Sorry, kids - another "not a poem" entry from your poet-in-exile:
I find critical consensus on pop culture as suspicious as, or maybe even more suspicious than, commercial consensus – so I watched Batman v Superman. Some common critiques are spot-on; many of same are exaggerated relative to general treatment of the genre; and some are peculiarly lazy. It's not nearly as bad as Man of Steel nor is it as utterly negligible (nor as dismissive of real source material) as Age of Ultron.
In context of action adventures featuring the supernaturally powerful, I’m leaning toward the film’s few successes outweighing its many failures. It’s shocking that I'm even remotely defending Synder. Revealingly, the most damning criticism accuses him not of being a hack filmmaker or lacking own vision (however hyper masculine, objectionably Objectivist, juvenile, or primarily visual it maybe be) but of taking too much of a dark &/or personal risk with supposedly surefire corporate intellectual property. His latest movie's most interminable sequence is apparently obligatory in this sort of endeavor; the frequent daftness is in no way unique; the collisions of big spectacle and mawkish sentimentality may feel intuitively irreconcilable but are actually such standard issue as to perhaps be unavoidable (maybe even emotionally honest) at this scale; and the Luthor character needed some (why so?) serious reconsideration. But for biting off so much, the director chews a fair amount of it down to fairly digestible, and he benefits from having Affleck as the most buyable Bruce Wayne the big screen has had. (Opening credits validation for creators & comic fans: Bill Finger finally gets his name onscreen - even if it really oughta go before Bob Kane’s.)
To Snyder’s surprising credit he does make a movie that, more so than the titular costumed conflict (and yes, their fight scene does deliver) is Wayne v Kent. As much as he’s been knocked for not getting the big blue Boy Scout, Snyder grasps these characters enough to focus on the core conflict. The issue isn’t how a bitter billionaire with just wits and fists can power up enough to take on a nearly omnipotent alien. The real battle pits a traumatized rich orphan from the shitty part of town, grown so damaged that his grand deduction skills are manipulated by the most vain and transparent of villains, against the working class farm boy made good in the shiniest side of the city, whose idealism has been nearly terminally taxed. It’s no great accomplishment, and it’s all handled at a surface level, as the director is known for. So, fine, they both love their mothers. I’ve seen shallower messages delivered in far less maligned pictures with nary a cape nor glowing pair of eyes in sight.
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