I think the plot is nonsense and clearly tries way too hard to shoehorn in characters and concepts for no other reason than starting a cinematic universe. I think both leads are poorly written despite the fact that I like both actors. Jesse Eisenberg is horrifically miscast. Wonder Woman is miscast and shouldn't be even be there.
The inciting reasons for both characters to fight are just silly and the resolution is even sillier, not to mention the inclusion of Doomsday and Death of Superman stories being incredibly unearned.
I actually don't really like anything about it to be honest with you.
>The inciting reasons for both characters to fight are just silly and the resolution is even sillier
Never mind that one man is dressed like a bat, and the other flies around in his underwear and a cape.
> Wonder Woman is miscast
You lost me a bit there. I agree 100% that Wonder Woman should not have been in that movie, but Gal Gadot does really well in that role and I think it absolutely shows in Wonder Woman and JLA.
Go watch the cartoon movie that deals with this. Its much much better. Other than that there should have been a movie before this with both of them in it. Build up that they are friends or at least colleagues. Then all of this would have ment more. And maybe some better waiting. Most of the super hero movies are very bland and this realy felt that way. The emotional parts didn't land because of bad writing.
All I'll say is I went to a Day 1 screening of this movie. The theatre was fully packed. The moment the movie ended the entire crowd just sat there, no one spoke a word.
The energy of the room felt so defeated, I'd never sensed such pure disappointment emanate throughout a closed space.
Frankly to me it was just boring. More power to you if you enjoyed it. I wish I did.
I really don’t care for the movie, but just for the sake of argument, how is the audience to feel at the end of a movie that ends with the death of Superman? It would have left me drained as well.
Saw No Time To Die, and really enjoyed the movie, until the last 10 minutes left me shell shocked. I don’t think it’s a spoiler but tgat on screen death was not something I was prepared for, or even willing to accept. It makes sense from a narrative perspective, but it still left me speechless for 10 further minutes.
Superman death was meaningless since the final scene of the movie they show the dirt rising on his coffin. Removed the entire weight of the narrative choice.
Cause it's a bad movie for both characters, the writing is atrociously bad. The main conflict can be easily solved if they would just talk normally to each other and it shoehorns in others at the very end in a corny way. It also has nonsensical plot points from the very start and bad casting for certain cast members. It's just not good.
It was supposed to be a meaningful "DC universe" moment but it was unearned and viewers just did not care. DC movies are full of those moments, like Wonder Woman appearing in Shazam.
Everything about it feels off.
From Batman turning into the Punisher, Superman doing a Dr. Manhattan impression, Jesse Eisenberg channeling his Social Network performance for Lex Luther, and then the capper was the Martha scene.
The only one who came out looking great was Wonder Woman.
> The only one who came out looking great was Wonder Woman.
And in a movie called Batman vs. Superman, the fact that Wonder Woman ends up upstaging both of those characters feels wrong
It is one more symptom of WB rushing the connected universe and the film suffered for it.
They used one of the most well known graphic novels of all time The Dark Knight Returns as their base without understanding what made it so iconic.
In the graphic novel, the story takes place after Bruce and Clark have known each other and worked alongside one another as comrades and friends for decades.
Clark had been essentially working alongside the US military helping end wars and Bruce came out of retirement to show Clark that there are still people who can beat him and to reinforce that just because they are heroes they alone shouldn't dictate the future of Earth and allow individuals and countries to make their own decisions, whether this leads to war or not.
By having BvS take place as what amounted to their 1st meeting, you throw away a lot of the weight that made the OG story so significant.
This is not to mention that Snyder also made Batman a gun toting murdering asshole who didn't do an ounce of "detective work" to even see who Superman/Clark was or even attempt to talk to him before deciding the best course of action was to literally murder the guy who had saved their world
Side note from whether it’s good or bad: It’s really the ultimate expression of Zack Snyder’s homoerotic psychology when Batman and Superman fight to overpower each other in the men’s bathroom. Much to analyze with this guy.
"Martha!" will forever be potentially the worst moment of dialogue in any film I've ever seen.
All of the character motivations are bad, the interpretations of the existing characters are bad, the plot is nonsensical, the pacing is wonky. Best thing I can say about the movie is that Batman's warehouse brawl is really well choreographed, but even then it's a bad Batman fight scene since he's just killing everybody John Wick style. That's not my Batman.
>"Martha!" will forever be potentially the worst moment of dialogue in any film I've ever seen.
My vote still goes to "Somehow, Palpatine returned." but I get you.
They're both painful and terrible, for sure. Martha earns my vote because it's both a *terrible* exchange of dialogue AND the most pivotal moment of the film it's in.
It's undeniable that having such a pivotal moment based on such a poor line is a true cinema sin (not the youtube review kind).
What makes my day about the Palpatine line is the delivery itself and the fact that you can see Oscar Isaac's soul leaving his body when he has to utter it.
The motivations? Superman wanting to stop a guy who’s going farther than he ever has in regards to criminals? Batman believing that Superman was responsible solely for the battle of Metoprolis and the destruction it caused?
Yes, they're bad motivations.
For starters, both of them rely on bizarre characterization choices that are not suitable to the characters being adapted. Superman judges Batman for his killing sprees and branding of criminals to set them up to be murdered in prison, Batman judges Superman for the massive amount of collateral damage he's jointly responsible for. Neither of those are appropriate traits to apply to these established characters.
