E.g., the baffling matter of Batman's (Ben Affleck) motivations and virulent psychopathy could have been solved with just two lines of dialogue, suggesting he retired in a nihilistic funk after his ward Robin was brutally murdered (a pre-existing subplot that the movie references visually, and then strangely ignores), and is now unretiring with bitterness and rage; a looping subplot involving Lois Lane's (Amy Adams) investigation into a conspiracy that reaches from the U.S. government to the Middle East is forgotten and unresolved, when a similarly brief handful of explanatory lines would have nicely tidied it up as a key portion of the movie, instead of a go-nowhere detour. Some of the very worst, most galling parts of the movie could have been fixed through the simple matter of not including them in the first place, the net effect of which would have been completely negligible on anything in the plot of this movie, and which would have had the benefit of trimming a 151-minute film down by ten minutes or so. I could go on and on - the script does plenty wrong, but almost without a single exception, its mistakes could have been solved with five minutes of work or less apiece.
Hard to say if this is a sign that the filmmakers were sloppy, lazy, or simply absent-minded; it's annoying, anyway, because the good parts of Batman v Superman are at least as good as the bad parts are bad, and trying to appreciate them while they're being drowned out is tiresome. At its best - mostly but not entirely confined to the first hour-or-so - this has flashes of being the best Superman move since the 1978 epic that is the ultimate progenitor of the superhero movie genre as we know it. At any rate, it is the movie that I wanted Superman Returns to be, and haven't quite gotten over yet, some ten years later: the story that finds Kryptonian refugee Kal-El (Henry Cavill), turned into a near-immortal superbeing thanks to the yellow sun of Earth (or our atmospheric density or whatever technobabble they trotted out in 2013's Man of Steel, the film to which Batman v Superman is a sequel, in one of its many guises) seriously grappling with the basic morality involved in being or not-being Superman. Batman v Superman is by no conceivable means the ideal version of this story: Cavill is a perfunctory actor, and the script, which finds Chris Terrio giving a spit & polish to a David S. Goyer original, has a dazzled, puppy-like inability to stick with one idea long enough to develop it. But for the length of individual scenes, here or there, it clicks into place: the wan expressions that are Cavill's sole good trick as an actor, alongside the artfully murky images of cinematographer Larry Fong, give the film a troubled and unquiet sense that is something, and something's more than plenty of superhero films can drum up. It's striving for a mythopoeic register that it only sometimes hits - for one thing, the script is too ready with its humorless one-liners, and it keeps undercutting the surprisingly classical grandeur of the images and music.
That is, anyway, at the level of the individual scene. Batman v Superman is pretty good at individual scenes; it has individual scenes by the handful that are the best stuff directed by chaotician and slo-mo fetishist Zack Snyder since all the way back to his 2004 debut, Dawn of the Dead. It's largely not very good at stringing those individual scenes into a complete whole. The film is trying to juggle a lot of balls, and plots go meandering into the darkness, get hastily recalled and resolved so abruptly that it's hard to tell what happened, or find themselves laid out in bland, mechanical exposition. It is easier to summarise the thing character by character than try to do anything like reconstruct the plot the way the film presents it: first, businessman Bruce Wayne, AKA Batman, is horrified by the destruction wreaked by the Kryptonian-on-Kryptonian battle that ended Man of Steel, and dedicates himself to becoming the one human who might be able to destroy the surviving alien in matched combat. The general raging nihilism he feels around all of this pushes him to take the Batman routine to nearly unheard-of levels of psychopathy. Incidentally, Snyder & Co. overcorrect to an amazing degree: apparently quite sincerely stung by the criticism that Man of Steel was violence porn, the filmmakers keep interrupting their climax with news reports and standalone lines of dialogue making sure we get that there are no civilian casualties. This is an UNINHABITED ISLAND. These are ABANDONED DOCKS. And so on. Zack knows he's been a bad boy; he is perhaps unable to fix it artfully, but the gesture is charming in its ineptitude.
Back to the plot. "Clark Kent", a fake identity that these films really don't care about in the slightest, is starting to figure out that plenty of people distrust or hate Superman, and it's causing him a lot of self-doubt; when he triggers an international incident, largely by being a selfish dick, it's the first in a chain of events that cause him to re-evaluate his whole moral code. Meanwhile, Clark's girlfriend and the sole protector of his alias, Lois Lane actually gets to be an investigative journalist in something that comes awfully close to redeeming the character and Adams's generally great performance thereof from the way she was mishandled in Man of Steel. Meanwhile Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg)...
