Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg
Have I Seen it Before: :gritting through my teeth: Yes.
Did I Like It: Let’s get right to it, shall we?
This is... Yes, I’m going to say it, a more wrong-headed film than Batman & Robin (1997). More stunted than Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987). To slightly break up the pattern I’m building, it is even more irritating than Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007), which would make it the single most irritating film ever produced.
Now that I’ve cleared all of the Zack Snyder fans off the site*, let’s really talk about how the film goes wrong.
Martha. We’ve all talked about it. Or, more appropriately, we’ve talked at the issue. From before this film shot a single frame, the conceit has a flaw that was going to take some heavy lifting to surpass. The film was never going to be the battle royale between the Dark Knight (Affleck) and the Man of Steel (Cavill). They would initially disagree, and maybe scuffle just a tad, before realizing that they need to join forces in order to vanquish a larger, common foe.
This movie gets to that point, but hinges their eventual alliance on the fact that their mothers happen to have the same name. This would have been annoying storytelling in its own right, but the fact that the film almost, very nearly credibly sells Batman’s need to destroy Superman, all to have it not mean anything. Suddenly. Irrevocably. So much so that it fuels Batman’s megalomania well into the next movie.
Had Superman had a moment of humanistic purity that stopped their fight, or if Batman’s intellect had uncovered the realization that Lex Luthor (Eisenberg, more on him in a bit) had been playing them for fools the whole time, the third act really could come together.
This movie could never possibly recover from that moment.
Oh, but wait, there’s more. Is there a poorer casting choice in recent memory than Jesse Eisenberg trying to take his Mark Zuckerberg schtick to its absurdist conclusion and make something like a Lex Luthor out of it? He lacks the gravitas for the character. Bruce Willis could have played this character. The task may have been beneath the skills of Bryan Cranston. Even Kevin Spacey equated himself well enough, if nauseatingly in retrospect. I had a debate with somebody shortly after the release as to whether or not the miscasting of Eisenberg or the Martha blunder would be the film’s lasting legacy.
Why can’t it be both?
And there are other flaws as well that are more banal and less load-bearing. At three hours for the “ultimate” edition, it utterly fails to warrant its runtime. There are plenty of perfectly fine films that filled two VHS tapes back in the day, but also plenty of great films that didn’t need to be that long. Making a film long doesn’t guarantee an epic scope, or a story we can sink our teeth into. It guarantees nothing. Editors, please proceed with caution.
Also, I do have one big beef with the film which bears mentioning, speaking of the Ultimate Edition. In the lead up to this home video release, there was a bubbling sense that this extension would include Barbara Gordon/Oracle, and she would be played by Jena Malone. This would have been great casting, and widened the DC movies in a pretty great way. It didn’t happen, though. Malone played... I dunno, some IT person at The Daily Planet. Is it the film’s fault that it didn’t give me Oracle? No. Is it DC Films continued fault that they won’t give us Oracle, even in Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn) (2020)? Absolutely.
And yet, it’s not all bad, which makes it somehow more frustrating.
Affleck is actually good as Batman. I’m reasonably sure I didn’t need a cinematic reboot of the character only four years after The Dark Knight Rises (2012), but he brings a certain quality to the character that was missing from Bale, or Kilmer, certainly Clooney, and dare I say, even Keaton. His interplay with Alfred (Jeremy Irons) is pristine. His unflinching eagerness for danger in the film’s opening minutes is about as Batman as a film performance could get. The sequence where he rescues Martha is pretty great. Sure, he’s a little eager to kill people standing in his way, but even Keaton wasn’t above some murder, so who am I to judge? I could have done with several more movies with him in the role, if only in the hopes that he could finally shed the title of Best Batman To Never Be In A Good Batman Movie.
And now there’s nothing left to do but endure Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Speaking of things which have no right to be as long as they are... Let’s get this over with, I suppose.
*I would remind those of faithful still remaining that I kind of liked Man of Steel (2013).