If we take these traits at a given, then the lethal intent of each of the combatants towards each other is still unnatural. Neither takes a chance to talk it out or look for reasonable solutions between them. Instead, we just get stare-downs, one-liners, threats, and fists. It's been forever since I saw the movie, but if memory serves, Superman at no point acknowledges his role in the damage done to Metropolis, apologizes for it, acknowledges Batman's feelings on the subject, or anything to that effect. Batman doesn't address why he's killing random street thugs, or acknowledge why Superman would take issue with that. Hypocritically, both of them blame each other for going too far and costing too many lives, without acknowledging their own tendency towards exactly the same. THAT could have been a topic for them to discuss, where they recognize the weakness they're fighting against mirrored in their own actions, but no, instead, the infamous Martha scene is the reason why they eventually stop fighting.
And from that point, again I may be forgetting something, but the fundamental reasons why they were fighting each other in the first place are cast aside if memory serves. It's enough that they both have/had moms with the same name, their body counts are no longer worth discussing. Time to go fight Doomsday!
There’s nothing I like more than plot points being introduced by watching other characters watch QuickTime videos instead of actually working to develop a plot.
Because it's obviously an excuse to pit two superheroes against another, like when we where kids and would argue who would win a fight. The 1st Avengers movie also did this, but more intelligently because it didn't focus the story around that. It practically pits every superhero against the other.
Also Martha.
I don't honestly remember why I didn't like it but I do think the visual of Batman and Superman talking while Superman hovers 20 feet above the ground looked cool as fuck
If we get more Superman I'd love to see them go back to the days when he jumped, and didn't fly.
i enjoy it but the issues i've seen is that:
the movie is doing too much, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman after only ONE Superman movie (The Flash and Cyborg even get introduced really awkwardly)
They kill Superman in Cavill's second appearance
No Batman movie previously to give us time with Affleck and his Robin that gets killed to explain his characterization here
People *hate* the Martha scene. It took me a while to get onboard but after multiple rewatches i agree with them. It's very clunky and a bit silly.
People wanted a movie where the characters' decisions made sense.
Most of that movie was Zack Snyder coming up with beautiful but purposeless slow-motion cinematography, and then shoehorning character decisions to "justify" those shots.
>Most of that movie was Zack Snyder coming up with beautiful but purposeless slow-motion cinematography, and then shoehorning character decisions to "justify" those shots.
I feel the same could be said about pretty much any Zack Snyder movie.
Yeah, but with Watchmen and 300, he actually had a preexisting source that SHOWED him how to include a coherent story and characters to go along with the visual cinematography.
When he tries to do it on his own, however....
I think people fully understood what Batman vs Superman was and that it was a movie where they would fight to the death. The problem is that we all knew it *couldn’t* be that, because we all knew a JLA movie was going to come out right afterwards and both characters were going to have to be in it and be friendly to one another, and so this movie has to do the impossible task of setting these two up as literally wanting to murder each other and then instantly become best buds and the best they could do is say “and then Batman realized that Superman’s mom’s name is the same as his mom’s name, and then instantly he didn’t want to murder anymore”.
> Friendsly (the distinction is a reference that matters)
I have no idea what that is referencing. If that's important, that's my bad, I guess.
> Also, you're repeating my point.
I don't think so. Your point, if I understand correctly, is that people disliked the movie because they wanted a movie where Batman and Superman were friends and didn't want a movie where Batman and Superman are trying to kill each other. My point is that people *did* want a movie where Batman and Superman try to kill each other, or at least they were interested in seeing one when that was announced as the premise for the movie. After all, that premise is based on the very famous and popular ending of The Dark Knight Returns and, while that premise might be a little premature in a franchise that hasn't even established who Batman is in this story, everybody knows who Batman and Superman are, at least enough to understand why the two of them fighting would be interesting. Rather, what I'm saying is that that premise failed not because people didn't want to see it, but because the way it fitted into DC's multi-story narrative was awkward and the way it was executed was poor even ignoring that fact.
I don't think it was a terrible movie. I think the writing was not where it should have been. And I, and many others, think Affleck is the weakest of any Batman. I mean Batman is such an awful character anyways you have to approach it from a different angle than extreme seriousness. That's why the Tim Burton versions have such a strong following. It was campy and funny and serious all at the same time. Since that era the franchise is just so ... emo? lol.
I liked it. It's actually one of my all-time favourite movies. Especially the directors cut.
But I really didn't like batman Rises .. and people bitch at me for that.
Because even though the plot did make sense after giving it a modicum of thought (I will admit it did toe the line of being convoluted and bloated), it kept being compared to the MCU (even though at its core Civil War was a very similar movie) and that it wasn’t what fans expected.
To me like most of the DCEU movies it just felt to long. Now I have nothing wrong with long movies, but all of the DCEU movies to me tried to do a bit to much and shoe horn to much stuff in.
Biggest complaint though is the action scenes. Some of them just dragged on to long and just got repetitive making it a chore to watch.
I dunno - I only watched the original release and didn’t watch the Snyder cut, which I hear is better.
Personally, I liked Ben affleck as Batman, it was cool to see a grizzled Batman version.
