier, I love the Black Sabbath Lex performs to birth the demonic Doomsday. Not merely a beast of unethical science in the vein of Baron Frankenstein, but an affront to the cosmic order itself. Something that summons a demon into your pool of blood. But that demon is perhaps best saved for another movie.
As for the fight itself… you kinda wish it was literally anything other than that. Like, it basically throws away all the implications, stakes, and interesting things in favor of being a punch up between the DC Trinity (a marketing tool to make it look like DC cares about Wonder Woman) and a monster it’s ok to kill so we don’t have the DISCOURSE™ Man of Steel wrought. The images within the fight itself are amazing. Zack does know how to shoot a fight scene.
Ritesh: Yeah. It’s the weakest part, and it’s where I really do wish this had more room for us to actually have a film to really explore and sink into that ‘Metahumanity’ and ‘Metahuman Thesis’ idea. The ‘Dawn Of Justice’ really is the weak link, whilst the Batman v Superman stuff rips. It might’ve been stronger with another script pass or two tweaking things, who knows, but really, the finale where it becomes a big American Monster Movie, wherein the heroes have to take it down? It’s where it’s most predictable and familiar.
But I do dig the conceptual strands around it, particularly as The Justice League DOES form by fighting a gigantic American Monster in the comics- Starro The Conqueror. I hate Doomsday and think he’s shit, and he is no contest whatsoever to Starro, but I can appreciate what’s being attempted here, I think? And symbolically the idea of them having to war with this literal demonic construction of how the worst of humanity views them? This shadow offspring and manifestation that must be confronted, and that’s how The Trinity is first formed? I do dig that. I fuck with that idea.
David: Speaking of stuff that works better in concept than execution, I wanna bring up the actual Batman vs. Superman fight itself. It’s a solid brawl that is basically anti-satisfactory in a commercial sense, stripping away most of their defining visually cool traits so they can punch each other until one falls. It makes absolute thematic and contextual sense! That this is the delivery of the marketing promise of the title is one of the many reasons this was never gonna take off commercially. Do adore the ‘punch, punch, CLANG’ followed by Batman nervously backing up though, and him finishing off Superman with the sink. He even snuck in some Who Watches The Watchmen? graffiti, and I kinda gotta love it.
Ritesh: Batman beating on Superman with a fucking sink is honestly one of my favorite moments or scenes in anything, I’m not gonna lie. I think about it a lot. It’s so extra and petty and pissed off. It’s so funny. Shit kills me.
Also on the graffiti, there’s also a The End Is High one when Gotham is first introduced, so yeah, there’s a lot. But also just beyond that, thematically, this is a film about two figures answerable to no one, not even god, who find the respective other individual to actually answer to someone. It is that classic question of ‘Who Watches The Watchmen?’
Sean: Not us, we skipped that movie.
Ritesh: Dreadful movie. Snyder really fucked up on that one.
David: I genuinely don’t know whether I love or hate that the answer to the movie’s question of whether Superman’s existence is compatible with democracy is shrugging and going ‘well, that’s what the Justice League is’. Truly galaxy-brain absurdity.
Sean: And the series doesn’t really engage with things from that perspective. The Justice League forms, certainly. But there’s no sense that they’re going to mitigate the concerns about what an omnipotent being would do to the notion of democracy. In fact, the films are very blunt in pointing out the degree to which they fail miserably via the Knightmare sequences.
In this movie at least, we are shown the Superman ruling a dystopian hellscape full of flying demons, Superstormtroopers, and Superman burning out the skulls of desidents. The Justice League fails miserably to stop this from coming to be. That’s not taking away from the sheer perverse pleasure watching the sequence gives. Of seeing the hell Batman fears in all its horror. But that doesn’t change what it means. What happened to the world in spite of the Justice League.
David: Knightmare rules, I don’t remember whether I thought so at the time but it rules. Look, the Super-armbands are tasteless in the extreme, and “You took her from me” while literally meaning the death of Lois Lane is also another bit that plays VERY different in hindsight knowing the original plans. But it just plain rules seeing this maximalist edgelord nonsense of Batman in a trenchcoat with Joe Chill’s gun and a Joker card (which we got explained in ZSJL!) fighting Parademons on Earth-Fury Road. And the sequence starring The Fastest Studio Liability Alive following it rips too, proper weirdo mythic shit.
Ritesh: Zack Snyder really went ‘What if we took Batman #666 AND Injustice AND Rock Of Ages and smashed them all together by way of my love of George Miller?’
Sean: Fitting, considering Miller was among the many directors to try to make a Justice League movie prior to Snyder.
