Batman V Superman: Why the Critics got it Wrong

There were 9 of us. Most adults, with one kid. It was a good mix of non fans, comic book movie fans, comic book fans, Marvel fans and DC fans. After the movie, we had question.

What the fuck were the critics smoking?

BvS is sitting with a 30% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. That is lower than Daredevil. Lower than Batman Forever. Lower than Spider Man 3 (by half!). Lower than Rise of The Silver Surfer!

That is also, insane.

At it's worst, the movie is divisive. It has some incredible strengths, and major weaknesses. The reviews have been out for a few days, so it's pointless to add to that mix. However, going through them both before and after watching the movie I feel they don't provide an accurate portrayal of what the movie is like. So instead of doing another straightforward review, let me take some specific aspects, address their critiques and devil's advocate the shit out of the movie.

But first, the short review roundup, in case you don't want to scroll through the wall of text below, because oh FUCK I have so much to say.

Mini Review Begins----------------------------

I think the movie is a perfectly enjoyable summer blockbuster that occasionally stumbles only because it tries loftier things than the average summer blockbuster. It asks some hard questions, and tries to make a point beyond "Bad person has upgraded version of my power/suit. Now we must fight!" That makes it interesting. More than that, it imbues the movie with a sense of ambition and scope which many superhero movies lack. It features largely good acting, phenomenal cinematography and action and an interesting plot that doesn't simply reheat the last superhero movie.

The biggest problem, I felt, was that it does not know who to please. For example, the first time Wonder Woman showed up, the people in our group who didn't follow comic books at all (a.k.a. the casuals a.k.a. the demographic DC has to please to have a hope in hell of making the movie successful financially) were confused. Why was this random woman who, so far, seemed to exclusively attend parties wearing clothes that never had enough material to cover the back, suddenly fighting with a sword and a shield? This was not an obscure reference - Wonder Woman is a core part of the final battle, and the casual audience has no clue who she is! Similarly, a lot of Luthor's motivation becomes a lot clearer once you know his character from the comics.

On the other hand, the movie deviates from the generally accepted canon regarding character and motivation waaaaay too much, and we all know how rational comic book fans are about such things. See, in this version, Luthor is a twitchy, neurotic maniac. In this version, Batman's "no-killing" rule is more relaxed than the dress code at a pajama party. In this version, Superman isn't a big blue beacon of hope.

How much you enjoy the movie will depend on your preconceived notions. See, this is a movie that requires SOME knowledge of these characters and their history. Nothing that can't be cleared up after a five-minute conversation with your comic-book loving friend. If, however, you are a stickler for how they are in the comic books, this movie is the equivalent of an abusive spouse who is also great in bed. It will make you incredibly happy, and incredibly sad, until you are a confused, seething mess of drool and rage.

Mini Review Ends----------------------------

Ok, so let's get down to business, dissect the movie and the critique, and see why Batman V Superman is worth your time. Because holy fuck, it's worth your time.


Cast and Acting:
This, very few reviews had problems with. Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot are the highlights, in spite of Gadot's limited screen time, while Jeremy Irons is a brilliant Alfred. More dour and snarky and less fatherly than Caine or Michael Gough. This is an Alfred that has given up on trying to make Bruce realise that dressing up like a bat to punch criminals is crazy, and is now focused on keeping him alive. Amy Adams does not have much to do, but even then, adds humanity to Henry Cavil's Superman. Cavil himself is a blank slate, looks adequately like a brick wall and delivers a steady and unmemorable performance.

The divisive one here is Jesse Eisenberg as Luthor and well....I didn't hate him. I can see how his performance, affected as it is, will rub fans the wrong way, but for non fans who don't have any idea of the suave, cruel Lex Luthor, Eisenberg is fine and even a little magnetic. I've seen him compared to the Joker; however, this Luthor is teetering on an edge of insanity, whereas Joker has already gleefully jumped in. Moreover, I found that the Machiavellian aspects of his character has been left intact. Luthor is, after all, the master of the long game, and here, it's apparent that he has been playing for years.