Lex Luthor just sucks. No two ways about it. Every other performance ranges from "actually great" (Holly Hunter attempting to salvage a thankless role as a senator trying to clamp down on Superman by pretending that her character has an entire rich arc and a movie all her own) to "surprisingly damn good" (Affleck makes for a superb world-weary and bitter Batman) to "I look forward to seeing what happens when you're working with a director who has any clue how to engage with women" (Gal Gadot as Diana "Wonder Woman" Prince, who has acres of screen presence and fuck-all to do other than strike poses and model dresses). Eisenberg is a complete disaster. Remaking the chilly industrialist/genius Luthor into an internet nerd with deep dark daddy issues was a peculiar choice, but not irredeemable; playing him as a kitschy clown proves to be the single biggest problem in a film that suffers from no shortage of them. The unrelentingly dour tone the film adopts is odd and ultimately tedious, but not unprecedented (it's one of the many things it lifts from Frank Miller's epoch-defining miniseries The Dark Knight Returns), and I'm inclined to say it's even a relief from the increasingly brittle, banal quips in Marvel's movies. But it can't support a performance like Eisenberg's embrace of full camp even in a tiny role; taking that approach to the antagonist (and then attempting to walk it back in the last act, badly) is insane.
But the thing is, as the film is good only in individual scenes; so too is it really only bad in individual scenes. For the most part, the action sucks, marred by atrociously sloppy, arrhythmic editing and Snyder's indefatigable ardor for speed-ramping; but there's surprisingly little action for most of the movie, which instead focuses on Batman's increasingly messianic quest to track down Krytponite and murder Superman, or on Superman's growing awareness that he's an asshole (it's far more film noir that comic book action movie for a huge portion of its running time, and frequently a rather engaging one). There are, for no apparent reasons, dream sequences and visions; they could be sliced right out of the movie without affecting its flow or character arcs in the slightest degree. There's a stunningly awful scene in which Wonder Woman very patiently watches YouTube trailers for Justice League; it too could be snipped off without leaving even the tiniest hint that it was ever there.
The film is made out of nuggets, basically. Some of the nuggets are dismal. Some are perfectly unexceptional. A few are really great - like everything involving the harried Perty White (Laurence Fishburne, like Adams given a chance to shine after Man of Steel fluffed his character) in his attempts to keep newspaper The Daily Planet functioning in in the face of Star Report Lois Lane's increasingly brazen insubordination (like Hunter, Fishburne redeems his chunks of the movie by deciding that his character is the protagonist). Or a gorgeous chiaroscuro sidelight in a doorway, one of the most beautiful comic book shots in the history of comic book movies. Generally speaking, besides Eisenberg's unforgivable Luthor, the only thoroughly unacceptable parts of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice are the sequel hooks that make it brutally clear how Justice is Dawning, or the trivial matter of Batman v Superman - the final fight is easily the worst action sequence in the movie, as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman fight the cave troll from The Fellowship of the Ring, somehow rendered in CGI worse than we had in 2001. But it's also the point where Hans Zimmer & Junkie XL's engaging, motif-driven score (the new Batman theme is sold, the Superman theme remains as great as it was in 2013, and the new Wonder Woman theme - which I'm pretty confident is Junkie XL's major contribution - is a stone-cold triumph of electric guitars and militaristic bombast). And while it's ugly and cut like a fever dream, I do like how the final fight is so low-stakes and character-based: Luthor hates Superman, that's really all that it's about. No world domination, nothing.
Anyway, it's a messy sprawl with much that is exhilarating and much that is completely repulsive, and it's a completely unfulfilling and unsatisfying experience which I found myself enjoying anyway almost the whole time. It wants to be a lot of things, and it keeps on falling short; but it's not afraid to go Very Big in its attempts to return to the idea of superheroes as modern mythology, and God help me, I kind of dig that.
6/10
[Updated 4/3: switched from a Right-Aligned Poster of Dismissal to a Left-Aligned Poster of Recommendation. It wouldn't do to start being cowardly about my opinions at this point in my life]
Tim, I think in your heart if hearts you wanted to give this a 7/10. As a bona fide Snyder-hater, I have to admit I found this highly entertaining, which is more than I can say for Age of Ultron. It's too bad the script was so piss poor but that's a critique you can lob at most comic book movies.
ReplyDeleteNah, I walked out of it pretty sure it was getting a 6, and I'm happy with that. In my heart I did want to give it a left-aligned poster, but the pushback would have been tedious.
ReplyDelete100% agreed that it was a more rewarding sit than Age of Ultron.
Zack Snyder is now a major influence in my life. I'm not even gonna attempt to thread these musings into a cohensive paragraph.
ReplyDelete- What an aggressively insular, parochial, uninclusive film! Every positive that Kevin Smith outlined on his video review is basically what is destroying cinema. The idea that you reduce this artform to little more than a DVD bonus disc is infuriating. There are whole pivotal scenes that not even your knowledge of Man of Steel can serve to enlighten us about. To answer your opening gambit, that is how you end up with titles resembling UN resolutions. Why are we accepting this? Imagine if there were whole key chapters in a novel that required you viewing a separate stageplay? Don't know about you Tim but I go to the cinema to see a story with a beginning, middle and end - not supplementary material for comics someone else has bought and read.
