Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice

‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’ is no classic. Let’s be completely honest about that. It’s as flawed as ‘Man of Steel’ was. Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. The things that don’t work – in particular matters pertaining to Lex Luthor – are hugely awful. The things that do work – in particular matters pertaining to Diana Prince – are as iconic as any fanboy could wish for. The film is a mishmash, and narratively wonky. But does it deserve the outpouring of hatred that the critics have almost unanimously delivered? In my humble opinion, no.

Which isn’t to say that, having emerged from the cinema with a general feeling of I enjoyed that more than I thought I would, I’m going to fashion this review into not just an apologia for ‘B vs S’, but reappraise it as a misunderstood classic of the genre. No, sir. It would be remiss of any reviewer to gloss over the film’s problems, just as it’s lazy of the majority of them to join in the hurling of brickbats.

In the interests of objectivity and balance, let’s acknowledge the faults. First and foremost, the characterisation of Lex Luthor is terrible, partly because Jesse Eisenberg is miscast but mostly because the script (a) gives him some of the most thankless dialogue any actor could find himself saddled with, and – more problematically – (b) fails in establishing any credible motivation for his increasing sociopathic behaviour. And, no, his oft-repeated variations on a theme of man’s victory over God doesn’t really cut it since there’s no moment in his character arc that leads him to this mindset. In fact, he doesn’t even have a character arc. It’s as if the first script conference settled on Lex Luthor as villain based on the rationale that everyone knows he’s the villain anyway so let’s just wheel him onstage and give him villainous things to do and we won’t need to bother with any of that tedious exposition business.

Likewise, the titular Batman/Superman conflict is predicated on very little. Sure, there’s the effective opening sequence where the finale of ‘Man of Steel’ is restaged from Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck)’s perspective as he navigates rubble-strewn and dust-choked streets in an attempt to facilitate his employees’ evacuation while Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod twat each other in an orgy of city-wide destruction and wait a fucking minute, since when exactly was Wayne Industries based in Metropolis? So, yeah, the ultimate superhero anti-hero, a man who was wreaked his fair share of havoc in order to take down bad guys, suddenly goes all antagonistic on Superman because he wreaked havoc in order to take down a bad guy. 

Meanwhile, Clark Kent pursues a media campaign against Batman for little other reason that it gets him off the sports desk. Though why he spends his time at the office getting all moody and embittered when he’s shacked up with the uber-foxy Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is anybody’s guess. Ditto why Lois continually puts her life in danger chasing down stories when she’s just as loved-up herself.

Finally: the flashbacks/dream sequences. They’re piss-poor, on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Really, really piss-poor.

And if you took ‘B vs S’ on the 500 words above, the critical kicking would be easy to understand; in fact, you’d probably feel like grabbing a burning touch and allaying yourself with the village lynch-mob. But said course of behaviour would leave one blind to the pleasures of the film. To whit:

Ben Affleck as Batman. I’ll cop a guilty plea, right here and right now, to face-palming and groaning when I heard the news of Affleck’s casting. And by the same chalk I’ll hold my hands up and admit that I was wrong. Trudging through the metaphorical treacle of a script that can’t even establish a fundamentally plausible motivation for his character, Affleck nonetheless knocks it out of the park in his portrayal of a Batman who is middle-aged, world-weary and descending into an embittered psychosis. This is a not just a Batman who, prior to the titular stand-off, has to force himself through a masochistic training regime and build an armoured suit that it’s effortful even to walk in (in fact, there’s something about seeing the un-suited-up Bruce Wayne pounding at a truck tyre with a sledgehammer that presents an anti-iconography: the training montage actually strips a superhero down to a new personal low), but Affleck is just as acute in his characterisation of Bruce Wayne, showing a jaded multi-millionaire going through the motions of what society expects of him; even the playboy lifestyle and womanising seems forced, to the point where Alfred sneers at him that there’s little hope for a next generation. 