The Tone:
"Grim". "Joyless". "Humorless". This was my first clue that there might be a teensy bit of bias going on. I don't want to drag this into a Marvel vs. DC morass, because then we'd be here all day, but this idea that it's only the Marvel tone that works for superhero movies is a throwback to the idea that comic books are for kids. That anything to do with comic books have to have a rainbow-sized colour palette and a RDJ-alike making quips a mile a minute. I don't mind Marvel doing Marvel stuff, in fact, I welcome it, but a lot of critics seem to have decided that a dark, grim tone in itself is a negative.

"So if critics hate dark, how come they loved the Nolan movies huh?" Yeah, this is the most common defense being pushed around. Here's the thing - the Nolan movies were brilliant. BvS is decidedly NOT a brilliant movie. It's good, but not great. However, calling a good movie, or even a mediocre movie bad BECAUSE of its tone makes no sense. Worse, it suggests that those who prefer a particular tone are somehow, by virtue of their aesthetic choice, less evolved in their taste. I happen to prefer this tone, as do many others I know. Some of Marvel's movies bore me simply because of their very different tone. Doesn't make them worse movies though.

Oh, and there are laughs to be had here. Almost everything Perry White or Alfred says elicits a chuckle or two. Because they aren't coming at you like machine-gun fire, they land with more impact.

Plot and Storytelling:
The plot has holes. So. Many. Holes. But there are also hints and suggestions regarding plot points, and the viewer is expected to connect the dots, which is something that some critics seem to have a problem with. This is a movie where not everything is spelled out, and requires careful watching for it to make sense. Is that a good thing? Should a summer blockbuster always be a switch-your-brain-off kind of thing? I don't know, and I am not suggesting it shouldn't. It's true that Snyder is not a skilled enough director to juggle the multiple plot points and heavy themes efficiently. But the fact that the movie even tried to do it, even though it failed, makes it more interesting to me.

However, one thing I never had a problem with, and I don't really understand why so many reviewers did, was the storytelling. It's certainly choppy, but I personally enjoyed that. The movie is told through multiple perspectives and some events take place concurrently. There are multiple plot points, but they are not hard to follow, and when they come together, it's satisfying to see the threads meet. Again, there seems to be a "if it's a comic book movie it has to be simple and linear" attitude which is difficult to agree with.

But yeah, the blatant fanservice videos of the other heroes should definitely have been placed at the end, instead of right before the big fight.

Action and Visuals:
Some things are just automatically cool. Watching the DC Trinity work together on the big screen is one of those things. The action is epic, and the ground level shots where Bruce is watching Superman and Zod duke it out really provide a sense of scale of the destruction caused. However, the film takes time to get going, and the action ramps up only in the last hour or so. Batman gets a couple of solo fight scenes that are bone-crunchingly brutal, and the marquee main event is just as I envisioned a Batman vs Superman fight to go down. It even has a decent laugh! Wonder Woman shows up in the coolest manner imaginable. Electric cello blaring, she looks every inch a gladiator forged in battle. Where Superman, in spite of all his power, questions and wavers, she leaps at the enemy - sword, shield and above all, lasso in hand. For all Snyder did wrong, Wonder Woman has been done oh-so-right.

Visually, the film is typical Snyder - beautiful shots that look like comic book panels, with a sense of grandeur in the visuals. The 3D doesn't really help, making the dark visuals even murkier. Once again, 3D mucks up an otherwise beautiful movie.

Which brings us to two major criticisms of the "action" aspects of the movie. Let's deal with them one by one

1) "Batman kills. He mows down henchmen. This violates his no-kill code" - Batman has always killed in the movies. In the Burton movies, he definitely killed henchmen, while in the Nolan movies, he kills two face and flips a truck over. He had NO WAY of knowing that would not kill everyone inside the truck. Canon batman does not kill, but this is not canon. Each director has his own version of the character, aspects of which are canon, and aspects that are not. I have never felt that "no killing" has to be an integral part of every Batman. If you do, that's certainly an opinion, but not one casual fans care much about.

