06 June 2016

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

5/10
This was not as downright bad as I expected it to be but it's still an extremely confused, holy mess of a film. In fact that's partly why it's so frustrating, because good ideas, scenes, dialogue, etc constantly rub up against bad ones. It has weird contradictory problems - it's very long and is constantly throwing plot exposition at you but at the same time it feels underdeveloped and half-baked. There is enough about Affleck's Batman that's different from Bale's so as to make him intriguing as a character, but not enough to make his motives throughout the movie feel believable. Jesse Eisenberg did the best he could, but his Lex Luthor was a boring cliché of a character from start to finish. On one hand, I liked the idea of Luthor pitting Superman against Batman, but I don't think it was executed terribly well. We're never given much of a reason to care about why this is happening, and the idea of two of the biggest superheroes in the world being manipulated and acting like children was more lame than anything. The battle scenes are great, although the final one with Doomsday which felt very messy.
That's kind of how the whole movie went for me - anything done well was almost immediately undone or at least marred by something else done poorly. It became very evident that the starting point for this project was "let's do Batman vs. Superman - anybody have any good ideas for that?" as opposed to "I have a good idea for doing Batman vs. Superman". Zack Snyder has to take it all on the chin for this failure but it's also evident that enough things went wrong to suggest this was the fault of the many.

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