- I liked Ben Affleck too! A lot. He's made me reevaluate my theory that his performance only ever equals the strength of the material. Here his world-weary expressions elevate the little of the movie that's still comprehensible. He's maturing as an actor. Like my relationship to DiCaprio, my view of him as a boy is giving way to him becoming a man.
- Isn't Amy Adams the only main cast member nominated for an Academy Award? I have to disagree with your assessment. I thought she was wasted in a plot that could have been easily excised, in hokey newsroom scenes and in MJ-level cringeworthy perils. Sorry.
- Years ago when I watched early rounds of The X-Factor, I would instinctually turn away from the screen whenever someone entered in a corona of confidence only to then enagage in the most brutal feline asphyxiation. So it's a no from me, Jesse. That I had to avert my gaze in a public place is nigh-on unforgiveable. Jim Carrey without jokes? No thank you.
- I can't bring myself to hate this film. They were at least trying to do something a bit grand in theme. I also admired how nasty the proceedings grew in terms of the treatment of Congress and most shockingly of Martha Kent. It was just sunk by the utterly deplorable direction of a creature who thinks the most interesting thing about Bruce Wayne's parents dying is the way the pearls in a necklace can explode with the power of a tiny sun. So much time devoted to style and exposition dumps for actively damaging plot threads, while having the audacity to claim your movie is about religion. No, that comes from interesting people having interesting converations about interesting value systems - not having someone repeat the word "God" 151 times. I have never felt Christopher Nolan's absense more than now. Really puts everyone's incessant whining about The Dark Knight Rises into perspective.
- There is a film critic around at the moment - intelligent sentient being - passionately arguing that this is Stanley Kubrick's comicbook film… Bueller? Bueller?
5/10. Though in my defence that score can only be truly appreciated once you've seen my long running ice dancing show.
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At some level, I appreciated that it was trying to ask big questions, but it mostly felt like they were there in an attempt to make it feel important. They were forgotten as soon as there was something more interesting to do.
ReplyDeleteI think the movie's best joke was the quite possibly unintentional interrogation of the idea of superhumans. By Elastigirl.
@ the concise statement,
ReplyDeleteI'll go on record as saying that I think BvS is a better movie than The Dark Knight Rises simply because it's more entertaining. Both are equally rife with plotholes, poor editing, poor acting, and poorly-thought out themes, but BvS is more visually arresting with comprehensible action scenes. If you want to say that Eisenberg's Luthor tips the scales in Rises favour, I'll thank you to remember Mathew Modine's performance and the outrageous camp excesses of Tom Hardy's overwrought performance.
One of the things I have come to love about this movie- wholeheartedly love, as opposed to the actual movie, about which I am ambivalent- is reading/watching people's reactions to it, and what they thought worked and didn't work. People calling Snyder a corporatist hack has become a favorite sport for some, but I doubt somebody who actually was simply a bad filmmaker wouldn't generate half so much discussion. You'd expect a movie involving two of the most iconic comic book characters ever would be both popular and controversial, but this movie is literally breaking people's brains and it's kinda awesome to watch.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, I agree with Tim on most all counts, and think the 6/10 is fair. It's a gloomy mess of a film, but I've been thinking about it a lot and it's brought me to something of an epiphany* about Zack Snyder: I don't hate him anymore (if I ever actually did) because I think I finally grok where he's coming from as a filmmaker, and it's actually a more substantive place than someone who just produces a rote superhero movie and calls it a day. Snyder, when you get down to it, is into suffering; into struggling against forces both internal and external to achieve justice, freedom, redemption, or what have you, and of eventually achieving that goal through sacrifice. In every film he's made from 300 onwards (with the possible exception of that owl movie, which I've never seen) he's examined that idea to one degree or another, and it's obviously informed his entire idea of what heroes are to him. Here's a snippet from an interview of Snyder on the themes he was working with for this movie**:
"Interviewer: The so-called no-win scenario is the only way to test a hero’s rules and ethics.
ZS: And it’s the only way to move forward with a hero, because otherwise the hero drowns in the mire of his own morality, in that he never can go forward, he never can evolve. He becomes an allegory, he’s a lesson, like, “This is the way to be, kids,” not a real story. He becomes like one of the Ten Commandments. He’s not like an actual [person]. "
In other words, he doesn't want anything to do with an unconflicted, effortlessly happy Superman or a Batman who kills no one and fixes everything because he's smart and has money; that wasn't the story he wanted to tell, and it's a story other people have told successfully, and I dig that. And I also dig his shot composition which is not only pretty but references a whole lot of classical art; it's obvious he longs to give this story and these characters the weight of a mythological epic.
But he still doesn't know how to tell the stories he wants to; like Tim said, the movie is overlong and extremely clunky, with dangling plot threads and scene transitions that only a butcher could love. He also has continually teamed up with writers (including that arrogant hack Goyer; all of the hatred some people reserve for Snyder, I hold for Goyer) who aren't really good at incorporating the themes Snyder wants to examine with the story and (extremely wooden) dialogue, and who generally also fail to balance Snyders vision with the works he adapts and the vision they had. This all adds up to a bloated and barely coherent mess with exciting visuals, a fascinating failure. I'm still going to see where Snyder goes with this, but I'm not going to fight anyone who doesn't.