2) "They cause citywide destruction again, after making that such a big deal in the MoS movie" - The first thing Superman does is fly Doomsday into outer space. The only reason the battle comes back to earth is because of the knee-jerk reaction of the powers that be. If anything, this movie proves that Superman has evolved and understands his responsibilities better than those passing judgement on him.

The Final Word

Batman vs Superman does a lot of things right. Problem is, some  things it does will appeal to casual moviegoers and piss off hardcore fans, and some will appeal to hardcore fans and piss off casual moviegoers. On top of that, Zack Snyder's limitations as a filmmaker means the film has glaring weaknesses, while his fanboy love for comic book means it also has a lot of heart and is emotionally powerful. That's why this is such an incredibly divisive movie, and that is why it cannot make anyone completely happy. Given a chance, however, it is a fantastic entertainer, and gets me excited for another comic book universe on the big screen.

Chew (Or, how to eat a book)

When I was very little, I learnt how to read silently. Even got in trouble for it. See, we didn't have much of a library at school, but we had a "library period" - A 45-minute stretch of time where a group of fidgety 8-year-olds were expected to sit still and mumble from whichever book had been handed to them. Not because they loved it, but because "Library sir" would whack them between the shoulder blades with a freshly plucked switch if they didn’t. This wasn't meant to foster a love for reading, it was meant to keep us relatively quiet and scared; Which would describe a LOT of our classes, now that I think about it. But I digress.

My mother taught me how to read silently. It was the mark of culture, she said, to not move his lips when he read. So as I sat on the scratched, brown bench, hunched over my Blyton with no cover and ripped pages, lips unmoving, it must have seemed like I was staring, rather than reading. a classmate noticed, and keenly felt the unfairness of it all – him having to slog through books while I just sat there, in bliss, not absorbing ANY of the painful words into my brain. A teacher was summoned. The complaint was succinct. "He isn't reading. His lips aren't moving". I got away with it because, let's face it, as the only one in my class who snuck into the library rather than the football field during recess, it wasn't really believable that I wouldn't be reading. But I have always felt faintly smug about the incident, long after I had any right to be of such childish gotchas.

And then, I discovered, I was wrong. My mother was wrong. One day, I discovered the joys of reading out loud.

I blame Pratchett. The quality of his prose made me realize that it wasn’t enough to just read the words, that I wouldn’t be satisfied if I couldn’t feel them in a tangible manner. I needed to experience them through as many senses as I could, not just one. Hearing them, and yes, even speaking them out loud, feeling my lips and tongue and teeth perform the intricate symphony of storytelling the author had left there for me was a more complete experience, enveloping me and drawing me deeper into the world that had been weaved into my soul.

There is something solid about words. They aren’t simply vibrations in the air, or pixels on the screen, or curvy little blobs of ink on paper. They live, they breathe, and if I wanted them properly, I had to savour them. To say them out loud, to chew them, to bite, gnaw and nibble them until they felt real, in my mouth. I developed this system of “chewing” a story, where I don’t just read it out loud. I do the voices, I put on accents, I do characters. In short, I do my damndest to sound like a bad radio play, over-inflecting every word, suitability be damned. Does it slow down the process of reading? Certainly, but at the end of the day, it can’t possibly be about reading more than the other guy.

I don’t advocate reading whole books this way, of course. Not every word, not every passage, not every page or chapter is there to envelope you in. Some of them are there just to take you from the really good bits, and if you are lucky, the good bits are close by. But when you get to them, you will know. You will feel the familiar pinpricks of your hair standing on their end all along your arm, you will feel that tiny tingle in the back of your neck that tells you something special is going on. Your lips will part, your breath will pause, and somewhere in the deepest recesses of your animal brain, synapses will crackle with a little more fire. And when that happens, it doesn’t matter whether you are tucked into your bed with a book and a flashlight, or if you are in the metro, hanging onto the strap with one hand while you flick across your smartphones with the other, verbalize. Read it out loud. Trust me, eating your words never felt so damn good.