Subject of whom: Jeremy motherfuckin’ Irons. Hot on the heels of his fantastic turn in ‘High-Rise’, he reinvents Alfred to his own specifications within seconds of appearing onscreen. Retaining the Jeeves-like pragmatism of the character’s previous incarnations, Irons adds a level of barbed irascibility and the result is magnificent. In fact, I’d give Irons the Agitation of the Mind “man of the match” award if it weren’t for …

… Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. Introduced in oblique fashion, with much of her narrative arc and motivation remaining enigmatic for most of the running time, Gadot isn’t given much to do but look slinky and seductive as Prince and wield a sword in menacing fashion as Wonder Woman. Given the script’s total inability to treat a female character as anything other than a plot device, Gadot could easily have come adrift in the melee, her character mere eye-candy in the CGI-driven morass of the final act. But, by God, a former model who I wouldn’t have previously credited as having any claim to cinematic iconography doesn’t just make something out of nothing, she creates bona fide moments of mainstream cool.

Other plus points: Snyder’s commitment to a dark vision of the material – slammed by the critics for humourlessness – yields some genuinely striking moments: the film begins and ends with funerals (Snyder shoots funerals with the same quasi-pornographic delight that Argento at his best reserved for death scenes); Wayne’s contact with a Russian mobster takes place at a grungily ugly bare-knuckle boxing competition; Superman’s coercion into appearing at a congressional hearing is the culmination of a subplot about political showboating/careerism and is full-stopped by a hugely cynical punchline almost calculated to plug into contemporary America’s terrorism fear-factor. Snyder plays it equally dark and cynical in terms of classical allusions, throwing in Icarus, Parsifal and a painting in Luthor’s apartment that’s basically a combination of Gustav Dore and William Blake; there’s even a dream/hallucination sequence where Kevin Costner reappears as Clark Kent’s mortal step-father, staged in such a manner that short of inserting a title card reading “and my father on that sad height” the nod to Dylan Thomas couldn’t be more explicit.

And this is perhaps what ‘B vs S’ offers as an apologia for itself even in the face of its harshest critics. In an era where superhero movies – specifically those of the Marvel ilk – have come to define mainstream cinemagoing, Iron Man and Captain America might flirt around the edges of prescient storylines about the corrupting influence of power and the fear of the unknown, but you’re highly unlikely to stumble across a classical allusion or a debate on the very redundancy of heroism; whereas Snyder, carrying on the dialogue he established in ‘Man of Steel’, batters furiously and incessantly away at the very concept of the genre even as he embraces its most fetishistic excesses.

Man of Steel

Right then, I’ve steeled myself up (pardon the pun) and I’m going to see ‘Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice’ on the big screen later this week. There’s a certain car-crash mentality to this decision. I can’t even call it morbid curiosity, because curiosity suggests an open-mindedness, a spirit of inquiry rather a morbid confirmation of what one knew already. Yes, I know ‘BvS: DoJ’ is going to be downright flawed at best and an abject piece of shit at worst. But after a fortnight of reading reviews brimming with bilious hatred, I need to see it for myself. If only to experience the zeitgeist. The last time the collective critical consensus went against a major tentpole release – Gore Verbinski’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ – I opted out of seeing it theatrically. Two years later, I caught in on DVD and my immediate opinion was “yeah, whatever, not great, not terrible, nice train chase”; then, with a jolt of realisation and complete bewilderment, “wait a minute, the critics hated on it that much?”

So I’m going to tootle along to my local multiplex, lay my money down, invest two and a half hours of my life (three if you count the wanky ads for piss-weak foreign lager and aspirational lifestyle bollocks), and revel in the mangled wreckage and streaks of blood on the side of the highway. We’re talking schadefreude, folks, and you don’t need to speak German to dig it. Because tonight, thank God, it’s Zack Snyder and not me. 

But before I go and see ‘BvS: DoJ’ and before I hammer out my review of it in a Lagavulin induced haze, there is the necessary context of ‘Man of Steel’. So here goes.

Cards on the table: I liked Richard Donner’s ‘Superman’ with Christopher Reeve. The sequels were shabby, and got worse as the franchise lumbered on. Bryan Singer’s ‘Superman Returns’ was one of the dullest big-budget studio films I’ve ever seen, and I’m including the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ sequels in that, so nyah-nyah-naa-nyah-nyah. Innit?

