Speaking as a fan of
Man Of Steel and of
Zack Snyder’s work in general, I am baffled by what I saw tonight. In one regard, it certainly feels like they delivered on the promise of that incredibly awkward and franchise-minded title. But I’m not sure how a filmmaker whose work normally speaks to me as clearly as Snyder’s does could deliver something that feels this confused, this impersonal, and this corporate. It is a confounding mess of a movie, and while there are individual sequences that I enjoyed as isolated moments, it is almost breathtakingly incoherent storytelling. Characters do what they do because the movie requires them to do it, not because they are behaving like characters at all. There’s no sense of voice to the film. I have no idea what I should think about Batman or Superman or
Wonder Woman based on what I see here. They are all apparently blanks who simply exist to react without thought or purpose to whatever stimuli is presented to them. Structurally, there’s something fundamentally broken about the way this thing’s been built, and I have a feeling it’s going to take some time to really pull apart all of the mistakes that were made.
One thing’s clear: I don’t want the
Justice League this movie promises.
Simply put, I don’t care. I don’t have any reason to care about what’s being promised here. This is the least compelling franchise come-on since
The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and as the closing credits concluded, I was relieved to see there was no post-credits scene. The entire movie feels like a closing credits scene already, winking and elbowing us to let us know we’ve got so many more movies coming. It’s hard to call something an Easter Egg when the movie stops cold to spotlight it, so it feels more appropriate to call these digressions outright previews. As previews go, though, they left me less interested than ever in what they’re selling, so I guess I’d have to call this a failure.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t hate the movie while I was watching it. More than anything, I was indifferent to it. I found myself looking at it more as an exercise than as a movie, and that’s a problem. At no point did I get drawn into it as a movie. If anything, I’d love to hear someone who has no history with comics try to describe the story of this film after they watch it, because I’m going to guess they would be absolutely baffled by it. I can tell you that as someone who is intimately familiar with all of the source material they’re drawing on here, I am still baffled, but at least I can tell you what they’re doing. I can’t tell you why they’re doing it at any given point, and that’s a major problem. Or rather, I can, but it’s not because of anything that you see onscreen. This is, more than any movie I’ve ever seen, a response to the responses to the film that came before it, and in answering his critics, Snyder has undone everything genuine about
Man Of Steel, selling out his characters and undermining the point of that movie. Before I went to the press screening tonight, I revisited
Man Of Steel, and I walked into
Batman v Superman with that film’s tone fresh in my head. Maybe that’s why I’m so confused by what I saw. It felt like the work of two radically different filmmakers, and it felt like the second filmmaker didn’t like the work of the first filmmaker at all. It’s like
Batman Begins was followed up by
Batman and Robin.
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