In the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s dour superhero movie Watchmen, there’s a montage showing a generation of superheroes as they travel through decades of American history, participating—triumphantly, tragically—in major events and riding undulating waves of public opinion. It’s a brilliant bit of world-establishing, and a tingling evocation of something so many comic books capture, and yet so few of the movies based on them do: a true sense of how these icons—vessels of our squarest hopes and most persistent cultural paranoias—have been mapped onto the American psyche, both reflecting and absorbing us. It’s a downright moving sequence, and makes one of the most convincing cases for translating superhero comics into film that I’ve yet seen.
Of course, then the rest of the movie happens and things get messy, Watchmen clunking down the well of cultural memory and disappearing into the dark. Zack Snyder’s new superhero film, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, seems, unfortunately, destined for the same fate.
Like in Watchmen’s beginning moments, this new film-as-brand-extension has a stretch, arriving somewhere in the middle this time, that is captivating, persuasive, resonant. In those scenes, we watch a society (American society, in particular) grapple with the realities, and surrealities, of this newly arrived alien called Superman. He’s just defended Metropolis, and the world, from General Zod and his army, but Metropolis has been ravaged in the process, at the cost of thousands of lives. The opening of Batman v Superman brings us back to that city-destroying battle, seen at the end of Snyder’s Man of Steel, and shows us the perspective of a man on the ground, racing through dust and rubble while two extraterrestrial beings, gods come to Earth, duke it out above.
Some time later, public opinion has started to turn on Superman—he’s even brought before Congress. (Holly Hunter is terrific as a skeptical Kentucky senator—pity she doesn’t get more scenes.) We see talking heads—real-life media gadflies like Andrew Sullivan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson—weighing the philosophical quandaries of Superman, while the hero himself goes about his solemn duty, rescuing downtrodden folks looking to the heavens for deliverance. It’s not the most nuanced or sophisticated discussion of faith and politics ever committed to film, but in its context, embedded in a loud summer-season-kickoff movie like this, it’s rather striking. It’s engaging on emotional and intellectual wavelengths, and shows Snyder’s expert talents, apparent since his near-perfect Dawn of the Dead, for montage filmmaking. Indeed, the best parts of Batman v Superman play as turgid, bombastic, and really effective music videos for a Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL album about the quaking of the American spirit, and the hard-jawed men who wrestle on its fault lines.
So, there is plenty of good in the film, much more than in Man of Steel. The moral keening of this new film seems largely inspired by the backlash to Man of Steel’s opera of annihilation, as if Snyder is himself grappling with the pervasive criticism that the increasingly massive, city-wide melees so popular among franchise films these days have begun to lose all sense of context. Batman v Superman takes stock of the genuine, human toll of its predecessor, opening the door for the deeper inspection of superhero-ness that gives the film its most gripping, provocative moments.
But before too long, Snyder has shaken off the self-reflection and returned to the senseless clamor of before, bogging down Batman v Superman with an empty seriousness where, for a few inspired scenes, some actual thought has flickered tantalizingly. There is, nominally, a plot: Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck, angry and withdrawn) doesn’t much like Superman, and Clark Kent (Henry Cavill, alabaster and cool to the touch) isn’t liking what he’s hearing about this vigilante Batman. Meanwhile, Lois Lane is investigating an attack meant to frame Superman as a bad guy (Amy Adams, one of our most talented American movie stars, does her noble best with a role that, at one point, forces her to say “I’m not a lady, I’m a journalist”), Congress is investigating, and a twitchy tech mogul named Lex Luthor is cooking up some sort of plot to shoot Superman out of the sky.
Luthor is played by Jesse Eisenberg, an actor who knows a thing or two about playing megalomaniacal inventors/world destroyers. Like Mark Zuckerberg, who Eisenberg brilliantly embodied then immolated in The Social Network, Lex Luthor is exasperated by the dummies around him, and wields his preternatural intelligence as a cudgel to beat down the more basely powerful people who threaten his omnipotence. (Don’t worry, the jocks win in the end.) But the Zuckerberg conjured up by Eisenberg had some human shape to him, whereas his Lex Luthor, with his wiggling fingers and high-pitched vocal tics, is pure theatrics. It’s a shockingly misjudged performance, making a goofy hash out of any scene he’s in, and further clouding an already sketchy motivation.
Not that what surrounds him is making much sense on its own, as our two heroes gird themselves for war with one another, until they inevitably, briefly fight, then, whoops, join together against a common foe. That foe, I won’t tell you who it is, is plunked down into the picture with such arbitrary laziness that the entire last battle—with its huge, meaningless array of fireballs, electrical shock waves, nuclear bombs, crashing music—could be cut out of the film and you’d lose almost no actual story. They say that what makes a musical a musical is that the songs have to advance the plot (a rigid rule that isn’t always exactly true). Well, I think we should impose a similar guideline for fight scenes in superhero movies. Sure, sure, the end of Batman v Superman’s climactic battle brings us somewhere big, but that end could have been arrived at in myriad other ways, none involving Snyder senselessly re-destroying a city he just said he was sorry for destroying. (Well, technically what he’s destroying is across the harbor in Gotham, but it’s essentially the distance of Jersey City to lower Manhattan.)
And so Batman v Superman becomes that which it initially cries out against. Ah well. At least there are the film’s handful of moments, with swelling score and rich cinematography, that bracingly probe superhero identity. And, hey, there’s the exciting enough introduction of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, tall and mysterious) and maybe some other folks, promising an Avengers-style convergence to come.
Speaking of the Avengers, the next film in Marvel’s endless series is subtitled Civil War, as brother will fight against brother in a battle for the superhero’s place in the world. Which is pretty similar to the thematic thrust of Batman v Superman. The current comic-book movie franchises seem to be entering the “What does it all mean, man?” phase of their adolescence. Batman v Superman takes to brooding, a sulking, self-serious movie that occasionally hits on some blunt insights. The Marvel movies are less high on their own portent, so it will be interesting to see how lightly, or not, they handle all this soul searching. That it’s being done at all is probably a good sign nonetheless. Wisdom, maturity, and, most crucially, a hard-earned sense of perspective may yet lie ahead for our aging superheroes. As, we hope, it awaits us, too.