*And I sorta mean that literally actually, as I had just woken up when I came to this conclusion and was kinda like, "wow."
** Full interview is here (warning: Forbes): http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2016/04/01/interview-zack-snyder-discusses-themes-behind-batman-v-superman/#6a873b874df6
No mention of the stupidly high mentions of God in the movie, or the fact that it killed a Hillary Clinton look-alike? That part alone almost made me think that this movie is ridiculously right-wing. I doubt that they were attacking Clinton's militarism given the scene in Africa (not the Middle East) where they repeat all the racist tropes against dark-skinned fanatical Muslims that we have seen in many movies in this century alone. If anything, they were attacking her perceived dovishness.
ReplyDeleteAnd oh God, Lex Luthor. Who the heck thought Mark Zuckerberg fused with the Joker would be a good villain? Seriously, who?
I really give this movie a lower score, and I hope that this, alongside Civil War which also looks like it will be a complete mess, will be the downfall of the superhero genre, a dumb explosions-driven mess of a genre full of silly plots and materialistic and consumerist logic.
I love the line "gesture is charming in its ineptitude." I almost laughed in the theater when I heard those news reports. It's like they already had their script and they didn't want to meaningfully alter it so they added the lines later in order to address the criticisms.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I just thought it was tedious, and boring, and confusing, and ugly. Sure, it presents the surface-level image of wanting to address Superheroes as figures of Modern Myth, but it has nowhere near the ability, or even really the actual interest, to engage those ideas in any sort of meaningful fashion, and so instead they just feel like a fig leaf to justify its relentlessly heavy-handed Grimness, the sort of thing a 13-year-old finds Mature and Cool, but is unbearably annoying to everyone else (the psuedo-Wagnerian pounding that acts as Batman's apparent motif in the score is absolutely hilarious in exactly the wrong way).
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, good effing luck figuring out why basically anyone in this movie is doing anything; the very CONCEPT of motive feels super-murky to this story, and even when you get what a character wants, they CONSTANTLY act in ways that feel counter to that supposed goal. The titular bout is rendered completely inert by virtue of both parties' dislike/distrust of the other feeling less like an actual clash of ideologies and more like petulant children who don't want to share their toys; both are given variations on the theme that they dislike the other's abuse of their power, but since both are seen CONSTANTLY abusing their power, it just feels silly and sloppy.
And then there's the simple fact that the story spins its wheels, going nowhere and doing nothing, for what feels like an eternity. 90% of what happens prior to the final twenty minutes is basically so much empty nonsense that circles back on itself, goes nowhere, and contributes in no meaningful way to the actual story, but the movie devotes a tremendous amount of its time and energy to them anyway.
Which is ultimately the chief sin: this movie doesn't really HAVE a story, and it drags its non-story out far beyond its ability to distract you from that fact. Meanwhile, Snyder's normally-reliable visual style is almost completely absent, and only surfaces in the smallest bits and pieces toward the end in service of two back-to-back big fights neither of which is able to generate any actual excitement by virtue of how generically they're ultimately staged.
Sorry, Tim, but I think you're being far kinder to this movie than it even remotely deserves. To my eyes, it's an absolute train-wreck, top to bottom.
@Travis Earl
ReplyDeleteModine was forgettable. Forgettable is an acting masterclass against the epileptic Nic Cage freakshow, Eisenberg tried to pull. And I stand by Hardy's performance - the amount he does with just his eyes was remarkable. In fact, I'm surprised you didn't find Marion Cotillard intolerable in the final motions. She was a real downgrade from her role as Mal in Inception.
I feel that Wonder Woman's watching the videos was the whole point of the movie; to explain there are meta-humans, and that working together they can deal with villains to come. It's not a perfect movie, but your score is indeed perfect, nothing more or less. I am definitely hooked to watch WW's solo movie, and now that often-creative Znyder is out of the picture, they can bring someone who delivers more stable JL movies in the future.
ReplyDelete@ The Concise Statement
ReplyDeleteYou're right. Einsenberg's performance is unforgivable. I was more than a few glasses of wine deep when I wrote that. I still stand by my original assessment of Rises vs BvS. Expectations might have played a part in my reaction; I expected a masterpiece with Rises; for BvS, based on the reviews I expected it to be another Suckerpunch or Batman and Robin and found myself being like "it's actually not so bad". By the end of the movie I was thoroughly enjoying myself despite my prejudice against it and Snyder.
I’m surprised anyone would even compare this to The Dark Knight Rises, which was not only successfully entertaining throughout, but made a clear statement (against Occupy Wall Street). I don’t agree with Nolan’s politics, but I will applaud him for having something to say and creating a story that speaks from his heart. BvS, on the other hand, wants to touch on issues but has nothing to say about them.