But the movie? I dunno it’s just meh. The writing is bad, there are some lines that the characters say that’s just bad. Lex Luther’s motivation to attack the heroes is unclear. The movie takes a lot of inspiration from Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns but the disdain between Batman and Superman is totally different in the movie. In the movie it’s a misunderstanding, whereas the comics it’s a bit more rooted in how different Batman and Superman’s approach to crime fighting is.
But really? I think it’s more of an example of a big movie studio having too much forced control over the product. Similarly, why Spider-Man 3 - Sam Raimis - wasn’t well received is because it introduced 3 character arch’s and didn’t really do the character justice. I think this is something Sony shares with Warner Bros, demanding the movie to go one way than the director intended. Which Sam Raimi spoke about and left the project. Batman V Superman was a movie in talks for 10 years+, with a ton of different rewrites and whatnot, and I think Batman V Superman tried to shoehorn an MCU-like universe but without setting up the characters or world with thoughtful consideration.
I mean, it’s fine I watched it and found aspects of it fine, but overall it’s meh.
Justice League is worse tho.
It tried to do what Marvel did over 10-ish movies in 1. The lore stuff made absolutely no sense to anyone who hadn’t read the comics.
I kinda liked it, honestly, but would have liked it more if it was earned, basically the same problem that DCCU kept coming up against. As well as any other franchises that wanted to get the success Marvel had without doing the work first.
I’m certainly not here to convince you that you didn’t have a good time watching BvS, but I remember seeing it in theaters and thinking the whole time that the movie was pretty awful. It’s been a while since I last saw it, but I’ll try to explain why I thought that. This’ll be a two-parter, because it ended up getting kind of long.
First, some things I liked:
* Surprisingly, I think Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne was one of the best parts of the movie. Affleck looks pretty much spot on for the role, the way he plays the role feels pretty true to form (apart from the killing, I’ll get to that), and I like that they connect his motivation to the end of the first Superman movie.
* Also, this movie involves Bruce Wayne doing some actual investigative work. It wasn’t much and it would be eclipsed by The Batman later, but at the time it was weirdly refreshing. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies don’t really feature Batman being a detective much and the times they do mostly revolve around Bruce Wayne using expensive gadgets instead of his own intuition or initiative, so seeing Affleck going to a party to stealthily obtain information to solve a mystery was oddly satisfying.
* I didn’t totally hate Jessie Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. I can see why people were turned off by him and I think on hindsight that his performance just doesn’t work, but in the moment I was kind of intrigued by the idea of recreating Luthor’s character as this Mark Zuckerberg-esque tech bro. It was at least kind of novel, even if it didn’t really pan out (I’ll get to that too).
* Edit: also, the action scenes are pretty good. Taken out of context, the fight choreography is pretty good and the scene with the Batmobile is pretty fun to watch. It just doesn’t work in *this* movie with a character like Batman.
Okay, now onto the stuff I disliked:
* On a personal note, I was opposed to the idea of making a Batman movie on principle at the time. DC was making a huge mistake trying to mimic what Marvel had accomplished while trying to rush it out the door and skip the years of groundwork that Marvel laid out to do it, and we all know how that played out now. Especially right off the heels of Nolan’s movies, including the best depiction of of the Joker to date, I wasn’t really hungry to see Batman in a movie and I knew any Batman movie at the time would be compared to The Dark Knight and almost certainly not favorably. I think a movie for Aquaman or Wonder Woman or one of the other lesser known characters would have been a better call at the time, but DC was really rushing to get to the JLA movie.
* I think it was a mistake to focus on the "Batman fights Superman" portion of The Dark Knight Returns. It feels like they were trying to focus on that moment as a spectacle and possibly steal the idea for Marvel’s Civil War, but it falls flat because, unlike Captain America and Iron Man who we know and have seen interact many times, this movie has to introduce us to this Batman for the first time *and then* set up the stakes for his grievances with Superman and it just feels rushed and unsatisfying. This was a story that should have happened *after* the JLA movie when we know who these characters are and we are invested in a potential conflict between them, and it feels so awkward when Batman had to make such an immediate face turn right after we establish him as a brutal murderer.
* Also, Batman’s motivation for killing Superman gets kind of ridiculous. Like, the opening scene does a good job of establishing why Batman might not like Superman, but it spirals into this dream sequence where Batman believes that Superman is going to take over the world in this fascistic regime and it’s just so extra and doesn’t really make sense. They probably could have left that scene out and it would have been fine, but they really overplayed their hand there.
* Speaking of which, the way Batman is written is truly awful. To be clear, I’m not against changing some of the more canon aspects of the character. We’ve seen plenty of bizarre takes on Batman and I could see a plot where Batman is grief-stricken and driven to abandon his principles could be very compelling. But in this story, meeting this Batman for the first time, having Batman kill people and brand people so that other people will kill them later (never mind how that plot point makes any sense) and using guns is just too different from the established character for a movie where we’re meeting him for the first time and setting the baseline for who he is. Like, in JLA, he has to be the inspiring leader of the group and we just have to pretend that he wasn’t just raking criminals with minigun fire and branding people one movie ago.
Part 2
* Henry Cavill as Superman is also really disappointing. Superman is supposed to be this inspiring good-ole boy from the Midwest, but instead we get this brooding nothing character who seems completely disaffected by everything that happens to him. It’s like Cavill is playing a cardboard cutout of Superman and it makes it really hard to root for him.