David: A movie I will always think of in terms of there being a scene where Barry Allen vibrates his molecules through his wife to get her off, and at the same time I recall Miller noted a lot of it would be ‘geared towards kids.’ Possibly as wild in its own way as what Zack was gonna go for! Plus Armie Hammer, truly the Ezra Miller of the proto-DCEU.
Ritesh: Every attempt at a live-action Justice League movie is cursed with at least One Problematic Star as a minimum, and an absolutely weird, wild artsy director dead set on making it as uncommercial via their idiosyncratic choices as possible whilst also aspiring to great commercial appeal. These conditions must always be met.
David: So you’re saying my dream of the Wachowski’s Justice League is still entirely a possibility?
Sean: No, The Matrix Resurrections basically saw that dream burn to ashes in glorious fire of queerness. Plus Lily is doing comedy nowadays as opposed to sci-fi.
David: Aw.
Ritesh: Also realistically speaking, do you think any actually sane or savvy director with meaningful ambitions working in the industry right now, who looked at and saw the absolute fucking shitshow that was the Justice League movie and the eventual Snyder Cut and the whole mess around that and the cult and fandoms that sprang around that, how directors/writers/ppl get hounded…and went ‘Y’know, I really want this in my life. This is something I’d like to do, I think. I would like to do Justice League, absolutely.’ If those fuckers have an option, they would never go for it, or would at least opt for a Matt Reeves or James Gunn ass deal wherein they get one thing that they can hard revamp in their own quiet corner, wherein they can do a trilogy and a buncha spinoffs, and then fuck off. Not more than that.
While we would love for The Justice League to continue to be a vehicle for weird experimentation in the space of big blockbuster corporate art, as much as can be allowed, with many creatives and casts doing regular reinterpretations of the concept that stand on their own, without connections, I don’t reckon that dream will hold in the upcoming Zaslav-Discovery era. What we’re gonna get is gonna be a hyper-connected shared cinematic universe Justice League flick strategically designed and focus tested to hit those Avengers checkpoints.
Sean: We might not get that considering what’s been happening with HBO Max. The parts are being gutted and sold to the highest bidder. There’s nothing creative about their desires, not even the pretense of creativity that allows Ryan Coogler to skirt the edges to make a movie in the system.
Ritesh: Which reminds me. Y’all remember when Infinity War/Endgame were coming out how there was all that Russo Bros. noise about having Real Queer Representation? They made such a big deal out of it. And then it’s just this one fucking nothing scene that mentions a husband, I think?
David: A dead one!
Ritesh: I was watching the Ultimate Edition and in the Clark journalism scenes, there’s a queer Black/Brown couple kissing in the background. It’s not a big deal. Snyder never made noise about it, as far as I recall. He was not looking for backpacks and claps for Doing A Representation. He just casually did it. And y’know what, Zack? I appreciate that. I appreciate the casual queerness. I’ll take your reality over the Russo bros tryhard appeal for approval.
Sean: In some regards, this highlights the limitations of representation in corporate art. Yes, it’s nice that there are queer people within the worlds of both the MCU and the DCEU. Yes, it’s more honest the way in which the DCEU presents it and more wholesome. And yes, there’s a degree to which the MCU’s approach is very much asking to be thanked for table scraps.
But the thing of it is… neither one of these will be about the queerness. Imagine, if you will, a story about a queer couple living in Gotham or Metropolis witnessing these massive forces of power and horror duke it out on the streets. What’s life like living in these cities where monsters dwell? What does queerness look like in these worlds beyond mere kissing? What are their fights like? How do they feel about Superman? What kinks do they have? What fights have they fought? What are their cruelties? Their kindnesses?
The story will never go down that route. Not simply because the two are background characters, but because corporate art will always try to market to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible. There will never be an equivalent to a Manhunt or a Luda or even a The City in the Middle of the Night within the big blockbuster franchises. Because these stories centralize their queerness in all their messy, problematic, delightful ways.
There may be a Batwoman movie or a Young Avengers movie. But they will be Superhero movies first and foremost. And the corporations will sell merch that highlights their allyship. Representation is a nice thing to normalize things within the culture to prevent the world from killing us all. But never forget that an ally isn’t always a friend.
Ritesh: Yep! Or as I like to often joke ‘I do not wish to be represented by The Walt Disney Company, thank you’. Like, it’s neat that Superman is bi or Tim Drake is bi, sure. And queer creators getting hired to write them is cool, because it materially benefits, employs and puts money in the pocket of actual real life working queer people. But as far as the work itself goes, the actual corporate queer art mostly means so little to me compared to like, watching James Tynion, Tate Brombal, Aditya Bidikar, Nick Robles, and Isaac Goodhart building Christopher Chaos outside corporate constraints. Queer folks creating a whole world, mythos and cast of queer characters and cool queer shit that is explicitly about queerness? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the end, we always have to make our own. We have to invest in our own, beyond these corporate sandboxes. We gotta build our own shit, and support those of our folks who are doing just that. Corporate Approved Representation and their approval stamps are not the things to be looking for approval from. And to be reliant on them or have them as NEEDS is not probably not useful.