ReplyDeleteThe scene where Superman flies down for the congressional hearing, for example, wants to connect Superman to the issue of illegal immigration, but what does this film want to say? That we should be more welcoming, because Superman is such a great guy? That we should fear illegal immigrants, because Superman causes such harm? The film isn’t clear on what it thinks about Superman, much less what it thinks about illegal immigration.
During that whole scene, I just kept flashing back to the much better congressional hearing scene in The X-Men. There, it was crystal clear Singer is calling for more tolerance, even as he lets his villainous Congressman articulate a solid argument against tolerance.
Let's not derail the comments into a referendum on Rises but I would say that Nolan's anti-occupy message is equally as murky. In Rises, Gotham is taken over by terrorists who then free criminals that go on a rampage. It's not the proletariat spearheading a populist uprising that winds up getting out of hand. So Nolan tried to have it both ways as well unless he was saying that the Occupy movement was a secretly run by terrorists who wanted to act like a fifth column to bring down America.
DeleteGonna have to disagree on this one. I liked some of the visuals and can't really fault any of the actors, but the script is such a disaster--much too long, with three movies' worth of storylines, characters that prattle on endlessly about Themes without doing hardly anything, and two idiotic asshole protagonists--that the whole thing just felt largely unpleasant.
ReplyDeleteI wrote more here, but suffice to say that the movie completely botches its titular conflict by giving Superman a needless existential crisis, and then hingeing the big fight on a stupid misunderstanding.
Based on this, though, I want a Zack Snyder adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead like you would not believe.
Strange. I thought the first forty-five minutes, give or take, was absolutely fucking terrible and the movie gradually improved as it went on.
ReplyDeleteI have it 5/10, for the record.
It's interesting to see the commentariat as mixed in opinion as the review itself, since everyone was looking for a bloody slaughter of a takedown. All these positive(ish) opinions keep making me think "maybe I'm being too hard. Maybe it's just a case of ambition exceeding grasp?"
ReplyDeleteAnd then I remember: Inexplicable bathtub sex, eeeeevil brown people in "Naimobi, Africa", nobody seems bothered over a ï¼£ongressional committee blowing right the fuck up, countless instances of "why don't you just SHOOT THEM already?", even more of "does this world not remember that ordinary bullets do nothing to Superman?", a quarter-billion dollar budget that can't even mask where the shitty CGI kicks in, a score that would make John Williams say 'could you turn it down a little?', and fictional geography that says the distance between Gotham and Metropolis is precisely as far as it needs to be for the plot to happen, and I fall back on the side of "nope, just bad."
The super-important thing to remember about The Dark Knight Rises - it was into post-production when Occupy Wall Street came into being. A lot of what makes its politics seem confuddled is because it had no intention of being about the actual real world, it just got unlucky. Or lucky, hard to say. And for the record I do think its villainous plot is a morass of confused impulses, trying hard to make an inherently anti-populist, redbaiting scenario into something that has no political commitments. Movies with prospects for a billion dollars worldwide do not have the luxury of making political commitments.
ReplyDeleteThat, plus the clear sense that there's an hour of story missing, most famously in the "you can sleep off a broken back" and "Bruce Wayne hitchhikes from central Asia back to Gotham" edits, those are things I most especially hate about that screenplay. But beyond that, I don't think I could ever go as far as calling TDKR worse than BvS.
Meanwhile, Sean's epiphany is terrific and I love it. At any rate, calling Snyder a hack is a lazy mistake that completely ignores how, no matter how terrible they are (and some of them are so terrible), he's putting every inch of his heart and soul into them. He's basically Michael Bay v.2: he unashamedly knows what he loves, he can stage a tremendously beautiful frame but can't stitch shots together, and he has an almost comical disregard for even the most basic kind of narrative functionality.
But the Dark Knight Rises wasn't even a concept when the bailouts began and class-warfare started heating up. At what point in the film-production OWS crystallized as an expression of that anger is less relevant (though it does seem mighty convenient that one of the best scenes involves the villain literally occupying the stock-exchange and denouncing corporate greed); Nolan saw the anger building and clearly had something to say about it.
ReplyDeleteZach Snyder, ONTH, sees plenty of topics of interest, but never engages them; he merely acknowledges their existence and moves along.
After the March preview, I never imagined I would be in a position where I was less enthusiastic about BvS than Tim was, and yet here we are.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, I share in Tim's appreciation of Snyder's "willingness to go Very Big"; I confess to a certain weakness for works of art that are self-conscious in their pursuit of significance and scale. I would compare my appreciation of Zack Snyder's DC films to my appreciation for the Xenosaga series - they are, in many ways, grotesquely flawed and the product of a multitude of conflicting impulses, but the ambition involved makes them more interesting to think and talk about than any number of inarguably "better" works.