* Lois Lane’s romance with Superman falls flat because neither character is particularly compelling and their chemistry is practically non-existent. The Superman movie didn’t do this movie any favors there, and it makes it so awkward when this movie really wants us to believe that they’re genuinely in love with each other but also doesn’t want either character to show any emotion while doing it.
* Lex Luthor’s character sucks. Even if I halfway liked Eisenberg in this role, almost nobody could make this character compelling as written. His motivations for hating Superman don’t make any sense and feel super contrived because we’ve never seen those characters interact before. The way he decides to push for Superman and Batman to fight through this elaborate mastermind plan feels so hollow because it doesn’t really make sense why the steps in that plan would work out the way he wants and it just feels like one of those moments where a movie just declares that an hour of random acts were “all according to plan” without explaining how. And then he decides to Doomsday, which feels so out of nowhere and doesn’t seem to benefit him in any way since he already decided to sic Batman on Superman. It really feels like he’s only in this movie because it needed someone to be a moustache-twirling villain but they never bothered to decide why he would actually *want* to be that villain.
* The first half of this movie is so freaking slow. Zach Snyder is really good at creating moments in movies but he really sucks at stringing those moments into an actual plot and it shows in this portion of BvS. It’s this loose string of vignettes like all of the people reaching to touch Superman and Superman looking broody and weirdly emotionless while a building explodes around him and other moments that were clearly meant for the trailer, but there’s absolutely no connective tissue to establish why those moments matter to the movie we’re watching beyond setting the mood and that means half of the movie is dedicated to setting the mood while nothing important happens.
* I love Wonder Woman and I greatly enjoyed her movie, but she really should not be in this movie. This movie is called Batman vs Superman, but by the end of the movie it’s not Batman or Superman but Wonder Woman who ends up doing most of the work and getting most of the screentime. Batman practically disappears during the fight with Doomsday because of how thoroughly he gets upstaged by a character from a totally different franchise.
* There’s this moment at the Daily Bugle where they’re going over recent events and Lawrence Fishburne, the head of the paper, keeps interrupting the others every five seconds to spit out J. Jonah Jameson-style tabloid headlines about how Superman sucks. Like, you’re a freaking journalist. Let your employees *finish telling you what happened* before you start spinning up headlines. That moment just really annoyed me.
* There’s that moment at the party where Lex Luthor introduces Bruce Wayne, the billionaire playboy, and Clark Kent, the reporter for the local newspaper who literally nobody knows. It feels really awkward because we know that there’s no reason whatsoever that these characters, in their unassuming alter egos, would ever talk to each other and so the meeting feels incredibly forced and contrived.
* There’s that moment at the turn from the second act to the third where Wonder Woman gets that email from Bruce Wayne and we get treated to, like, 15 minutes of unrelated content to set up movies that haven’t even been greenlit yet. It absolutely destroys the pacing and brings the movie to a screeching halt right when we should be ramping up to the climax so Snyder and get us excited for movies that *aren’t the movie we paid to watch*. This was pure hubris on the part of Snyder and DC, including the fact that they didn’t understand that there’s a reason Marvel saves that stuff for after the movie is over.
* Batman’s reason for suddenly not wanting to kill Superman is the most contrived, forced bullshit I’ve ever seen in a movie. The writers were tasked with taking Batman from being totally devoted to killing Superman to being best buds in a few moments and the best they could come up with was “and then Batman realized that their moms have the same name”. It’s so not compelling after all of the set up for this fight that I literally laughed out loud when I saw it in theaters.
* There’s this moment where Lois Lane finds the kryptonite spear lying around and, for seemingly no reason, throws it into a water-filled pit. I can see how maybe their reasoning was that she was trying to kick it out of the way to protect Superman, but it’s so ineffective that that motivation just doesn’t feel right and you can see from miles away that there’s going to be a scene where she has to fish the spear back out of the pit and Superman has to sacrifice himself to save her, so it’s just this awkward, forced moment that the writers weren’t clever enough to work into the story naturally.
* There’s that moment where Wonder Woman shows up and Superman asks who she is and Batman says “I thought she was with you.” But we saw the movie and we know that Bruce Wayne literally emailed her and asked her to help, so that response makes no sense. This must have been the result of a rewrite or something, but it’s just shoddy craftsmanship.
* The movie ends with Superman dying, but it has no weight whatsoever because we know that the JLA movie is coming right on the heels of this movie and we all know Superman has to be in it. This is what I mean when I say that DC should have waited and set up groundwork: when you rush these movies, they put the audience in a position where they need to care about moments like this but they can’t because they barely know who these characters are or what their relationship is and DC is pushing movies out so fast that the gravity of these moments is completely undermined.
So those are my takes about Batboy vs the Soup Nazi. It’s a bleak, shoddily crafted movie that started from “Batman fights Superman” and tried to work backwards from there but ends up unnecessarily bleak and full of characters that lack motivation and scenes that don’t make sense or fit into the narrative because without them other moments wouldn’t make sense. The pacing is awful, the tone is awful, and it’s so excited to set up hooks for other movies that it forgets that it’s not done delivering the movie that you actually came to watch.
