Sensory Overload: The Movie begins with
deceptive quietness. The first scenes are a rehash of Batman’s origin story –
the mugging in the alley, that scene from Batman Begins where he falls into the
cave, the first dream sequence, where Bruce is lifted up by the bats into the
air. In a well-publicised attempt to make Man of Steel’s
widely-criticised orgy of destruction into a meaningful plot point, BvS has
chosen to make Bruce’s presence at ground zero his motivation for killing
Superman. The presence of world-ending terraforming engines and evil
Kryptonians who Superman was fighting against should surely mitigate against
such an uncompromising judgment, but this version of Batman has no nuance; his
catchphrase is lifted directly from Dick Cheney –
‘if there’s even a 1% chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as a
certainty’.
Other
things this version of Batman does include killing people outright – we see him
cause innumerable explosions which engulf henchmen in flames, but when he has
the chance to shoot a man to save Superman’s mother, he chooses to shoot the
man’s flamethrower tank, because, in Zack Snyder’s
words, “Of course, I went to the gas tank, and all of the guys I
work with were like, ‘You’ve gotta shoot him in the head’ because they’re all
comic book dorks, and I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be the guy that does that!” In
the same interview, Snyder explains that Batman killing by ‘proxy’ is
acceptable, just not directly - unlike Superman, who's fresh from snapping a
neck in Man of Steel.
Showing
that he learned his lesson from that film, Zack Snyder overcompensates by
having multiple people clarify (in a distracting, obviously-shoehorned way) that every location of BvS’s high-speed battles is unpopulated. The message: no
collateral damage. Showing he learned little else, Snyder refuses to portray
the most quintessentially heroic character in popular fiction as heroic. Every
time Superman saves someone in BvS, he's either dour-faced or
grimacing, and shot in slow motion with grim lighting. He hovers above
pleading flood survivors but the film refuses to show him helping
them. His heroic efforts are cast as the reluctant duty of an unwilling
saviour. Taking over from his bafflingly amoral father, Superman’s mother
assures him: “You don’t owe this world a thing. You never did”, before Jonathan
Kent himself reappears in another runtime-wasting dream sequence to tell his
son a story about a time he accidentally diverted flood-water from his own farm
into a neighbour’s and all their horses died. The message? Don’t do anything,
because it will always have unintended negative consequences. Superman smiles
perhaps once or twice in this film, and is kept to a trim 43 lines.
The second billing is telling.
This
is Batman’s film, which, sadly, doesn’t mean Batman’s character is explored. He remains
grimly determined and vicious throughout, and the spotlight given to him is
mostly spent on unnecessary dream sequences which bash you over the head with
their obvious metaphors. Bruce is lifted up by bats in the cave. Bruce looks at
the graves of his parents as they seep blood and a bat-monster leaps out of
them. Bruce is a lone bastion of resistance against a fascist warlord Superman;
Bruce beats the latter’s goons in a bafflingly-choreographed fight scene where
men with guns choose to try and hit him with their guns instead of using them
to shoot. Substantial time is also spent on a subplot about hacking into Lex
Luthor’s data, which reveals a cache of impeccably-curated sneak-peek trailers,
each with their own superhero logo, letting you know that the Flash, Aquaman,
and Cyborg will be coming to theaters soon. The brazenness of inserting these
advertisement-cameos into the narrative is almost funny.
The plot of the film is, at best,
shaky, relying on all the right people behaving idiotically – both Batman and
Superman make no effort to communicate or resolve their differences, with
Superman hypocritically taking exception to Batman being a vigilante just like him, and ordering Batman to stand down, while Batman wittily retorts that he'll make Superman bleed. Jesse
Eisenberg’s tech billionaire Lex Luthor is shrill, manic, and extraordinarily
annoying as he orchestrates the plot to make them fight by involving the CIA, a
Senator, Congress, a survivor of the Metropolis disaster, and the Russian mob,
in a confusing whirl of moving parts which Chris Terrio’s abysmal screenplay
fails to clarify. The first hour of the film is a plod from one plotline to the
next, with scenes following each other simply because they must – no attempt is
made to edit the film so it has an engaging pace.
Confusion suffuses the film, from the
plot to character motivations (Lex’s reasons for opposing Superman change from
fear of absolute power, to a desire to profit from metahumans, to resentment
over childhood abuse, to being a puppet of Darkseid) to the action. The fight
scenes are afflicted with constant use of shaky-cam, endless cuts without rhyme
or reason, ill-lit battlefields draped in smoke which obscure visibility, and a self-indulgent feast of lasers. A chase scene involving the Batmobile and a
truck convoy passes without a single establishing shot to show the relative
distance between the cars or their locations. The constant spatial delirium of
the action scenes renders their special effects bombast pointless. It becomes
an abstraction of blue/pink/brown blurs surrounded by bright lasers smashing into
architecture, arranged haphazardly by hyperactive editing, framed
headache-inducingly by a violently shaking camera.
Snyder is usually defended by citing his visual style. He may be a complete failure on the textual
level, but at least he has verve, at least he composes bold images. So, in
his own way, he’s an auteur, unlike those studio-controlled hacks directing
Marvel films. BvS surely has to be the film which kills this
argument. It's constantly dark, with almost every image first being leached
of colour and then put on high contrast so your eyes can hurt while you squint
to make out the details. The action scenes are nearly-impossible to follow or
derive enjoyment from thanks to his directorial ineptitude. When he constructs
an image for the purpose of metaphor, it's so laughably obvious as to make his
double-profile shot of Clark and Jesus from Man of Steel seem
nuanced. He uses slow-motion constantly, on sights as unnecessary as Bruce’s
overcoat unfurling as he walks to the Wayne mausoleum or the cannon salute at a funeral.
The attempt to wring sophomoric visual dash out of a moment of pathos as
unequivocal as a funeral is Snyder’s style in microcosm. He has no sense of
what is appropriate, whether in terms of character, dialogue, theme, or image.
This is a film which somehow manages to
be chock-full of plot points and fights and talking heads making generalised
comments about the ethics of power in a democracy, and also be totally empty.
It’s the apotheosis of Zack Snyder’s style-over-substance approach to
filmmaking. You’ll come out of it shellshocked, ears ringing and eyes blinking,
and realise that you never actually felt a single emotion.
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