I do think that the storytelling here is incoherent to the point of madness, and that the essential absence of motivation or causality swamps whatever good qualities the film possesses - if we're making the comparison to The Dark Knight Rises, I feel TDKR is a story with some holes in it, whereas BvS is a big hole that intermittently coalesces into a story. But accommodating for that, I would take Snyder's wrongheaded fever dreams over the impersonal, corporatised blandness of e.g. The Amazing Spider-Man films any day.
@Thrash 'Til Death
ReplyDeleteYou just nailed that. Particularly on the hole:story ratio.
I almost entirely agree with this review. Except (1) I thought Perry White was kind of annoying and unnecessary, merely reminding us of how fun he can be in other contexts but not actually being fun, and (2) I kind of liked Eisenberg, actually. He's a little obnoxious, but he's the bad guy--we want to hate him. And he's the only one making any jokes. They're not funny, but they liven things up. And the action scenes were solid enough for me.
ReplyDeletePlus I like the idea of a superhero movie that actually has Themes and Images in it, even if they're kind of incoherent. Marvel doesn't even try.
To me, the message of TDKR was clear: leaders who urge you to take part in a populist uprising don’t care about you and will lead you to your doom. If Nolan didn’t want that message, he could have softened it with one easy change.
ReplyDeleteThere’s a scene where Salina and others are looting a mansion, and Salina sees a family photo. She suddenly realizes to her horror that the wealthy homeowners were people, and she feels bad for them. Here, she seems to be learning the lesson Nolan wants us to take away, that the wealthy should be free to enjoy their wealth. Imagine how different the film would be if that scene were removed and, in its place, we had a scene where Salina and others rejoice in seeing Gotham’s wealth finally spread out more equally, the poor and desperate no longer suffering so badly.
Not only would that soften the anti-populist theme, it would strengthen the film’s narrative. After all, Bane’s stated plan was to give the people of Gotham hope before destroying them. Why not show the people enjoying some hope? The answer, I think, is because Nolan didn’t want to depict a populist uprising having any benefits, even temporarily. So instead he depicts the results of this uprising as Salina feeling guilty and every other sympathetic character running, hiding, praying for salvation, and finally fighting back.
Well, again, it's insinuated that it's criminals who are doing the looting. It's not really a populist uprising. Besides, it's a huge plot contrivance to believe the people of Gotham would join a populist uprising led by a masked maniac that holds them hostage with the threat of nuclear annihilation. It's just weak screenwriting that adds in a muddled subplot to an already bloated film to argue that the one percent should be free to exploit the poor.
DeleteThere's actually a common denominator between Rises and BvS that explains why both films are a hodgepodge of underdeveloped themes and plot points: David S. Goyer had a hand in developing both films' screenplays. Hopefully the DC cinematic universe jettisons his influence entirely; it would go along way to making everything more coherent if they hired someone competent to develop their stories.
There's just so damn MUCH at play here - from how DC is going about building its filmic "Universe" (especially compared to how Marvel is doing the same) to the filmmakers' struggle with the previous film in the series, that HOW BvS is bad and IN WHAT WAYS it goes wrong are absolutely fucking fascinating to me. Why anyone would spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a film with so much esoteric comics-based nonsense that is absolutely unnecessary to this film (to the point of making it both interminably longer and barely coherent) and barely necessary to subsequent films, is beyond me - as is the fact that Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman is easily the best thing about the film but everything that makes her so is confined to the last act, completely upstaging this film's supposed reason for existing.
ReplyDeleteI am so utterly confused that a product on which so much future product and revenue is based would be allowed to be this unfocused, this strained, and ultimately this alienating.... but at the same time, how could it be otherwise, since so much future product is based on it?!? WHAT a conundrum.
I don't think that I feel comfortable calling BvS a BAD film - it's just mostly a NOT GOOD one. So much about it just feels WRONG as opposed to awful, which is not something that I usually feel watching most "not good" films. The things it does well I have trouble caring much about, frankly, but the things it does poorly and not-so-well are fascinating to me, making me want to get to the bottom of why those choices were made because they're so baffling. To put it another way, I've become much more interested in this film as a piece of product than I am about it as a film, and this is the first time that's happened to me.
I generally agree with you on a lot of this, however, I did kind of wonder about your comments RE: Batman's motivation. If the sight of Robin's costume let you to fill in gaps about it, did you NEED somebody to say it? Snyder is obviously trying to do as many things as possible on a visual level, for good or ill, and I thought that one worked. This Batman so far over the edge, in part because Robin is dead, and I think the film is brutally aware of that - the entire coda seems to be related to Batman feeling he went to far, and the entire thing feels so much like an allegory of the NeoCon reaction to 9/11 that I can't think it's coincidence.
ReplyDeleteIt's totally a huge, yet glorious, mess. Count me up with the group that admired at least the attempt to grapple with something larger. Also, yes, better than Ultron. I'll take 3-4 lines reminding us that no civilians were harmed, over an entire sequence of loading every, single possible casualty onto buses. Even flying buses.
