Having seen 2013’s Man
of Steel, Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot which was a serviceable origin
story retelling until it exploded in monotonous tone-deaf city-smashing, it
shouldn’t be too surprising to find the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as punishing as its title is
unwieldy. It’s another of Snyder’s dunderheaded epics of missing the point, a
gleaming picture of dour comic book tableaus pre-digested with little regard
for meaning, stripped of whatever power they once had, and weighed down by the
burden of a visually overdetermined and thematically indigestible form.
Overstuffed with empty calories, every so often the lumpy mass chokes up ideas
so thoughtless and virulently stupid I couldn’t help but wonder if it was
subliminally disgorged from the ugliest corners of our national id. After all,
this is a movie about a noble extraterrestrial savior and a tortured
crimefighter and the best it can think to do is contrive reasons for them to
scowl as they go about representing the mindset of anyone whose first response
to reasonable disagreement is to punch it in the face.
The story finds Superman (Henry Cavill) a divisive figure.
He smashed up Metropolis pretty good in the last movie, ostensibly in the
process of saving it, but with the unintended consequence of inflicting a 9/11-scale
disaster on every other block. That understandably made a few people mad. Some,
like a Senator (Holly Hunter, underutilized) whose logical concern is treated
as mildly treacherous, want to constrain his power. Others, like Batman (Ben
Affleck, growling with brooding trauma), whose alter-ego’s Wayne Enterprises
had a skyscraper caught in the fracas, plot to bring him punishment for his
otherworldly strength and its potential bad consequences. Still others, like
villain Lex Luthor (played as a squirrely sociopathic tech bro by Jesse
Eisenberg), want to contrive a reason to something something Kryptonite. It’s
all of a piece with an intent to image a worst-case scenario superhero world,
in which they’re lawless self-righteous power-mad vigilantes viewed with
suspicion, fear, and worship, and who nonetheless must muster the energy to
save the planet.
That’s not necessarily a bad idea. A real Superman would
indeed be a scary thing, a man who could not be controlled by any earthly
authority if he so chose. We’re lucky he mostly wants to do the right thing.
But in Snyder’s vision, this becomes a troublingly muddled mess. It presents a
Superman weirdly uncharacterized, and mostly motivated by his desire to save
his mother, Ma Kent (Diane Lane), and his girlfriend, Lois Lane (Amy Adams).
He’s not much of an altruist, aside from a few token saves, and certainly lives
up to the suspicion he’s under. He acts with impunity, and on a whim. As for
Batman, here he’s a violent bruiser, killing waves of faceless criminals by
gun, by car, by plane, and by hand in bone-crunching rounds of savagery, then branding
his logo onto the survivors. Ouch. This is bleak, grim nihilism, a film in
which superpowers are real, but the idea of heroes is foreign. At one point Daily Planet editor Perry White
(Laurence Fishburne) snaps: “The American conscience died...”
Snyder, with a script by Chris Terrio (Argo) and David S. Goyer (Blade
Trinity), is channeling the trend begun in 80’s and 90’s comics that mistook
a dim, darkly lit, and violent vision for an interesting, realistic, and meaningful one. Here’s a movie
convinced its unremitting cruelty and cheap cynicism adds up to ideas of any
import. It’s just deadening and uncomfortable, with pessimism and
nastiness so garbled it comes out sounding downright fascist. It makes its
heroes monsters to be feared, and then forces us to look up to them anyway. Its
world is better off without them – every outlandish conflict is a direct result
of their actions – but we’re to root for their demagogic unilateralism, to let
them run rampant because only they have the super-strength to strong-arm their
way to a victory. And if a certain number of mere mortals have to be
obliterated in the name of their idea of justice, so be it.
The film traffics in images of terror. One scene finds a
suicide bomber detonating in slow motion, the flames billowing out. The movie
is bookended by buildings collapsing and filling the streets of a major east
coast city with smoke and debris while citizens flee. An early inciting
incident is a chaotic ambush in an African outpost used for political power
plays in Congress. Snyder injects these unmistakable real-world associations
into the film to goose its power, and to lend borrowed gravity to the story of
two superheroes deciding to fight each other to prove…something. It’s
borderline irresponsible, especially as he uses these spectacles of terror to
excuse their actions, to argue for the justification of these men serving as
their own judges, juries, and executioners. And every character who expresses
reasonable objections is met with death, usually at the hands of this threat,
as if to say they got what was coming to them for daring to want limits on
these God-like super-people.
So it’s not much fun for most of the 151-minute runtime.
It’s a slog, not just for its heavy (and heavy-handed) mood, but also for its
straining and monotonous graveness. It grinds good performers under its
demands, sapping Cavill and Affleck of charisma, turning Adams and Lane into
damsels in distress, and leaving everyone else, including Jeremy Irons as
faithful butler Alfred, trying to coax life into turgid exposition. When not
going through its over-extended plodding plot, it’s mostly a cavalcade of seeds
for future sequels and spin-offs, bringing in Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) for a
mostly blank glorified cameo, the worst of which finds her in front of a
computer essentially watching three teasers for upcoming projects. Or maybe
it’s the upskirt flash that’s the nadir of the movie’s insistence on turning
every woman into a pawn to be trapped – one maternal figure is gagged and bound
in sadistic Polaroid’s – or, failing that, sexualized. It’s dismaying, just
another reason I found the whole desensitized thing exhausting and tiresome,
from its opening repeat of the Wayne deaths to an ersatz King Kong restaging followed by a hero getting nuked in the face.
This is a technically proficient blockbuster insisting on loudly thundering down
the wrong road at every turn, ponderously bringing flights of fancy to
overblown heights and down to reductive muck. With the whole history of these
iconic larger-than-life characters to play with, there’s nothing more
imaginative here than having one of them trying to hit the other over the head
with, say, a porcelain sink. Still, it’s best when mind-numbing, in long
sequences of concussive fantasy fight night or bonkers nightmare sequences, for
at least that’s a break from its maddening point of view. Built from mythic and
resonant components made curdled and rotten, its characters are meant to save
us, but are indifferent to the suffering in their wake. Neither red-blooded
adventure nor sharp auto-critique, it’s content to be ugly and cacophonous, the
sights and sounds of this approach to the genre wrung-out and dying before our
eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment