Those of you hoping for a review of ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ on this website will probably need to look elsewhere; I’ve never been particularly interested in seeing Zack Snyder’s take on the Batman/Superman rivalry, to say nothing of the fact that I’ve always felt that giving the two a “rivalry” was a misguided take on both characters to begin with. And Chris is tweeting that he has no particular interest in seeing it either. Unless you want to start a Kickstarter to pay for my tickets, I will let other people have All the Opinions on this one.
Oh, and hey, they do! The movie is currently hovering around the 30% mark on Rotten Tomatoes, which is…let’s just say Not Good. Further, the reviews themselves have been filled with phrases such as “like putting your head into a beehive for 2 1/2 hours”, “rectum-puckering garbage fire of a movie”, “blunt, humorless and baffling”, “overstuffed and preposterous”, and my personal favorite, “a ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie scored by a choir that sounds like it’s being drowned in lava.” (That last from NPR. I didn’t think they got that mad about anything, up to and including Trump.)
So basically, the movie is not reviewing well. And Warner Brothers is right up against it–‘Justice League Part One’ begins filming literally within days, and this movie is going to be seen as the direct precursor to that one. Meaning that if audiences agree with critics, well…they are going to have to drastically retool ‘Justice League’ pretty much on the fly, starting with the decision of whether to keep Snyder.
On the other hand, if the movie does well (Thursday box office was great, but those numbers were always going to represent people who went to see the movie on faith) then it could be another ‘Transformers’, a critic-proof franchise that draws in major box office despite getting bad reviews. Warner Brothers can probably live with that.
So this weekend is going to be very important. Because BvS has to have a showing that will put it on track for the kind of 1.5-2.0 billion dollar box office that WB has every right to expect from a movie that finally puts two of their most iconic characters onscreen together. We’re probably talking about something in the $400-500 million dollar range, at a minimum. Anything less than that and you will see panic. And I mean panic; WB has left themselves almost no time cushion to absorb any lessons that might come from the success or failure of BvS, so if they find themselves in a crisis of faith, they will have to pull the trigger quick on any changes they want to make.
And they may make changes anyway. Some of the pre-release articles have hinted that not everyone up top buys into Snyder’s vision; if there are executives with itchy trigger fingers already, they may decide that it’s not worth the risk that audiences will stay away from another Snyder joint and bring in someone else to direct. Sometimes it’s all about how the person signing the checks feels about the movie. (Just ask ‘Superman Returns’, which was ultimately a modest success for the studio, but which alienated the top brass at Warner Brothers.)
Why am I so interested in this? Because with ‘Batman v Superman’ not sounding like anything I want to see, I take my entertainment where I can find it.
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I’ve got no plans on seeing BvS:DoJ. Nor will I be disappointed not getting the Seavey or Bird reviews of it. I will feel a deep aching, loss in my very being if we don’t get a Flapjacks collection of liveTweets…
I’m going to wait to see it Tuesday. With it being Easter, how long is BvS’ “opening weekend?”
Saw it. I’m giving it a C-grade. Really doesn’t do much for the reputation of DC movies, even with a good performance from Gal Gadot. I’m hoping they get their act together in future movies . . . but if they want to pull the plug on the Justice League movie and settle for doing Wonder Woman, I wouldn’t be surprised.
One of the brighter notes . . . no after-credits scenes. Just so you know.
As bad as Zack Snyder’s movies are, at least he isn’t as loathsome as Bryan Singer.
The only thing that tempts me to see this is Wonder Woman’s big-screen debut, and that doesn’t tempt me enough. Though I’ll certainly Netflix it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tries to blame it on giving screen time to WW instead of more to Real Men.
I went and saw it, and this makes me feel like I should apologize, because it was unrelentingly bad, and I contributed to it having what is on track to be a record-setting opening.
Consider this a spoiler warning.
Okay, the first and most egregious sin: Batman kills between, conservative estimate, seven to ten guys in the movie. He does it using guns. I’m not talking accidental shit, either. I’m talking “Batman coolly lines up a shot and cuts a pair of dudes in half using a machine gun.”
You have completely fuckin’ missed the point of Batman, you fucking horses ass. And I don’t let Affleck off the hook here, either; man had rewrite privileges
The relentlessly deployed quotes from Dark Knight Returns weren’t helping, especially since they’re divorced from their original context and, again, reflect that the man deploying them absolutely missed the point of said original context.
And that’s just the goddamn Batman. Superman has the precise same problems he had in Man of Steel, which is that he acts like a vaguely detached, puzzled alien to Earth who barely grasps human morality, but everyone treats him like he is in the comic, where he’s an absolute goddamn paragon of same.
The plot is a muddled mess. Batman’s motivation for provoking a deliberately thought-ought murder-fight with Superman is left almost completely unexplained. Said murder-fight happens when Superman goes to Batman for help, and instead of landing and instantly saying “Lex Luthor has kidnapped my mother and demanded I murder you to release her”, a course of action basically guaranteed to elicit Batman’s sympathy, he decides the best way to ask for Batman’s help is to kick the shit out of him and repeatedly demand his surrender without explaining himself. Because if there’s one thing Superman stands for, it is using force first and diplomacy last, right?