I'm going to avoid the Rises discussion because I'm the guy who 100% seriously thinks Batman & Robin was a better movie than Rises.
ReplyDeletePartially I think Rises was overrated, partially B&R massively underrated...
I became remotely interested in this at the exact moment I watched the deleted scene( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-MUzvASr8s )
ReplyDeleteand suddenly realized there was no way I could ignore a film which could cut out a scene with a crazy space monster and not have the plot significantly affected.
I was about to comment on your lack of balls for deciding that you can't recommend it, only to find that you have put your Poster back on the left hand side. Ah bless.
ReplyDeleteAs for me, I'm definitely putting it on the Bad side, but that's where I get confused. I think Daniel put it most succinctly when he said, "I've become much more interested in this film as a piece of product than I am about it as a film." I walked out of the movie feeling that I would not have enjoyed it as much if I was sober. Yet, as I discussed the movie with more and more people, I became very much alive talking about its baffling choices. For stretches at a time, the movie hits a sort of baseline competence that is rudely interrupted by moments of sheer ineptitude that would never have gone past Disney's stringent test marketing (Between this, Jupiter Ascending and Fury Road, Warner Bros. surely is a wonderful place for auteurs to go batshit.)
I just want to add that I saw this on IMAX, and the sequences chosen for the super-large format are indeed just as baffling as many of the other missteps the movie takes. Yes, the titular fight was shot on IMAX film and it looks pretty good on it. I guarantee you if the Doomsday fight was filmed the same way, we would have had significantly less chaotic editing and much much less shakycam. And the less I say about the harbour car chase, the better for me.
But the other sequences chosen for IMAX are bizarre. Why, of all the scenes, do you choose that particular dream sequence? Why that disastrous ending sequence? I might not be paying attention, but I think the opening credits, with the nth re-enactment of the Waynes' murders, is also shot similarly.
Can we talk about that ending? SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
It gave me horrendous flashbacks to Star Trek Into Darkness, stealing an iconic moment from its source material without earning it one bit, coming far too late in a long-ass movie, with assholes for protagonists, for anyone to care. Adding the fact that we already have the Justice League movies announced, and that is all its emotional resonance robbed (the last frames of the movie in particular are a BIG BIG MISTAKE.) The cherry on top of the shitcake is that they have the gall to score the funerals to Amazing goddamn Grace.
Oh my God, when the dirt started to float, I wanted to set the screen on fire. Such a pointlessly, obviously wrong decision.
ReplyDeleteShould have read more comments before I replied.
ReplyDeletempjedi2- That gets us to quite a thorny question of adaptations and what audience a given property is meant for. As a person who's seen Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, I understand exactly what resonances Snyder meant for that shot to have, and I have to be more honest here than I was in the review proper: I think part of the reason I liked the movie, insofar as I did, it was because that shot gave me all I needed to know about Batman's motivations and mindset, and so the whole "why is Batman acting this way? None of it makes sense!" complaint all over the internet just didn't apply to my experience of the movie.
But I've seen Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. How many others have? Certainly not as many as had seen Batman v Superman by the end of its opening weekend - probably not even by the end of its opening Friday. So is it okay if you bury important psychological background for one of your two protagonists in an image that's onscreen for what, three seconds, and which requires specific knowledge that not all of your audience is necessarily going to possess (I suppose it's reasonable to assume that the audience knows the Joker is Batman's nemesis, and that Robin is Batman's ward, so it's possible to put 2 + 2 together; but it's a real short moment if you're not primed for it)? As a person who understood the import of that moment, I greatly appreciate the subtlety and trust in the viewer it suggests. But I'm also a long-time Batman fan, and it's really not fair to expect a $250 million tentpole to be a fans-only proposition. I don't think.
It is, at any rate, a question I've been rolling around for a week now.
Travis- Yeah, as long as Goyer has any kind of creative power, the DCCU is never going to be more than just barely okay. Dude's career has been almost unrelentingly awful except where Jonathan Nolan bailed him out.
I find Return of the Joker an odd touchstone for that (although great film)
ReplyDeleteIt's from, like much of the lines taken completely out of context throughout this movie, The Dark Knight Returns originally, albeit without the spray paint. It's been a constant presence in the comics since just as Death in the Family. Return of the Joker was referencing the same things this film did. The idea that Joker getting Robin is why Bruce retired before Dark Knight Returns (it didn't, incidentally, lead to his retirement in Batman Beyond. That was reaching the point where he had to pick up a gun to win a fight. So, yeah, this movie didn't borrow much from BB.)
But Jesus Christ all the lines lifted straight from comics but in completely wrong contexts... Fucking hell this movie.
The point pretty much stands, though. Dark Knight Returns (and I believe, you but I don't remember that plot point at all - haven't read it in over a decade) is still not something that most of the movie's target audience has read.