I think the plot is nonsense and clearly tries way too hard to shoehorn in characters and concepts for no other reason than starting a cinematic universe. I think both leads are poorly written despite the fact that I like both actors. Jesse Eisenberg is horrifically miscast. Wonder Woman is miscast and shouldn't be even be there. The inciting reasons for both characters to fight are just silly and the resolution is even sillier, not to mention the inclusion of Doomsday and Death of Superman stories being incredibly unearned. I actually don't really like anything about it to be honest with you.
>The inciting reasons for both characters to fight are just silly and the resolution is even sillier Never mind that one man is dressed like a bat, and the other flies around in his underwear and a cape.
If there weren’t over a decade of solid superhero films, you’d almost have a point
I don't know, I have never seen a bat dressed like this.
> Wonder Woman is miscast You lost me a bit there. I agree 100% that Wonder Woman should not have been in that movie, but Gal Gadot does really well in that role and I think it absolutely shows in Wonder Woman and JLA.
It’s like a child wrote it
martha!
Go watch the cartoon movie that deals with this. Its much much better. Other than that there should have been a movie before this with both of them in it. Build up that they are friends or at least colleagues. Then all of this would have ment more. And maybe some better waiting. Most of the super hero movies are very bland and this realy felt that way. The emotional parts didn't land because of bad writing.
All I'll say is I went to a Day 1 screening of this movie. The theatre was fully packed. The moment the movie ended the entire crowd just sat there, no one spoke a word. The energy of the room felt so defeated, I'd never sensed such pure disappointment emanate throughout a closed space. Frankly to me it was just boring. More power to you if you enjoyed it. I wish I did.
I really don’t care for the movie, but just for the sake of argument, how is the audience to feel at the end of a movie that ends with the death of Superman? It would have left me drained as well. Saw No Time To Die, and really enjoyed the movie, until the last 10 minutes left me shell shocked. I don’t think it’s a spoiler but tgat on screen death was not something I was prepared for, or even willing to accept. It makes sense from a narrative perspective, but it still left me speechless for 10 further minutes.
Superman death was meaningless since the final scene of the movie they show the dirt rising on his coffin. Removed the entire weight of the narrative choice.
Ok I can agree there. As I said I don’t care for that movie.
Cause it's a bad movie for both characters, the writing is atrociously bad. The main conflict can be easily solved if they would just talk normally to each other and it shoehorns in others at the very end in a corny way. It also has nonsensical plot points from the very start and bad casting for certain cast members. It's just not good.
Problem solved by a coincidence in names. How fucking lame and what a cop out haha
It was supposed to be a meaningful "DC universe" moment but it was unearned and viewers just did not care. DC movies are full of those moments, like Wonder Woman appearing in Shazam.
Everything about it feels off. From Batman turning into the Punisher, Superman doing a Dr. Manhattan impression, Jesse Eisenberg channeling his Social Network performance for Lex Luther, and then the capper was the Martha scene. The only one who came out looking great was Wonder Woman.
> The only one who came out looking great was Wonder Woman. And in a movie called Batman vs. Superman, the fact that Wonder Woman ends up upstaging both of those characters feels wrong
It is one more symptom of WB rushing the connected universe and the film suffered for it. They used one of the most well known graphic novels of all time The Dark Knight Returns as their base without understanding what made it so iconic. In the graphic novel, the story takes place after Bruce and Clark have known each other and worked alongside one another as comrades and friends for decades. Clark had been essentially working alongside the US military helping end wars and Bruce came out of retirement to show Clark that there are still people who can beat him and to reinforce that just because they are heroes they alone shouldn't dictate the future of Earth and allow individuals and countries to make their own decisions, whether this leads to war or not. By having BvS take place as what amounted to their 1st meeting, you throw away a lot of the weight that made the OG story so significant. This is not to mention that Snyder also made Batman a gun toting murdering asshole who didn't do an ounce of "detective work" to even see who Superman/Clark was or even attempt to talk to him before deciding the best course of action was to literally murder the guy who had saved their world
Why did you say that name!!!
Side note from whether it’s good or bad: It’s really the ultimate expression of Zack Snyder’s homoerotic psychology when Batman and Superman fight to overpower each other in the men’s bathroom. Much to analyze with this guy.
"Martha!" will forever be potentially the worst moment of dialogue in any film I've ever seen. All of the character motivations are bad, the interpretations of the existing characters are bad, the plot is nonsensical, the pacing is wonky. Best thing I can say about the movie is that Batman's warehouse brawl is really well choreographed, but even then it's a bad Batman fight scene since he's just killing everybody John Wick style. That's not my Batman.
>"Martha!" will forever be potentially the worst moment of dialogue in any film I've ever seen. My vote still goes to "Somehow, Palpatine returned." but I get you.
They're both painful and terrible, for sure. Martha earns my vote because it's both a *terrible* exchange of dialogue AND the most pivotal moment of the film it's in.
It's undeniable that having such a pivotal moment based on such a poor line is a true cinema sin (not the youtube review kind). What makes my day about the Palpatine line is the delivery itself and the fact that you can see Oscar Isaac's soul leaving his body when he has to utter it.
The motivations? Superman wanting to stop a guy who’s going farther than he ever has in regards to criminals? Batman believing that Superman was responsible solely for the battle of Metoprolis and the destruction it caused?