The actors all do their very best with the materiel they’re given but they don’t have much to work with and it shows. Amy Adams in particular struggles, just as she did in Man of Steel. Jesse Eisenberg is actually engaging as a new take on Lex Luthor, one of the few bright points.
God, I hope not, but at this point it is leaning in that direction.
Although where this might hurt them is downticket. The MCU movies have been so strong that they can make something like Ant-Man and have a built-in audience even with a modest marketing push and none of their marquee stars in it. Warner might not be able to do the same thing with their own downticket movies if the ones up top aren’t strong.
At least, that’s what I hope happens, because if BvS is indicative of the level of quality we can expect, this franchise deserves to fail.
@Murc:
What. The. FUCK.
Seriously? Even Frank fucking Miller’s overblown Republican fantasy sequel to TDKR doesn’t go that far.
I wasn’t particularly keen to see this one before, but now I’m going to be actively avoiding it.
(ETA: And honestly? I would’ve been totally okay with a fairly straight-laced re-telling of TDKR. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised how disturbingly right-wing it’s politics are, but it’s still a hugely important evolution of the genre, and given a more nuanced director, could be handled without pandering to either side of the political spectrum.)
Yes, seriously.
This isn’t like, say, when Batman led the Gotham PD on a high-speed chase in the Nolan movies, where you would watch it and go “there’s NO WAY some people didn’t die during that; he’s flipping police cruisers over like they’re Hot Wheels cars!” but you can at least pretend like he wasn’t actually doing murders.
This is the Batmobile and the Batwing both packing military-grade ordinance.
This is Batman juking the Batwing around the corners of buildings, lining up the shot, and cutting a pair of dudes in half with high-caliber rounds.
This is the Batmobile aiming machine-gun fire into the gas tanks of trucks so they explode and flip over and Batman revs the engine and zips through the wreckage action-hero style.
This is Batman grabbing a rifle, firing off a quip, and pegging a round into a flamethrower that makes a guy burn to death horribly five feet away from him.
This is Batman mutilating people he apprehends by branding the bat-symbol into their flesh like they’re cattle.
There’s a reason I listed it as the first and most egregious sin of this movie. Zack Snyder is apparently one of those guys who thinks Batman would be awesome if he were more like the Punisher.
The one saving grace of BvS is that the trailers are so incoherent, my five-year-old son wasn’t even aware that Superman and Batman were fighting. Because he was very confused and upset by the Civil War trailer, and I was not looking forward to another conversation about why two of his favorite superheroes were beating the crap out of each other.
I’ll admit, this whole thing was (almost) unrelenting garbage. Wonder Woman’s screentime in no way makes up for the many deficits, but does briefly cause a relenting in terms of garbageness.
Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor was… awful. I tend to find that an action movie fails the hardest when there’s no need for a hero to rise to the call when a villain is overcoming them. Jonah Hex fell prey to this – tough as nails bounty hunter vs. octogenarian in a wheelchair – and this hardly rises above that standard.
The writing is somewhat less than compelling. In a two and a half hour film, there were approximately two and a half jokes. I know that the DC editorial decision was to have their film universe be oh-so-serious, but it felt stilted and unnatural. I could understand the ‘Batman with machine guns’ motif, but only if the rest of the film felt very Golden Age, which it did not. Tim Burton’s Batman killed people as well… but I digress.
There’s so much in this film that seems to be demanding that another film exist to justify it. Wayne Manor is in ashes: how? Why? Sure it burned down in Batman Begins, but we’re pretty obviously not borrowing from that continuity, and even if we were, they rebuilt it. Don’t worry about explaining it: the movie sure as hell doesn’t. It’s just background noise, like all pretense at a plot beyond ‘Batman and Superman fight each other’, as written by a 12-year-old fanfiction writer.
In truth, that’s not fair to twelve year old fanfiction writers. It was more like four or five different writers, hopped up on Iron Age comics, decided to write a movie together without actually talking to one another.
I rather liked it. It is definitely a different take and a different look than the Marvel model.
But then again, I kind of love how out of sheer love for the work of Frank Miller, the film goes out its way to reverse everything about the Dark Knight Returns.
I thought all the actors did a good (Eisenberg) to Excellent (Cavill and Adams) job.
I’m OK with being a minority opinion on this one.
I saw BvS and enjoyed it as well.
It suffers in some spots from “Iron Man II” syndrome in trying to create starting points for other films to build on, but overall it is much better than the critics have said.
Since we’re spoiling things, it seems like people are fine with Batman killing people in other films (Burton’s, Nolan’s) but have picked this one to draw the line at.
I want to see it some day, but getting to a theater is hard these days due to parenthood, and it wasn’t quite a high enough priority even before I began seeing the reviews. So I’m almost definitely not going to bother until it’s out on DVD.