Plastic Pleasures

“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”  ― Douglas Adams

To many of us who love books, the printing press may be the greatest scientific achievement of all time. I mean, sure, without fire we wouldn’t have pizza and without the wheel there wouldn’t be a way to deliver pizza, but what is the point of a piping hot one with extra cheese if I don’t have a book to read while I absently shove slices in my mouth? Ok, that’s it with the pizza references, but the point of this is to say that people really, really, really love printed books.

And why wouldn’t they? First of all, it’s been around for a long time. It’s how we define books. It’s how our grandparents defined books. It’s how THEIR grandparents defined books, meandering back to the 1400s. Printed books are there in our bones, because they haven’t really changed in so long. We didn’t have any problem going from vinyl records, to cassettes, to CDs, to MP3, and that happened within a couple of generations. Nor do we yearn for when watching a movie at home meant lugging out the VCR and running to the video library three blocks away for a video tape that was just as likely to get wrapped up in the inner workings of the player as it was to provide an evening’s entertainment. Our music is digital, our movies are digital, our games are digital, so why do so many intelligent, reasonable people begin frothing at the mouth when the discussion turns to our books being digital?

Because they’re not wrong. There’s something about holding a book, about running ones fingers across the spine, about opening up a random page and glancing over the words. We don’t just read books. We feel books, and smell books, and touch books and sometimes, if the books are called 50 Shades of Gray, we throw books across the room in rage, but that’s neither here nor there. Books are warm and colourful and voluminous (literally). A stacked bookshelf, ceiling high, is a better adornment for any room than the world’s most expensive wallpaper. When choosing between digital and printed, the battle always comes down to aesthetics vs. practicality. And that’s the point of this post. To discover and discuss the aesthetic joys of digital.

It’s wise to remember that even the printing press was created out of a need for practicality. Books were the best way to codify and spread knowledge and information, but it was impossible to do that with the gigantic handwritten volumes of the day. The point was to speed up the process of making copies, not provide aesthetic joys. That came later, and it came because the size, shape and feel of a book became associated with memories. Practicality followed aesthetic pleasure. Hell, I bet someone complained when this newfangled thing called paper came in and made the “carvings on stone slabs” technology obsolete. This is what makes me sure that readers a few generations henceforth will find things to love about ereaders and digital books just the way we love printed volumes. The question is, what will they love?

Will they love the fact that going on vacation doesn’t mean having to choose only five of the fifteen or so books they will be reading over the next few weeks? Will they be thrilled by the way the ebook reader glows in the night…a luminous square of literature in the dark, and the rest of the world forgotten? Or will they delight in the fact that no book will go out of print. Ever.  Will they appreciate how wondrous it is that ancient philosophical texts and the latest prize winning fiction is available to them instantly? I do. It’s a thrill, a tingle in the base of my spine that I can only call an aesthetic pleasure. One that goes beyond the realm of the physical object and is almost, dare I say, magical? Yes, I recognize the aesthetic pleasures of a printed book. It’s why I have hundreds and celebrate the book fair as my own personal Christmas. But I also derive a different kind of aesthetic pleasure from a digital book. Fittingly, this is based on less tangible things, and more virtual, but it’s aesthetic no doubt, going beyond the realm of the words on the glowing screen. It’s the pleasure of more worlds to explore, more ideas to discover and more things to learn than I ever could, if I just stuck one way of thinking. Besides, printed books are not going away anytime soon, if ever. After all, we’ll always have 50 shades, and throwing my Kindle across the room get’s real expensive, real quick.