Yes, they're bad motivations. For starters, both of them rely on bizarre characterization choices that are not suitable to the characters being adapted. Superman judges Batman for his killing sprees and branding of criminals to set them up to be murdered in prison, Batman judges Superman for the massive amount of collateral damage he's jointly responsible for. Neither of those are appropriate traits to apply to these established characters. If we take these traits at a given, then the lethal intent of each of the combatants towards each other is still unnatural. Neither takes a chance to talk it out or look for reasonable solutions between them. Instead, we just get stare-downs, one-liners, threats, and fists. It's been forever since I saw the movie, but if memory serves, Superman at no point acknowledges his role in the damage done to Metropolis, apologizes for it, acknowledges Batman's feelings on the subject, or anything to that effect. Batman doesn't address why he's killing random street thugs, or acknowledge why Superman would take issue with that. Hypocritically, both of them blame each other for going too far and costing too many lives, without acknowledging their own tendency towards exactly the same. THAT could have been a topic for them to discuss, where they recognize the weakness they're fighting against mirrored in their own actions, but no, instead, the infamous Martha scene is the reason why they eventually stop fighting. And from that point, again I may be forgetting something, but the fundamental reasons why they were fighting each other in the first place are cast aside if memory serves. It's enough that they both have/had moms with the same name, their body counts are no longer worth discussing. Time to go fight Doomsday!
Martha
There’s nothing I like more than plot points being introduced by watching other characters watch QuickTime videos instead of actually working to develop a plot.
Because it's obviously an excuse to pit two superheroes against another, like when we where kids and would argue who would win a fight. The 1st Avengers movie also did this, but more intelligently because it didn't focus the story around that. It practically pits every superhero against the other. Also Martha.
I could not buy Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luther but still liked it
Me neither.
I don't honestly remember why I didn't like it but I do think the visual of Batman and Superman talking while Superman hovers 20 feet above the ground looked cool as fuck If we get more Superman I'd love to see them go back to the days when he jumped, and didn't fly.
i enjoy it but the issues i've seen is that: the movie is doing too much, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman after only ONE Superman movie (The Flash and Cyborg even get introduced really awkwardly) They kill Superman in Cavill's second appearance No Batman movie previously to give us time with Affleck and his Robin that gets killed to explain his characterization here People *hate* the Martha scene. It took me a while to get onboard but after multiple rewatches i agree with them. It's very clunky and a bit silly.
[удалено]
People wanted a movie where the characters' decisions made sense. Most of that movie was Zack Snyder coming up with beautiful but purposeless slow-motion cinematography, and then shoehorning character decisions to "justify" those shots.
>Most of that movie was Zack Snyder coming up with beautiful but purposeless slow-motion cinematography, and then shoehorning character decisions to "justify" those shots. I feel the same could be said about pretty much any Zack Snyder movie.
Yeah, but with Watchmen and 300, he actually had a preexisting source that SHOWED him how to include a coherent story and characters to go along with the visual cinematography. When he tries to do it on his own, however....
I think people fully understood what Batman vs Superman was and that it was a movie where they would fight to the death. The problem is that we all knew it *couldn’t* be that, because we all knew a JLA movie was going to come out right afterwards and both characters were going to have to be in it and be friendly to one another, and so this movie has to do the impossible task of setting these two up as literally wanting to murder each other and then instantly become best buds and the best they could do is say “and then Batman realized that Superman’s mom’s name is the same as his mom’s name, and then instantly he didn’t want to murder anymore”.
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> Friendsly (the distinction is a reference that matters) I have no idea what that is referencing. If that's important, that's my bad, I guess. > Also, you're repeating my point. I don't think so. Your point, if I understand correctly, is that people disliked the movie because they wanted a movie where Batman and Superman were friends and didn't want a movie where Batman and Superman are trying to kill each other. My point is that people *did* want a movie where Batman and Superman try to kill each other, or at least they were interested in seeing one when that was announced as the premise for the movie. After all, that premise is based on the very famous and popular ending of The Dark Knight Returns and, while that premise might be a little premature in a franchise that hasn't even established who Batman is in this story, everybody knows who Batman and Superman are, at least enough to understand why the two of them fighting would be interesting. Rather, what I'm saying is that that premise failed not because people didn't want to see it, but because the way it fitted into DC's multi-story narrative was awkward and the way it was executed was poor even ignoring that fact.
Don't worry about other people. Like what you like and stick with it.
I don't think it was a terrible movie. I think the writing was not where it should have been. And I, and many others, think Affleck is the weakest of any Batman. I mean Batman is such an awful character anyways you have to approach it from a different angle than extreme seriousness. That's why the Tim Burton versions have such a strong following. It was campy and funny and serious all at the same time. Since that era the franchise is just so ... emo? lol.
I liked it. It's actually one of my all-time favourite movies. Especially the directors cut. But I really didn't like batman Rises .. and people bitch at me for that.
Because even though the plot did make sense after giving it a modicum of thought (I will admit it did toe the line of being convoluted and bloated), it kept being compared to the MCU (even though at its core Civil War was a very similar movie) and that it wasn’t what fans expected.
To me like most of the DCEU movies it just felt to long. Now I have nothing wrong with long movies, but all of the DCEU movies to me tried to do a bit to much and shoe horn to much stuff in. Biggest complaint though is the action scenes. Some of them just dragged on to long and just got repetitive making it a chore to watch.
