Ok…. I saw it….. So.... I went into this movie wanting to love it... thinking I was gonna hate it.... and I really really don't know what to think right now.... Like, I know what I thought about pretty much every disparate part of the movie, but I don't know if I can form that into one singular "This is what I think of this movie as a whole" summation.... I'll try to collect my individual Thoughts and see where that takes me. Gonna start with the positives and get into the negatives a bit later, also, I'm gonna try to be spoiler free for a good chunk of this and then spoiler tag the rest, before that expect no more than what is shown in the trailers.
I think I can safely say.... I LOVED 1/3 of this movie.... The last 1/3 of this movie was excellent. Like, really loved. Like, barring a few (admittedly bigish) nitpics, the last 1/3 was pure fanservice. It isn't a spoiler to say Batman and Superman fight each other in this movie (it’s the title…) and anyone who has seen the trailer has seen that moment where Batman, in the armor, uncovers the Bat Signal in order to get Superman’s attention. From the moment that happens until the end, the movie was REALLY REALLY Good…… But I just had to sit through the other 2/3 of the movie to get to it….
But, I said I was gonna focus on the positives first… so… The cast was mostly excellent. I actually overall LOVED Ben Affleck’s Batman, Amy Adams is a great Lois, my problems with Cavill’s Superman are almost entirely with the writing and for what he was given, Cavill did a fine job. Jeremy Irons was awesome as Alfred, and though she had little screen time, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman was great whenever she was on the screen. For some reason, in the first 2/3 of the movie, my absolute FAVORITE character was Perry White… he was easily the most likable character.
Again, once the titular fight between Batman and Superman happens it became nothing but Fanservice and awesome and I loved it. It was also funny that the movie went out of its way to say, several times, that the place they were fighting in was abandoned. Batman had picked an abandoned place on purpose, and Zack Snyder REALLY wanted us to know nobody innocent was dying in that final fight. It was a bit ham-fisted, but it’s ultimately a plus.
It’s not a spoiler to say Doomsday is in the movie, he was in one of the trailers, but I did like his handling. His origin is, funnily enough, Superboy’s post-crisis origin only with Zod instead of Clark laying down the Kryptonian DNA and… he has Superboy’s Telekinesis as a result. Even though, he only uses it in big bursts out his body that push people away, I thought it was a nice touch.
Now for the bad… ok….
Takes a deep breath
BATMAN KILLS PEOPLE!!!..... ugh…. Like, I’d have been fine if there was accidental collateral damage, or he didn’t go out of his way to save some thugs when they did stupid stuff and got themselves killed… like, I was fine with the guy who died because he dropped a grenade during the fight and it blew up on him. That death was on him really, not Batman, and even the final guy in that fight that Batman beat by shooting the tank on his Flamethrower. If that explosion had killed him, it would have killed the hostage too so I’d buy that the guy got out of it with some (major) burns… but both times Batman is in a vehicle (Batmobile and Batplane) he uses guns on them to shoot at people and blows up at least 3 cars with people in them… then there was the two cars he sandwiched together with a grappling hook from the car… You might be able to argue those guys survived, but the guys whose cars he shot until they exploded DEFINITELY DIED… This is NOT Batman! He does NOT kill! Contrary to popular belief, he did NOT kill the The Dark Knight Returns. He used Rubber Bullets on the Mutants, and he struggled with the concept of killing The Joker later in the story. True, he was an older and slightly more brutal Batman, and I DEFINITELY Saw that influence here, but killing is a step too far…. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that he TORTURES AND BRANDS criminals in this movie… but that’s a whole other thing….
Then there’s the tone… the movie was just overall grim and dour… This is not inherently a bad thing as Batman, for example, IS a Grim character, so on one level it works, but the movie DOES need a dose of levity in order to get us to know and care about these characters. The scenes in the Daily Planet were easily the best in this regard, which is probably why I liked Perry White so much… he brought levity whenever he was on screen, and it was VERY welcome……. I think the thing though that underscores my problem with the tone the most however is the scene at the beginning where Lois was in the bathtub and Clark comes home. It starts with Lois still shaken about what happened to her, which is understandable, but when Clark gets home he tries to cheer her up by saying he’ll make her dinner and what does it and makes her laugh is when he starts getting in the bath tub with her, without taking off his clothes, and they have a genuinely good moment…… but the music playing through this entire scene never got uplifting or happy… it maintained the sadness and bleak tone it had even from the beginning when Lois was sad, and then… it ended abruptly. Same thing when Superman saves people at one point in the movie, he goes to Mexico and saves a girl, he is shown saving a Russian space shuttle, kindof a montage of saving moments, which again were nice, but they maintained the bleak tone and dour music…. These should have been moments that embodied the hope the emblem on Superman’s chest is SUPPOSED to stand for according to Man of Steel but…. They don’t quite hit that way…. These moments in the film are few and far between and are still played melodramatically pretty much every time, again with the exception of the Daily Planet scenes… where Perry White stole every single one of them lol.