Terry Pratchett

The trouble with heroes is that up close, they disappoint. It was simpler when we didn’t know them. Before the internet. Before message boards and reddit AMAs. There was an innocence to fandom that was too good to last, really. With every new quote, revelation and news report it eroded and heroes fell. Steve Jobs turned out to be a man who had refused to acknowledge his own daughter. Gandhi was a terrible father and a man with strange fetishes. Cliff Richard’s acting was the stuff nightmares were made of. Heroes failed. Heroes disappointed. Heroes crumbled until you stopped believing in heroes. Apparently, that was when you “grew up”.

When I picked out the colourful paperback so many years ago and bought it based on its admittedly strange and somewhat incomprehensible blurb, I wasn’t looking for heroes. Honest. I was looking for a good book, a diversion for a couple of days. What I got was not one, but two heroes, a whole universe to explore, and a cult to call my own. I forget how much the volume cost me, but it was cheap at any price.

My first hero lay within the pages of the book. "His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh; Commander Sir Samuel Vimes”, as he hates to be known as, is the man I wish I was. An authority figure who is anti-authoritarian, a man of intelligence who is smart enough to know where his intelligence ends, and a self-proclaimed “bastard” who is anything but. He’s practically zen, if zen spoke softly (on occasion, most notably when the baby was in bed), and carried a big truncheon. That’s not an euphemism.

The other “hero”, I took slightly longer to discover. His name was Terry Pratchett. He had a beard as white as Santa, but a red sack could never hold the innumerable treasures Terry carried inside his black fedora. Magician? Pffft! Magicians pulled rabbits out of hats. Terry pulled out a cosmic, spacefaring turtle bearing four elephants and an entire world on its pockmarked shell.

I devoured Pratchett. I explored Discworld, and over the course of 40 books, got to know its nooks, crannies, mountains, rivers, cities and villages better than I knew the way to my own kitchen. And believe you me, I knew the way to my own kitchen. Even now, when i close my eyes, I see the sludgy waters of the River Ankh, more solid than liquid, the only body of flowing water that supports its own fauna. I see the Ramtop mountains as they disappear into the clouds, and I know of the gods who live there. Not pretend, make-believe gods like in another, more spherical planet far away, but real gods who play with lives of men and women  (and trolls, and dwarfs and warewolves, and vampires, and golems. Well, not really golems, because golems are fireproof and thus, immune to smiting). I see the kingdom bathed in the greenish-yellow-purple hue of octarine, the most magical colour of the spectrum. And of course, I see the gushing waters of the Rimworld oceans spilling into the vastness of space, where they are magically transported back, ensuring the cycle never ends.

Terry Pratchett passed away in March. It’s taken me this long to write about it, because honestly, it still feels unreal. Strange that I won’t be reading a new Discworld novel every year like clockwork. It’s hard to accept that, because as heroes go, Terry was untouchable. I’d read up on him, preparing myself for the inevitable crash. Some skeleton in the closet that was the counterpoint to his genius. Some comment that proved his bigotry. There were none. To the end, he was the admirable, outspoken, acerbic, slightly cranky and whip-smart man I knew him to be. He was my hero, the only one I had in an adulthood teeming with cynicism and fallen angels, and suddenly, he’s gone.

Death had been coming to Terry for some time now, ever since his Alzheimer's was discovered in 2007. But then again, Death was everywhere in Terry’s rip-roaringly funny world. He  was more than a motif - he was its most prolific player; the ONLY character, in fact, to feature in every single Discworld novel. As Terry put it, he wasn’t afraid of Death because, as the man who made Death famous, Death OWED him. So when Terry took his hand and disappeared across the black desert, far, far into the horizon under the starless sky, as devastating as it was for me, as heartbreaking as it was, I could not be angry. I cannot be angry. All I can do is sit at my keyboard, flex my strained fingers and tap tap tap type away, creating teeny tiny sparks of octarine magic, in the glow of Terry’s roaring bonfire.