David: I like there being a bi Superman. Bi Superman ain’t saving the world. Speaking of the Civil War of it all, to wrap all the way back around before the very final thoughts: this sure didn’t change my mind that there’s a good reason that commercially kicked BvS’s ass up and down the block. But it’s now just as clear the victory goes at least as hard the other way in terms of which of these has a reason to exist in and of itself, not least of which because one has takes beyond ‘well, isn’t that an interesting question’.
Sean: David, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition is a movie. A flawed movie that often misses its aspirations and has some deeply troubling elements in it, but a movie nevertheless. Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Civil War, meanwhile, is not a movie. It is a slow motion series of moving images showing the death of cinema in each and every one of its frames. All hope dies in the wake of seeing the cold, hollow, dead eyes of teenage Tony Stark. The colors are flat, the action uninteresting, and the ‘Moral Dilemma™’ the film supposedly centers itself around is essentially discarded before it can even be engaged with beyond bluster. The dialogue is insipid, the acting ranging from ‘Chris Evans emoting’ to ‘Babyface McChild doing his best work as Spider-Man, given he’s only asked to be a generic teen with a vaguely defined moral center,’ and the music is crap. There’s nothing to be found in revisiting Civil War and god help you if either you try to drag me into a roundtable on the entirety of the MCU. Because I’ll see you all right. I’ll see you in Hell, my friends.
I WILL SEE YOU IN HELL!!!
Ritesh: I liked John Kani’s T’Chaka and Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa. That’s what I got. Though I should note that Daniel Bruhl, one of my favorite actors, was totally wasted in it as Zemo. But beyond their attempts at hard carrying that snoozefest, I got nothing I’m afraid. The movie is a giant blob of forgotten remnants in my head, like most MCU products. BvS though is actually memorable, it’s distinct, it has style and personality and feels like a human with interests, obsessions and flaws made it. It doesn’t feel like it just purely came off an assembly line.
David: I liked when Spider-Man held up a thing like Spider-Man does. :)
Sean: Go fuck yourself.
David: Some lightning round minor thoughts before we put a lid on this:
Bunch of minor contrasts and details leapt out at me this time. Lex playing hoops with his employees as his introduction as a ‘man of the people’ vs. Bruce running into Metropolis. The women at the start being scared of him vs. Martha seeing him as a superhero. Clark knowing Bruce is Batman the whole time because he hears Alfred on comms.
Sean: Just jumping in to note Batman never discovers Clark is Superman until he dies.
Would like to note the Waynes still saw Zorro the night of their murder, Excalibur was an upcoming feature.
Jimmy Olsen being betrayed by the ZEE ZEE ZEE is chef kiss.
‘Manipulating Superman into causing an international incident by saving Lois’ is pulled straight from Greg Rucka’s run on Adventures of Superman and its criminal he isn’t listed in the special thanks.
Kryptonite being discovered and obtained via indigenous exploitation feels like it was meant to be a clear metaphor, but I’m not sure for what in this context.
I totally recall people thinking ‘Wally’ in here was some kind of shot at The Flash. He lost his legs!
The Batman villain to counterbalance Luthor and Doomsday being the fucking KGBeast would be beautiful enough on its own, but I recall hearing Jim Starlin got paid more for his use here than Thanos’ in the MCU.
“Ah. High-stakes round.” is an all-timer Alfred line.
Another Wilhelm scream! Who says Zack Snyder doesn’t have fun?
Superman bringing people to the paramedics after the capitol bombing isn’t just a good moment that was cut, but necessary because it draws a parallel to the next scene where paradmedics are wheeling security guards away from the Lexcorp lab that Batman fucked up. On a smaller but similar note, the theatrical version cutting out all the buildup on the Sword of Alexander bit kills the gag stone dead.
Extremely important I share that Zack Snyder stated in an interview that in his personal background for this version of Bruce Wayne, the Dark Knight Returns armor already existed prior to this movie because Batman had developed it to fight a bear that escaped from the Gotham Zoo and he dragged it out of storage to kill Superman with. Which makes it his ‘hunter’ armor, making it a thematically appropriate as well as delightful detail.
Ritesh: I DID NOT KNOW THAT SNYDER HEADCANON.
THAT'S FUCKING INCREDIBLE.
IT'S BATMAN BEAR-FIGHTER.