WARNING: Spoiler tagged due to actual spoiler territory, you have been warned.
! Then there’s the ham-fisted Justice League setup. I will say that… I’m sure this part was Studio Mandated, so Zack Snyder did the best he could with that requirement and… for its part, the appearances of Cyborg, Aquaman and Flash were handled…. Better than I could have expected. They aren’t established characters in the film, they each get a minute or two of screen time as videos Lex gathered of other Metahumans in the world, and although the scenes felt obviously shoehorned into the movie, they were all very good individually, I loved Cyborg’s origin for example and I AM glad they at least didn’t bog the movie down trying to explain why these people would be involved in the story proper. And the Darkseid setup…. Ugh…. Ok, this part is gonna seem extra nerd-ranty but….
! 1: HOW THE HELL did Lex Luthor know “Someone” from “Space” was coming at the end?! Will this be in the director’s cut?!?! Was it the Kryptonian Ship?!!? I must have missed where Lex got this information.
! 2: For that matter, HOW DID BRUCE know about Darkseid?!?! A running theme in the movie is these dreams Bruce has about his past, about being Batman etc… and one of them involves a totalitarian future where Superman rules the world and in it… there’s a giant Omega Sanction carved into the ground, and he’s attacked by Parademons.
! 3: It ends with Barry Allen (I believe) popping out of the Speedforce to warn Batman something is coming and telling him to prepare… then he wakes up, it was a dream…… but this was BEFORE he saw the video about Flash (as it was still decrypting when he fell asleep) so… HOW did he know who Flash was? HOW did he know what Parademons and the Omega Sanction were??!?!?! Is he Psychic?!?! Was this supposed to be coincidence?! Was it supposed to be real somehow?!?!? He COINCIDENTALLY dreamed up The Flash, who he’s never met before, Parademons, and the Omega Sanction before ever having actually met or experienced these things?!?!?!?
I won’t rant anymore about the Hamfisted JLA setup anymore as this gets even nerdier and nit-pickier but… I will say I think this movie has somehow made me like Iron Man 2 more…. I used to criticize THAT for its hamfisted Avengers setup but wow… now I know it could have been so much worse…
! One quick thing, revealing Doomsday in the trailer was a HUGE mistake…. Massive… first of all because it spells it out that the titular fight of Batman vs. Superman ends with them teaming up to fight Doomsday, and two… and again, SPOILERS, his very prescience in the film leads people like me to (Correctly) guess that Superman dies fighting him. Again, the 3rd act was all amazing, but I would have liked being surprised at those two things rather than seeing one in the trailer and calling the other based on it.
! Last thing I’m gonna talk about is Jessie Eisenberg’s Lex…. I actually thought I was going to like him based on the trailers as I thought we were gonna get a Lex who is charming and quite sane appearing in public when dealing with people, as he IS the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and that he’d go creepy/crazy when the scene called for it. I just assumed the trailers were focusing on THOSE moments as Lex IS the bad guy and even casual moviegoers know that… but no…. Lex is Crazy/creepy every time he’s on screen…. It’s a one-note performance and I don’t like it…. Like, honestly, the only time it works is in that great last 1/3 of the movie because at that point that we’re at the final confrontation, it makes sense he’d go all out balls to the wall there and let his crazy out, but there should have been a BUILD to that… we should have seen SOME sign that this guy has charisma and is a good CEO at least, even if it’s the good face of a two-faced shark… instead, we even get a scene where he talks to a party of people and… he came off as awkward and creepyish in the speech…. Ugh…. If this was part of an overall performance and some buildup had happened to it, I probably would have loved him but instead, I got a silver age comic book villain…