Superhero movies these days almost always try to be Big. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice also wants to be Important.
It is loaded with musings about vigilantism, immigration, hero worship (with the emphasis on worship), cultural divides, grief and loss — and even a little about the decline of the news media.
All that is jammed together with commerce: the introduction of Wonder Woman and the setting up of characters who will form both the Justice League and still more movies.
Unfortunately, all those conversations are just side notes in an overlong, ponderous and at times incoherent film.
It’s not enough just to promise that Batman (Ben Affleck) and Superman (Henry Cavill) will fight. It has to be a fight with emotional resonance, and here both the fight and its aftermath lack that. The big moments in Dawn of Justice have been flattened by the labored and erratically directed incidents leading up to them.
Directed by Zack Snyder (Watchmen, Man of Steel), with a script credited to Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer, Dawn of Justice for the most part takes place in the aftermath of Man of Steel, the movie that introduced Cavill’s Superman.
The climactic battle in that film caused tremendous collateral damage to Metropolis, including to an office of Bruce Wayne’s company, killing and injuring its staff, Wayne, the secret identity of Batman, accordingly harbors a grudge against Superman — while reporter Clark Kent, better known as Superman, has concerns about Batman’s righting wrongs outside the legal system.
At the same time, Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) is maniacally intrigued by both heroes, and wants to pit them against each other. And there’s a mysterious woman on the scene.
The script for Dawn of Justice accordingly has a lot to juggle, especially in the early going when it tries to move among separate storylines for Superman, Batman and Luthor. Unfortunately, it often does so in ways that make little or no sense, or are caught up in their own tiresome self-importance.
This is not to say superhero movies cannot handle ideas. Look at the contemplations of terrorism in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, or the consideration of what people will do to feel secure in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
But more often than not, Dawn of Justice pays only minimal lip service to its ideas before going back to smashing up things. (There is an echo, intentional or not, of The Great Gatsby there.) It does not even give us much of a world for these characters to inhabit, its Metropolis and Gotham City barely backdrops to action.
The preview I attended included two separate requests not to give away spoilers, and I am trying to avoid them here. But at least one of the so-called surprises in the film will be obvious to audiences far more quickly than it is to the characters. And other scenes, surprise or not, will simply not make sense.
Then there is the problem of the leads. Neither Affleck nor Cavill digs very deep in his performance, with Affleck especially underwhelming, his Bruce Wayne a series of scowls and sulks. (Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is even more of a letdown, though much of that has to be blamed on a script into which she has been inserted with little logic or depth.) That leaves the dramatic door open to Eisenberg, who gets the best part — the villain — and does all that can be done with it.
Because of all this, the attempts to pay homage to some of the major moments in Superman/Batman literature are instead reminders of how uninspired Dawn of Justice is by comparison.
I have to tell you, it is killing me to write this. I’ve been asking myself, was I really this disappointed while watching? I have been looking forward to this movie for a long time. I have viewed the promotional spots again and again. I am often forgiving of Superman movies in particular, and really wanted this to work both on its own and as the real launch of a series of DC Comics-based movies akin to Marvel’s cinematic universe.
But yes, I was that disappointed. This film is an artistic failure on almost every level.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, Ohio.com, Facebook, Twitter and the HeldenFiles Online blog. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.