Reading about this movie, and watching Agents of SHIELD (which I’m still watching but not excited about), and Legends of Tomorrow (which is on our household bubble), makes me think that I’ve hit the point where just being a live-action superhero story isn’t good enough any more. You know, when I was younger, all superhero stuff except for the two Michael Keaton movies and some of the actual comics was definitely for kids. The Christopher Reeve series had its charms but was pure Silver Age, the Joel Schumacher Batman movies were… unique, the cartoons pre-Diniverse were pure Saturday morning fare. But then we got the X-Men movie, which was true to the comics, serious, studded with Oscar winners, and not half bad. And X2, which IMO was even better. And the Spider-Man movies, which had ups and downs but were likewise good. And Iron Man introduced the first live-action shared universe worth mentioning. And the Avengers was a great team movie. And the Nolanverse movies were great movies on their own and notably faithful to the source material.
But there have been a lot of stinkers in between, and faithfulness to the source material hasn’t correlated well with quality as a movie, and that streak began 16 years ago. I’m taking superhero movies qua superhero movies for granted now. I want a good movie or TV show that happens to be a superhero movie, not the other way around.
@UnSub:
Since we’re spoiling things, it seems like people are fine with Batman killing people in other films (Burton’s, Nolan’s) but have picked this one to draw the line at.
In fairness, plenty of people complain about this. To be exact, “mainstream” critics may not have complained much about Burton’s Batman killing people, but I’ve definitely seen geeky critics complaining. And Nolan’s Batman officially didn’t kill anyone except in very exceptional circumstances. (I don’t remember if Dent counts in the second movie? In the third movie, the villains of that might count, but a nuclear bomb is usually regarded as adequate excuse.) People have complained about how implausible that was due to how reckless he was, but officially, his hands are clean. Whereas this Batman apparently pulls the trigger himself several times.
Eh, it was alright. It’s ridiculously dark, but some of the action sequences are OK. That said, I thought Man of Steel was alright in the theater, but not sure it holds up now.
Lex was weird: is his whole anti-Superman plan because he thinks he might be a threat, or because he saw some alien thing, a “dark side” perhaps, and failed a sanity check? (I don’t usually consider Luthor insane, but evil, petty, and intensely selfish.)
I do prefer my Batman to not be a straight-up killer, but I accept there are other interpretations. The Batman of the comics is different from any Batman of the movies, all of which shapes yet differs from the Batman in my head…is this what religion is like?
@Un Sub: Can’t speak for everyone, but I walked out of ‘Batman Begins’ absolutely railing at the mushy inconsistency of Batman’s “I don’t kill” policy. “I don’t kill–now watch me flip these three cop cars! I don’t kill–ooooops, was that me setting off your entire stockpile of dynamite? I don’t kill…but hey, watching you die is totally a different thing.” It was the biggest sticking point for me, and the reason why I really prefer TDK.
And in his “Remedial Batmanology” series of columns for Comic Alliance, Chris Sims covers the Burton Batman movies’ flaws better than I can. And yes, he includes “Batman just straight up machine guns a bunch of guys” in his complaints. Synder is by no means the first guy to get shit about this.
I went to see this on Sunday and wasn’t expecting much, due to negative reviews of it, but was willing to give it chance. In the end, I thought it wasn’t that bad. Sure, it may not have been incredible, but I’ve seen worse (Daredevil, Spider-Man 2, Fantastic Four 2005)
I would have to say that the thing I disliked the least was Lex Luthor and his long luxurious locks.It’s hard to take someone seriously as a villain when they’re acting like Jim Carrey as the Riddler in Batman Forever 90% of the time. I’m surprised there wasn’t bite marks in the set.
Something that could have been expanded on was Batman’s background, not counting what everyone knows. My theory is that he had started out as a hero, but became more violent after the Joker killed Robin. I have little to back this up, but it would go to explain Batman’s motivation. Side note: I didn’t recognize Robin’s costume while I was watching the movie since it was so dark.
As was mentioned before, Superman acted like a doofus. The fight could have been avoided if he had of fought defensively and said “I know I was a dick before, but I need your help.” No, he tried reasoning once and then went straight to punch-you-head-off mode. Aslos, I felt the arty way some scenes were filmed, like the dream and Superman’s rescues, was a little much.
“And that’s just the goddamn Batman. Superman has the precise same problems he had in Man of Steel, which is that he acts like a vaguely detached, puzzled alien to Earth who barely grasps human morality, but everyone treats him like he is in the comic, where he’s an absolute goddamn paragon of same.”
This pretty much sums it up for me. Superman acts like he’s only being superman because of some vauge notion of that’s what he’s supposed to do. However, he dosent really understand why or even want to be superman. More or less he feels compelled to play the role because his parents instilled it in him. He’s clearly emotionally unstable and has zero desire to be a hero. I couldn’t help but feel as I was watching this movie like I was actually watching a prequel to mark waids series “Irredeemable” in which a superman like hero is slowly worn down by the failings of the world around him until he becomes unhinged and becomes his worlds ultimate villain.
Just coming back afterwards, it appears to have definitely NOT achieved the 1.5-2B box office.