Review of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) by Iampattyjack — 28 Mar 2016

This movie should have been called Dawn of Justice: Batman v Superman.

A huge part of the movie is nothing more than a buildup for the eventual Justice League flick. I’m alright with buildups, but not at the expense of the movie you are showing at the time.

The storytelling is produced well with at least Batman’s intentions being apparent.

He sees Superman as a threat to the earth and believes nobody should hold that kind of power, less they fall to the dark side. This is presented extremely well through Bruce Wayne and Batman as characters. Ben Affleck owns the role and it shows. He put a ton of work in to pull off the character.

The plot initially centers around Superman dealing with Earth’s population being uneasy about whether or not he is there to help and how he is affecting society. Bruce Wayne is at the secret forefront of this after seeing destruction first hand during the events of Man of Steel.

We get to see the two heroes face off in person once before their big fight. The initial face-to-face is fine but done at an awkward time. Batman is chasing illegal weapons smugglers when Superman just kind of stops him to tell him he shouldn’t want to fight him. Then they just let the bad guys get away.

Superman, you are supposed to stop the bad guys. In fact why even stop Batman? He was chasing the bad guys.

Also you might have heard, Batman kills people in this flick. Process that for a moment.

As much as I love the character of Batman, his entire philosophy is thrown out the window. He still uses non-lethal means for the majority of his fighting, but all of a sudden is fine with mowing down people and exploding occupied vehicles with guns on the Batmobile. Why is that acceptable but shooting someone with an assault rifle is not?

I really liked the first 50 minutes of this movie. There is some great drama between Luthor and government officials which has a great culmination and is my favourite scene in the movie.

The showdown between Batman and Superman is also very well done, it’s not a huge planetary fight which makes sense because it revolves around Batman taking advantage of Superman with a variety of tactics. Both gain the upper hand and build up some great tension in a very gritty battle.

The end of this battle is when the film gets much worse.

The entire reason why the fight ends is completely half-baked and involves shoehorning in Lois Lane. Not to mention in roughly two minutes the characters go from literally being about to kill one another to uttering lines saying they are friends.

Within five minutes this film throws out the last 40 minutes of character development.

The rest of the film involves the two heroes trying to fight back against Luthor’s plan, culminating in a three on one fight with Wonder Woman getting involved.

Remember when this was Batman vs. Superman?

That’s the core problem, the movie feels split in two. The first part does a great job of building up the hero face off, but then brings in a plethora of needless characters so the good guys have someone to fight and become friends leading up to the Justice League movie.

The movie should have been Superman and Batman fighting it out with strings being pulled by Lex Luthor until in the final fight, they eventually realize what happened and stop inches away from killing one another.

Instead we got that, but within the first 60 minutes along with various subplots, followed by the rest setting up Justice League and utterly wasting villains.

Yes, Doomsday was an absolute waste of a character that didn’t deserve the final 20 minutes treatment with little buildup.

I haven’t even touched on the filmography, which is another big issue I have with the film and dark DC comic book movies in general.

Every shot was so grey it almost looked black and white. Accompanying the lifeless colour was overly artistic shots that looked pretentious. There are too many shots of locations with branches out of focus in front of the camera. It doesn’t look edgy when you do it multiple times.

Zack Snyder knows how to do these artistic shots, but that doesn’t mean he always should. To me it gives the impression that he doesn’t know how to make people care, so he tries to make the shot look as interesting as possible.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice adheres to the title for the first half of the movie, until it goes off the rails and forgets telling a story in favour of hyping a sequel.