Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Review
Seeing the holy trinity of comics come together in a live action film has been every DC fan's dream since comic book characters started making the leap to movies. How does it fair? Lets take a look.
Warning lots and lots of Spoilers. Don't read if you have not seen it.
It starts out with a short recap of Man of Steel that adds Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne to the mayhem caused by the battle between Zod and Superman at the end of that movie. Bruce is caught in the destruction, and saves an employee, and a little girl form falling debris.
Then the movie feels the need to tell us Batman's origin story again. Because, maybe someone forgot how Batman came to being since the Nolan Trilogy ended.
Eventually, after around 30 minutes of setups, and explanations it gets around to its main plot.
This movie again gets caught up in what other comic book movies have suffered from in the past, and that is too many villains, which does not allow for proper setups to all the villains and one unavoidably feels like it was just plopped in there to offer up action. Spider-Man 3 suffered from this, Amazing Spider-Man 2 suffered from this, Fantastic 4: Rise of the silver Surfer suffered from this. Adding more villains is never the answer.
The movie in reality gives us 3 villains. Yes I'm counting Batman as the first one. Because he is throughout 75% of the film a direct antagonist to Superman, more so than Lex is in that time span.
Lex is heavily suggested to be plotting against Superman all through the movie, but we don't really see it. All we see is an egotistical kid with delusions of grandeur, trying to get the military and the government to do what he wants. Which is to give him access to Zod and his ship, and the green mineral found in the crash of the device Superman took out in the Indian ocean in the previous movie. Its only 30 minutes from the the end when he follows through and eventually Lex Luthor becomes an actual threat to Superman, by kidnapping Clark's mom and forcing him to fight Batman.
For the rest of the movie its Batman facing off against Superman, and shown prepping to face him. He's the bad guy here. He's distrusting of Superman for no real reason and acts on it. That's fine. Batman is supposed to be distrusting. He does need to research and get to know Superman before trusting him. But he doesn't do it at all. The Detective part of Batman seems to be ignored in this movie.
The Movie is Batman v Superman, so stick to it. We don't need extra antagonists. We want to see Bruce try to fight him, lose, and realize superman is not a threat
So Batman and Superman fight, in a very bland fight to be honest. Batman has some gadgets he's prepped to take him down, including a kryptonite spear. They fight, he tells Superman he's too dangerous etc... The fight goes on for way too long.
Then after almost 2 hours of movie, and 30 minutes of fight he just does a 180, and all is fine between them. Its like he just read the script that said, and now Batman is best friends with Supes, so they can take on another villain, End scene. The worst part is, it looks like the writers were going to make Superman just shrug off Batman's attempts and continue to try to talk to him, but then decided: "Lets have Batman break a sink over his head" for no reason, after which he suddenly just stops with no explanation, unless you call having their mothers share a first name an explanation. Then its like we're BFFs now, I'll go save your mother. You stop Lex. Bye!.
A couple other things happen, and we then get a final scene of Batman and Superman now joined by WonderWoman fighting Lex's Doomsday, made from the corpse of General Zod, and a bit of his own blood for some reason. No explanation is given as to why this is required or works, or why it creates Doomsday out of Zod.
This was really unnecessary. Lex had been plotting against Superman through the entire picture, and Doomsday is simply tossed in with a throw-away line from Zod's ship's computer about the process being banned in Krypton. No explanation as to why Zod's body turns into this, nothing about why we should suddenly feel this thing can take on Superman.
If you've read the comics you know what Doomsday can do but he was setup through several issues and went through several heroes before getting to Superman, he was built through out many issues as a real match to Superman and as a real threat. Here, and if you have not read the comic books and have no idea who Doomsday is, we're just expected to believe he is a threat simply because the movie says so without supporting it at all.
In my opinion having Lex build his all so traditional armor, with shards of the Kryptonite chunk he was trying to import would have worked much better, would have made Superman less of a threat in a more organic way, and would have allowed WonderWoman and Batman a bit more involvement in the fight. As it was they were pretty much just spectating. More so Batman, as WonderWoman does get in a few hits here and there.
It would also have been enough to show the armor being prepped at any point in the movie, a 5 second scene and we get he's building an armor. He owns a tech company, he's researched the aliens, he can do this, and its easily and believably explained.
But instead we get a scene where he is just able to control the ship, we don't know why, and without any explanation he immediately knows how this device works that will create a monster for Superman to fight.
At the end of the day, the movie which would have been a great setup for the future, is left sort of disappointingly lackluster as a sequel to Man of Steel, as a Prequel to the Justice League Movies, and as a standalone movie.
Again a few changes here and there, and the movie could have been great. Doomsday had no business being here at all. Why they felt they needed to kill Superman, is beyond me.
I will give kudos to Jesse Isenberg for a really fun and out there portrayal of Lex Luthor. Its not your typical Evil Businessman portrayal, but it does eventually get across how big of a threat he can be. He is very smart, and is very creepy at times. It was a lot of fun to watch him. He really steals every scene his in, specially with Ben Affleck's and Henry Cavill's cardboard-ey line deliveries at times.
All in all, a disappointing movie, that was hyped a little too much in my opinion, and could not live up to expectations even without all the story driven issues it has.
3/5.
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