Cards on the table part two: I’m not that keen on Zack Snyder. His ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake was better than it had any right to be, but nothing else in his filmography has lived up to its promise. ‘Sucker Punch’ came closest, and at least had the feel of a work by an auteur, but I still came away from it with a feeling of “meh”.

So I didn’t have much hope for ‘Man of Steel’. And maybe that negative expectation worked in its favour when I finally got round to seeing it. There was the opening sequence with Russell Crowe as Superman’s dad and a nerdishly unholy dose of sci-fi porn – glitzy, borderline incoherent and thunderously unsubtle … but it did the job. There was the montage of Superman-in-waiting, from his childhood as stepson to a couple of all-American farmers (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), to his troubled, peripatetic twenties – a welter of swaying cornfields, tornadoes, schoolkids in peril and oil rig fires … bludgeoningly obvious stuff, but all in context and effective enough. And. Then. Snyder. Went. Fucking. Apeshit. 

No stand-in for tarnished post-Nixon patriotism à la Donner’s classic; no heavy-handed Christ parable à la Singer’s snore-fest (although Snyder sneaks the odd visual metaphor for crucifixion). Nope: what we have in ‘Man of Steel’ is a superhero for a jaded, paranoid and politically compromised age where the entertainment value of superheroes is in stark contrast to the swathes of destruction they’d cause if you rooted them in an even remotely realistic scenario. This is the single greatest achievement of ‘Man of Steel’ and Snyder was given a kicking for it.

Hold that thought while we consider a heavily adumbrated précis of the film’s narrative: the infant Kal-El escapes Krypton in the midst of a putsch orchestrated by General Zod (Michael Shannon); he struggles to be accepted on Earth; the moment he discovers his lineage and truly embraces his powers as a force for good, Zod turns up looking for him and the US military first arrest and then cravenly hand him over to Zod in an attempt to avoid an intergalactic ass-whupping. When it becomes obvious that Zod is going to royally fuck over the planet and use its ruins as the basis of a new Krypton, Superman (Henry Cavill) saves mankind anyway because … well, actually, this is where the film loses me. Maybe because his step-parents were nice. Maybe because he quite fancies investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams). Maybe because he just wants to prove everyone wrong.

Got that? America – and by extension the world – doesn’t give a flying one about Superman. Scenes of a handcuffed Superman and a heavily armed US force handing him over to Zod constitute the bitterest comment on extraordinary rendition that I’ve seen in any mainstream American film, let alone a superhero flick. Snyder ramps up the deconstructive cynicism with Superman’s climactic smackdown with Zod and his forces. Whereas Marvel have given us epic city-wide battles, portals between worlds and all manner of futuristic technology with barely a civilian casualty, ‘Man of Steel’ stages its almost interminably wearying slugfest in a recognisable environment where a downtrodden populace are going through the motions of working, travelling and making ends meet. The carnage that ensues, excessive and CGI-driven though it is, takes on a weight and a brutish aftermath that the Marvel films gloss over. Whether it was intended or not, Snyder and his creative team seem to be holding up a mirror to the audience’s demands for violence and destruction and asking them to judge their own slavering reflections. Michael Powell pulled this stunt with ‘Peeping Tom’ back in 1959 and it all but ended his career. Snyder isn’t exactly standing in line at the labour exchange right now, but he certainly caught hell for it.

‘Man of Steel’ is a flawed but interesting film. Big concepts bubble beneath its surface, but are subjugated in favour of iconography – grim and bloody iconography but iconography nonetheless. Potentially fascinating characters are given glimpses of an interesting narrative arc then unapologetically sidelined, with Adams and Laurence Fishburne (as Lois’s hard-ass editor) coming off the worst in this respect). And it’s all so grungily self-important. But it strives to locate the concept of the superhero in a world that’s so morally, politically and socially compromised that even the offer of unconditional heroism is met with cowardice, fear and an executive order as regards the use of weapons – and the conclusion it arrives at is dark. The original big-screen iteration of Superman was the hero America needed at the time; the one in ‘Man of Steel’ ends up as compromised as the society he protects.