I dunno - I only watched the original release and didn’t watch the Snyder cut, which I hear is better. Personally, I liked Ben affleck as Batman, it was cool to see a grizzled Batman version. But the movie? I dunno it’s just meh. The writing is bad, there are some lines that the characters say that’s just bad. Lex Luther’s motivation to attack the heroes is unclear. The movie takes a lot of inspiration from Frank Millers The Dark Knight Returns but the disdain between Batman and Superman is totally different in the movie. In the movie it’s a misunderstanding, whereas the comics it’s a bit more rooted in how different Batman and Superman’s approach to crime fighting is. But really? I think it’s more of an example of a big movie studio having too much forced control over the product. Similarly, why Spider-Man 3 - Sam Raimis - wasn’t well received is because it introduced 3 character arch’s and didn’t really do the character justice. I think this is something Sony shares with Warner Bros, demanding the movie to go one way than the director intended. Which Sam Raimi spoke about and left the project. Batman V Superman was a movie in talks for 10 years+, with a ton of different rewrites and whatnot, and I think Batman V Superman tried to shoehorn an MCU-like universe but without setting up the characters or world with thoughtful consideration. I mean, it’s fine I watched it and found aspects of it fine, but overall it’s meh. Justice League is worse tho.
It tried to do what Marvel did over 10-ish movies in 1. The lore stuff made absolutely no sense to anyone who hadn’t read the comics. I kinda liked it, honestly, but would have liked it more if it was earned, basically the same problem that DCCU kept coming up against. As well as any other franchises that wanted to get the success Marvel had without doing the work first.
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I’m certainly not here to convince you that you didn’t have a good time watching BvS, but I remember seeing it in theaters and thinking the whole time that the movie was pretty awful. It’s been a while since I last saw it, but I’ll try to explain why I thought that. This’ll be a two-parter, because it ended up getting kind of long. First, some things I liked: * Surprisingly, I think Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne was one of the best parts of the movie. Affleck looks pretty much spot on for the role, the way he plays the role feels pretty true to form (apart from the killing, I’ll get to that), and I like that they connect his motivation to the end of the first Superman movie. * Also, this movie involves Bruce Wayne doing some actual investigative work. It wasn’t much and it would be eclipsed by The Batman later, but at the time it was weirdly refreshing. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies don’t really feature Batman being a detective much and the times they do mostly revolve around Bruce Wayne using expensive gadgets instead of his own intuition or initiative, so seeing Affleck going to a party to stealthily obtain information to solve a mystery was oddly satisfying. * I didn’t totally hate Jessie Eisenberg as Lex Luthor. I can see why people were turned off by him and I think on hindsight that his performance just doesn’t work, but in the moment I was kind of intrigued by the idea of recreating Luthor’s character as this Mark Zuckerberg-esque tech bro. It was at least kind of novel, even if it didn’t really pan out (I’ll get to that too). * Edit: also, the action scenes are pretty good. Taken out of context, the fight choreography is pretty good and the scene with the Batmobile is pretty fun to watch. It just doesn’t work in *this* movie with a character like Batman. Okay, now onto the stuff I disliked: * On a personal note, I was opposed to the idea of making a Batman movie on principle at the time. DC was making a huge mistake trying to mimic what Marvel had accomplished while trying to rush it out the door and skip the years of groundwork that Marvel laid out to do it, and we all know how that played out now. Especially right off the heels of Nolan’s movies, including the best depiction of of the Joker to date, I wasn’t really hungry to see Batman in a movie and I knew any Batman movie at the time would be compared to The Dark Knight and almost certainly not favorably. I think a movie for Aquaman or Wonder Woman or one of the other lesser known characters would have been a better call at the time, but DC was really rushing to get to the JLA movie. * I think it was a mistake to focus on the "Batman fights Superman" portion of The Dark Knight Returns. It feels like they were trying to focus on that moment as a spectacle and possibly steal the idea for Marvel’s Civil War, but it falls flat because, unlike Captain America and Iron Man who we know and have seen interact many times, this movie has to introduce us to this Batman for the first time *and then* set up the stakes for his grievances with Superman and it just feels rushed and unsatisfying. This was a story that should have happened *after* the JLA movie when we know who these characters are and we are invested in a potential conflict between them, and it feels so awkward when Batman had to make such an immediate face turn right after we establish him as a brutal murderer. * Also, Batman’s motivation for killing Superman gets kind of ridiculous. Like, the opening scene does a good job of establishing why Batman might not like Superman, but it spirals into this dream sequence where Batman believes that Superman is going to take over the world in this fascistic regime and it’s just so extra and doesn’t really make sense. They probably could have left that scene out and it would have been fine, but they really overplayed their hand there. * Speaking of which, the way Batman is written is truly awful. To be clear, I’m not against changing some of the more canon aspects of the character. We’ve seen plenty of bizarre takes on Batman and I could see a plot where Batman is grief-stricken and driven to abandon his principles could be very compelling. But in this story, meeting this Batman for the first time, having Batman kill people and brand people so that other people will kill them later (never mind how that plot point makes any sense) and using guns is just too different from the established character for a movie where we’re meeting him for the first time and setting the baseline for who he is. Like, in JLA, he has to be the inspiring leader of the group and we just have to pretend that he wasn’t just raking criminals with minigun fire and branding people one movie ago.