THAT RULES
Sean: BATMAN V PADDINGTON: DAWN OF MARMALADE
David: Only wish it had been a gorilla so we could’ve gotten this as DCEU canon.
Unfortunately “I believe you” is way cooler here than in DKR itself.
President Ocean Master!
Batman’s plan to beat Doomsday? Stupid. The willingness to bait and go head-to-head with a monster that just tanked a nuke and seemingly (already) killed Superman? Pure A+ hero shit.
Okay the Ultimate Edition including the big KENNEDY DEAD headline was a little much.
Pete Ross comes back for the funeral! That’s nice.
Speedrunning subcategory of gripes:
The docks scene is the worst part of the movie. Batman’s an idiot, the chase is boring, and Superman you asshole if you think Batman is that bad a guy then maybe stop him now since you can see he just killed about ten people, and if you’re giving him a pass since you figure they were bad guys maybe do something about the ones getting away.
“You don’t owe this world a thing” is…still so bad. I do get it, but. Lousy parenting! As for the other ‘dark/real’ Superman moment, “No one stays good in this world” is just awkward when bookended by big antithetical epiphanies.
“All religions believe in a messiah” okay we can all concede a lot of this movie is still quite dumb.
Lex with the wheelchair “To help you stand for something”, “He made me half a man”, Jesus.
I almost respect this movie using the x-ray vision uselessness against lead as a major plot point, but it didn’t need to be and also you didn’t explain that beforehand Zack. Similarly redundant, no reason for Lex to be behind the Bat-Brand killings, Bruce is no less on the hook for that.
Why do people seriously think Superman teamed up with an anti-Superman activist to blow up the capitol. With a bomb. Instead of his heat vision that he has. Even by mass public hysteria standards that’s a hell of a boulder to roll up the hill.
Sean: In the protest outside the capitol, one of the signs has the Superman logo with the S replaced with a swastika. Which, uh, has some implications especially considering the film came out in 2016.
David: By the same token, as I said before the armbands in the Knightmare are A Choice.
And finally: I know it’s a silly complaint with this movie, and it’s a fakey-fake Kryptonite-launcher thing, but dammit, I don’t like Batman having the big gun in the first-ever Trinity shot. Do not like it.
Ritesh: When speaking on BvS, Zack Snyder once said the following:
“I think that it’s definitely an unsure world. Unsure how to go forward. That American optimism… I think it does speak to, now that we’re a global family, what it means to police the world and how hard that is. Clearly, it’s not easy. Every step we take, there’s land mines everywhere.
“But I do think, in the end, the movie does have an optimism toward humanity and sacrifice. That those things still matter, you know? There’s a cathartic sort of… as you drill down, the ‘why’ of being a hero, that’s still there. That’s what I try to get at through the whole mire of politicized conflict, in the end, when the rubber hits the road, the ‘why’ of being a hero is still there. I think that’s important. I didn’t want it to be this completely deconstructivist superhero adventure. I wanted there to be the ‘why’ of the superhero down at the bottom of it.”
And that feels like a telling coda on things.
What are our final thoughts on the matter here?
Sean: As good an example of someone trying to have their cake and eat it too as ever there was one. There’s fun to be had, but the limits are there. Most of the problems are resolved by adding more rather than cutting, so the film must be doing something right.
All things considered, easily the sixth best Superman movie.
David: I walked in low-key dreading this rewatch, and I’m now still low-key dreading the social impact of being One Of Those Dudes Who Loves BvS. And I don’t blame my younger self for hating it, what he saw was a lobotomized effort presented in a context where it was never going to work, and he was a bit more caught up in the myth of it all to boot to hear all of what this was saying. But amidst a contemporary cinematic superheroic landscape of ashes, a big ‘ol swinging for the fences try at an American Epic with the subgenre’s biggest archetypes on power, pride, need, and one man refusing to stop giving a shit while another relearns how to, secretly turning out to be on balance good after all was as refreshing a pick-me-up as I could ask for. It’s still probably not even my third-favorite DC movie of the last decade, but it’s one that can in fact stand tall as a distinct and passionate contribution to its field.
Ritesh: A troubled sad man, an anxious and guilt-stricken man allied with the American Empire, who finds solace from his endless nightmares in the end through the prospect of being a Wife Guy, which is the only thing that his long gone Sad Dad tells him can do the trick. All filtered through an obsessive love of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. Add in some Doms, and this could be ghost-written by Tom King, people.
Sean: Of course, you’d also have to add in an interest in artifice as the cornerstone of life, a complex relationship with extrajudicial murder, and old cinema. But at that point, it stops being a Zack Snyder film and turns into a Quentin Tarantino one.
Ritesh: My final thoughts can really be best summed up via the following:
