BATMAN V SUPERMAN
Bat-tered and bruised
Another view on the Zackman’s controversial blockbuster.
released 1 august (Blu-ray/ Dvd)/out NOW! (download) 2016 | 12 | Blu-ray 3d/Blu-ray/ DVD/DOWNLOAD Director Zack snyder Cast Ben affleck, Henry Cavill, amy adams, Jesse eisenberg, diane lane
Bruce Wayne. Clark Kent. Diana Prince. Properly together on the big screen in live-action for the first time ever. Surely you can’t mess that up? And yet Zack Snyder, so consumed with the grim and serious tone he set in Man Of Steel, gives it a royal try, sucking the fun out of a landmark cinematic event.
But let’s find the positives, shall we? Ben Affleck makes for a decent, haunted Bruce, enlivened by his spiky interplay with Jeremy Irons’s Alfred and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. Gadot’s warrior is a ray of light, grinning into battle with the inevitable CG baddie, while the final confrontation – when it actually gives the actors something to do rather than their stuntmen – has a few flashes of the sort of movie we might one day get. That’s about it for the plus column.
Elsewhere, Snyder makes everything dark and foreboding, dragging Henry Cavill further away from the charm he has shown elsewhere, with writers David Goyer and Chris Terrio dreaming up a truly stupid reason for the two main heroes to fight and an even more ludicrous explanation for their change of heart. We all know the Justice League is in their future, and the ride to that point could have been exhilarating, but this feels more like a chore than entertainment. Amy Adams is stranded in a confusing, useless subplot and while Jesse Eisenberg does his best to inject fresh life into Lex Luthor, he’s also mired in twists and turns that do little to help the film’s cause. (The less said about Granny’s Peach Tea, the better.)
Snyder had a hefty effects budget to play with, so we certainly get some spectacle, but there’s little depth beneath it. With the director clearly figuring that Batman wasn’t gloomy and driven enough, now he’s extra violent, while Superman rarely bothers to seem more than annoyed that he has to save people from time to time. The final “twist”, meanwhile, is rendered meaningless given what we know about the character and their future with everyone else. Sure, it’s some sort of spur for the formation of the Justice League itself, but it’s
Remains a badly structured mess
such a waste of what could have been interesting down the line.
Batman V Superman has its defenders, but unfortunately the version that was delivered to cinemas remains a badly structured mess. Plot threads are left dangling for the future with all the subtlety of a streaker at a football match, and there’s a real feeling that a solid cast of actors (including Laurence Fishburne, Holly Hunter, Scoot McNairy and Diane Lane) are wasted, with little to do other than pushing the plot forward.
And if you are going to use a movie to introduce the other members of the Justice League in tiny cameos (their names and logos picked, confusingly, by Lex), at least do them the honour of finding some way of doing it that doesn’t make non-comics fans scratch their heads. Batman V Superman had all the ingredients to be a comic book movie classic. It’s just a shame that along the way, the recipe got muddled and the result was such a mishandled confection.
Extras The Blu-ray formats feature both the theatrical cut and a longer Ultimate Edition cut featuring 23 minutes of additional footage, which helps explain some confusing logic leaps (such as all the guff about the “magic bullet” that serves as a journalistic quest for Lois) but doesn’t necessarily improve things. You also get 11 featurettes on such aspects as the design of the new Batmobile, the Batcave, and the main characters. Some of these are fairly substantial, with the total running time clocking in at 138 minutes. NB: buy the DVD and you just get the theatrical cut, plus one five-minute featurette.
Affleck borrowed his suit to play Batman at his son’s fourth birthday party. Now that’s the Batman movie we need.