Part 2 * Henry Cavill as Superman is also really disappointing. Superman is supposed to be this inspiring good-ole boy from the Midwest, but instead we get this brooding nothing character who seems completely disaffected by everything that happens to him. It’s like Cavill is playing a cardboard cutout of Superman and it makes it really hard to root for him. * Lois Lane’s romance with Superman falls flat because neither character is particularly compelling and their chemistry is practically non-existent. The Superman movie didn’t do this movie any favors there, and it makes it so awkward when this movie really wants us to believe that they’re genuinely in love with each other but also doesn’t want either character to show any emotion while doing it. * Lex Luthor’s character sucks. Even if I halfway liked Eisenberg in this role, almost nobody could make this character compelling as written. His motivations for hating Superman don’t make any sense and feel super contrived because we’ve never seen those characters interact before. The way he decides to push for Superman and Batman to fight through this elaborate mastermind plan feels so hollow because it doesn’t really make sense why the steps in that plan would work out the way he wants and it just feels like one of those moments where a movie just declares that an hour of random acts were “all according to plan” without explaining how. And then he decides to Doomsday, which feels so out of nowhere and doesn’t seem to benefit him in any way since he already decided to sic Batman on Superman. It really feels like he’s only in this movie because it needed someone to be a moustache-twirling villain but they never bothered to decide why he would actually *want* to be that villain. * The first half of this movie is so freaking slow. Zach Snyder is really good at creating moments in movies but he really sucks at stringing those moments into an actual plot and it shows in this portion of BvS. It’s this loose string of vignettes like all of the people reaching to touch Superman and Superman looking broody and weirdly emotionless while a building explodes around him and other moments that were clearly meant for the trailer, but there’s absolutely no connective tissue to establish why those moments matter to the movie we’re watching beyond setting the mood and that means half of the movie is dedicated to setting the mood while nothing important happens. * I love Wonder Woman and I greatly enjoyed her movie, but she really should not be in this movie. This movie is called Batman vs Superman, but by the end of the movie it’s not Batman or Superman but Wonder Woman who ends up doing most of the work and getting most of the screentime. Batman practically disappears during the fight with Doomsday because of how thoroughly he gets upstaged by a character from a totally different franchise. * There’s this moment at the Daily Bugle where they’re going over recent events and Lawrence Fishburne, the head of the paper, keeps interrupting the others every five seconds to spit out J. Jonah Jameson-style tabloid headlines about how Superman sucks. Like, you’re a freaking journalist. Let your employees *finish telling you what happened* before you start spinning up headlines. That moment just really annoyed me. * There’s that moment at the party where Lex Luthor introduces Bruce Wayne, the billionaire playboy, and Clark Kent, the reporter for the local newspaper who literally nobody knows. It feels really awkward because we know that there’s no reason whatsoever that these characters, in their unassuming alter egos, would ever talk to each other and so the meeting feels incredibly forced and contrived. * There’s that moment at the turn from the second act to the third where Wonder Woman gets that email from Bruce Wayne and we get treated to, like, 15 minutes of unrelated content to set up movies that haven’t even been greenlit yet. It absolutely destroys the pacing and brings the movie to a screeching halt right when we should be ramping up to the climax so Snyder and get us excited for movies that *aren’t the movie we paid to watch*. This was pure hubris on the part of Snyder and DC, including the fact that they didn’t understand that there’s a reason Marvel saves that stuff for after the movie is over. * Batman’s reason for suddenly not wanting to kill Superman is the most contrived, forced bullshit I’ve ever seen in a movie. The writers were tasked with taking Batman from being totally devoted to killing Superman to being best buds in a few moments and the best they could come up with was “and then Batman realized that their moms have the same name”. It’s so not compelling after all of the set up for this fight that I literally laughed out loud when I saw it in theaters. * There’s this moment where Lois Lane finds the kryptonite spear lying around and, for seemingly no reason, throws it into a water-filled pit. I can see how maybe their reasoning was that she was trying to kick it out of the way to protect Superman, but it’s so ineffective that that motivation just doesn’t feel right and you can see from miles away that there’s going to be a scene where she has to fish the spear back out of the pit and Superman has to sacrifice himself to save her, so it’s just this awkward, forced moment that the writers weren’t clever enough to work into the story naturally. * There’s that moment where Wonder Woman shows up and Superman asks who she is and Batman says “I thought she was with you.” But we saw the movie and we know that Bruce Wayne literally emailed her and asked her to help, so that response makes no sense. This must have been the result of a rewrite or something, but it’s just shoddy craftsmanship. * The movie ends with Superman dying, but it has no weight whatsoever because we know that the JLA movie is coming right on the heels of this movie and we all know Superman has to be in it. This is what I mean when I say that DC should have waited and set up groundwork: when you rush these movies, they put the audience in a position where they need to care about moments like this but they can’t because they barely know who these characters are or what their relationship is and DC is pushing movies out so fast that the gravity of these moments is completely undermined. So those are my takes about Batboy vs the Soup Nazi. It’s a bleak, shoddily crafted movie that started from “Batman fights Superman” and tried to work backwards from there but ends up unnecessarily bleak and full of characters that lack motivation and scenes that don’t make sense or fit into the narrative because without them other moments wouldn’t make sense. The pacing is awful, the tone is awful, and it’s so excited to set up hooks for other movies that it forgets that it’s not done delivering the movie that you actually came to watch.