So I went and watched Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice yesterday. I walked out of the cinema not quite sure whether I’d liked it or not.
Here’s the thing, though. I only paid $8 to see it — the benefits of watching at a small and cute regional cinema — and on the simple basis of it being a movie that runs over two and a half hours, I can’t entirely claim to have had a terrible cinema experience. It’s certainly possible to spend more for less entertainment time, however.
The general critic’s response has been largely negative, bordering on the hostile, but I have seen a few folk saying that they enjoyed it, or at least thought the critics were being unduly harsh on what it was trying to do.
So I figured I’d give it a go. Which, naturally, means spoilers. Also a whole lot of personal opinion, and you’re entirely free to disagree with me if you must. Have at it, but keep it polite, thanks?
Still, lots of spoilers await. So click on that there back button as fast as you can if you haven’t seen it, or don’t care enough, or whatever.
Or just watch the Wonder Woman theme song, because we all need earworms:
Just to be super-safe (see what I did there?) as I did with my Man Of Steel review, you can have a picture of Captain Caveman to tide you over, and if you scroll past his furry toes, it’s on you.
Image: Spike’s Sketch Squad, Captain Caveman is © Hanna Barbera, etc.
Why isn’t there a Captain Caveman movie, already?
Ahem.
Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice: The Good Stuff
- Visually spectacular: Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice is nicely filmed, generally nicely lit, and for the most part it avoids that horrible jump-cutting thing that so many action movies take as a shortcut way of suggesting intensity in action but that leave the audience not entirely sure what’s going on. Even in the most CGI-heavy sequences, that’s not really a problem.
- Skips the Batman origin story: Really, this was a big plus, and for a movie with such a lengthy running time, the actual Batman origin is handled quickly and with a lot of aplomb. It looks like something that’s been cut down from a longer original movie, but it doesn’t insult the audience by presuming we don’t know the whole Batman mythos. It’s well handled and well paced.
- Wonder Woman is well handled: Yes, she’s perhaps not the comics Wonder Woman, and I do get that criticism, but it’s a movie, not a comic book. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is mostly (see below) handled well in terms of action sequences, being allowed to have her own moments and having a costume that looks realistic enough.
- Jesse Eisenberg: Yes, he’s on the hammier side of the equation, and I get why some people don’t like that much, but for me it carried a nice level of intense insanity with it. Again, tastes may vary, but against Henry Cavill’s very flat Superman and even Ben Affleck’s Batman, Eisenberg shines.
- Batfleck is good: Many groaned when Ben Affleck was cast as Batman. He carries it well, both within the suit where the primary attribute is essentially having an extremely expressive chin, but moreso when he’s being Bruce Wayne, especially at the start of the movie.Also, he’s totally a right wing fascist. Which Batman is, so that’s well handled.
Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice: The Bad Stuff
- It’s overly long: Way too long. I walked out of the cinema thinking that while it was solid value on a per-minutes dollar sense, it could have and would have been a much better movie with at least half an hour cut from it. You could lose the desert scenes with little fuss, most of the dream sequences and even the truly dumb Lois-drowns-herself-while-teasing-Aquaman sequence could go as well. I thought Man Of Steel was ponderous, but Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice is even more languid in its pace at times.
- Most characters are idiots: I rather like the themes that Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice tries to explore, but the problem is that it gets so caught up in high falutin’ speeches that it forgets to keep character motivations particularly clear. There’s some nice foreshadowing of Bruce’s problem with Superman on the ground that addresses one of my key complaints with Man Of Steel at the start of the movie, but after that, Batman/Bruce Wayne is just kind of a jerk. Superman seems to amble through the movie as though he’s on super-valium, Lois is your journalist-damsel-in-peril straight out of the 1940s, and I don’t even quite know what Wonder Woman’s actual story is. She’s breaking into Lexcorp because… a photo? She decides to skip out on chasing Lex and instead board a plane that’s inexplicably showing news that in any sane universe would panic the passengers even if the plane was going to be taking off because…?
- Doesn’t solve the Superman problem: This is something that struck me in my Man Of Steel review as well. Superman is this essential force, and there’s some clever dialogue around that in the film itself, but absolutely nothing of any consequence that’s done to make the core battles really count. Batman has Kryptonite gas (how? He ground down the big meteorite somehow?) but that only weakens Superman and he’s never even really bruised after being hit with it, despite the undertones of it weakening him to the point where it’s a “fair” fight. Sort of. The spear is a problem for Superman, but he can still fly with it. Even the nuke only makes him age (for some reason) massively in orbit. Because the stakes never feel high because he’s Superman the effect of the final battle is also muted, and his death feels like a tacked on afterthought that’s there simply because the original comics said that it should be. (spoiler: He’s not dead, but if we’re lucky they won’t remake <em>Steel</em> along the way.)
- Doomsday is a Lord Of The Rings Rock Troll: I don’t know if WETA did the effects for this flick. If they didn’t, somebody in the design department should be suing.
- Spreadeagled Wonder Woman: There’s this one shot in the Doomsday battle where Wonder Woman is knocked back — and I appreciate the fact that she, and not Superman or Batman actually carries most of the battle and is central to its victory — where Gal Gadot is knocked back, spreadeagled and smiling. It really, really felt out of place and bordering on the exploitative, because I couldn’t even entirely work out how she’d been knocked back that way. Cheesecake is fine in a movie about mythical hero figures, but this felt off to me.
- Batman isn’t very Batman-esque: As far as I can tell, Batman’s core ability is to man a machine-gun. He’s not a particularly skilled fighter, or the world’s greatest detective (the extent of sneaking into Lexcorp involves standing in the server room twice while pilfering data), but he sure does love shooting people in the face. Call me a crazy traditionalist, but that doesn’t feel like Batman to me.
Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice: The Verdict
Superman V Batman: Dawn Of Justice annoys me a lot less than Man Of Steel did, simply because I can see the core ideas that it’s trying to reach for.
That being said, it doesn’t quite get there in exploring them, suffers from inadequate characterisation, and above all it’s overly long. Chop it down by a half hour or more and it would be a significantly tighter experience that I would have enjoyed a lot more.
Is it as flawed as the reviews seem to suggest it is? Yeah, I tend to think it is flawed, and I’ve yet to see much criticism that isn’t at least partially either justified or something that could have been fixed with only minimal changes.
Do I feel like it was $8 wasted? Not entirely. This is a movie that will lose significant impact on a smaller screen, even if you’ve got a decent screen and sound setup — and I saw it in a tiny, one screen cinema at that! Most movie tickets these days aren’t $8, however, so it’s something you could leave to rental, streaming, or burning more than two hours on a plane sometime in the future. That’s not exactly a shining endorsement, is it?