ReplyDeleteNo, but they were quoting lines from it repeatedly throughout the movie.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure it's the only reason Clark got nuked (although the point of that in the book was to explain how he was weak enough Batman could beat him, so...) The line about the empty wine cellar (taken from when Bruce was retired as Batman) the "we've always been criminals" line, the rookie cop panicking and pulling the gun on Batman (though he didn't actually fire in the comic. And it was the first thing Batman had been seen in ten years so it made sense.) Etc etc etc.
Reading DKR is almost like tagging the first draft for this movie, especially if you also have a copy of The Death of Superman sitting around.
There's a really good animated version of Returns from a few years ago, although I confess I don't love DKR as much as most comic nerds. Always preferred Year One, personally.
"Or a gorgeous chiaroscuro sidelight in a doorway, one of the most beautiful comic book shots in the history of comic book movies" Which shot is this for those who didnt know what Chiaroscuro meant until you said it?
ReplyDeleteChiaroscuro is a mix of strong lighting and darkness in a way that uses the resultant shadows to define shapes and textures. In the case of the shot I have in mind, the camera is pointed at an open door from inside a pitch-black room, and the character enters with the light falling on the back-right of his head, so it wraps around little fingers of light that define him as basically just an outline.
ReplyDeleteIt says a lot about BvS, probably, that even though I remember the shot well enough that I could draw it, I can't remember where in the plot it occurs or which superhero is the one being lit. Probably Batman.
I can think of several shots like that but the phrase "pitch black" narrows it down to two (assuming Batman is the individual in question).
ReplyDeleteWas it a) the "evil Superman" maybe-dream sequence where Batman goes into the truck which claims to be supplying him Kryptonite, or b) Batman's break into Prison to interrogate and maybe brand an incarcerated Lex in the denouement. I'm trending towards B but it's your shot.
There were some things I enjoyed in this film, I couldn't get over how haphazardly the film is edited. The sequence of scenes feels almost random at times; just jumping from place to place and from character to character with no rhyme or reason.
ReplyDeleteAt one point we cut to a brief probably 20 second scene of Perry looking for Clark in which he frustratedly asks where he is; "does he click his heels and arrive in Kansas or what!" One would assume we'd cut to Clark flying to Kansas, but nope, there's like 3 other scenes, and the next we see Clark he's standing in the road in Gotham waiting for the Batmobile to bump into him. Why is that Perry scene even there? By the time we see Clark again, surely the audience has already forgotten about it (The big, narratively pointless batmobile chase happens in the interim).
The movie is filled with these kinds of these little scenes, that just seem to be checking in on the characters to fill time, or catching up on the variety of pointless subplots that go nowhere (for instance, Lois' bullet investigation-- if it were cut from the film, what would be affected). The fact that there are six-- SIX!-- dream sequences that could be dropped in pretty much anywhere, and at least nine news-broadcasts that characters watch to provide exposition (that's not even counting the montage of pundits over the montage of Superman saving people, nor those related to the Doomsday fight-- I lost count by that point) only adds to this problem.
I think the most egregious example of this kind of random editing is during the build-up to the title fight. We see Batman waiting on the roof with the bat signal, Lex tells Superman that he's kidnapped his mother, Superman is angry, the big battle is coming, the music is like building and building, and then RIGHT when Superman tells Lois he's going to have to actually fight and possibly kill Batman, he flies off and then--
We cut to Gal Godot in a softly-lit hotel room wearing a sweater and opening her laptop. She watches videos about three members of the Justice League, none of which have anything to do with the story. This takes five minutes.
--THEN we cut to Superman arriving in Gotham, and the two title characters confront each other.
The Justice League stuff feels tacked on and pointless to begin with, but of ALL the places to splice that scene in, what possible reason would you have to put it THERE? I'm honestly astounded that a movie which cost half a billion dollars to make and market could be so shoddily put together.
Oh the editing was an absolute fucking disaster. I had people on a comic book fan group on Facebook attacking me for saying to day it was poorly edited, and the only concussion I could come to is there literally don't know what film editing is.
ReplyDeleteTim, have you seen the Ultimate Edition yet? It's such a strong improvement over what was dumped in theaters, I think it deserves its own review.
ReplyDeleteBeen so long that it doesn't matter, but following up on Brian's point -
ReplyDeleteBvS was literally announced at Comic Con (I think) using dialog from Dark Knight Returns. The "I want you to remember the man that beat you" speech. It's been unabashedly an unofficial DKR adaptation from the very beginning.
Here's the comic image of the Robin suit in the glass case, without graffiti:
https://s22.postimg.io/7svxmz20h/bla.jpg
It's also a really, really fucking bad movie. The extended version is a bit better, but the only way this can be actually good is if you remove about an hour and a half from the running time. All the pointless subplots and dream sequences that go nowhere. I'd actually be curious to see a good fan edit of this. I think you can make a pretty damn lean 1h 45m version utilizing the extended cut as the source.