Bat­man v Super­man: Dawn of Justice

Some­thing has gone bad­ly wrong at the lab. The movies being released today aren’t movies. They’re some­thing else, some­thing indis­tinct and amor­phous. They look like movies. They feel like movies. They even smell like movies. But dag­nam­mit, they ain’t movies. They just don’t feel right.

It used to be that the sole func­tion of a trail­er was to piqué the appetite, a cin­e­mat­ic amuse-bouche if you will. As we watch them, excite­ment and adren­a­line lev­els build up, images lodge them­selves in our psy­che and, a few months down the line, we end up cap­i­tal­is­ing on that urge. A trans­ac­tion is made and every­one is hap­py. Can­dy. Pop­corn. A few laughs. To para­phrase The Lion King, it’s the cir­cle of life.

Zack Snyder’s Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice opens on a shot of a guy stamp­ing on a cam­era and ends with some bag­pipe music. It’s not a movie, but a trail­er for anoth­er movie. The same human impuls­es that are leached off of with a well-timed trail­er drop have trans­ferred over into the fea­tures them­selves. The DNA has been mixed. Blood of my blood.

The bal­ance sheets have been checked twice and the ongo­ing adven­tures now serve to rekin­dle a sense of déjà vu. We don’t see Bat­man V Super­man to enjoy Bat­man V Super­man, but to be wil­ful­ly manip­u­lat­ed into think­ing that we need to see more Bat­man V Super­man. It’s all fore­play and no cli­max. The point of clo­sure is no longer the nat­ur­al dra­mat­ic apex of the sto­ry – it’s the stuff that hap­pens after that, when the ensu­ing adven­tures are ever-more unsub­tly teased. Big, impor­tant stuff hap­pens in this film, but it’s con­struct­ed to feel like just anoth­er day at the office.

The trail­er­fi­ca­tion of movies is noth­ing new. It’s now com­mon for films to exist as step­ping stone works, points between a pre-mapped begin­ning and endgame. Hell, seri­als exist­ed as far back as the silent era. Yet Bat­man V Super­man is per­haps the first film to take that tran­si­tion to its next, unsight­ly lev­el. The phe­nom­e­non of world build­ing is prov­ing to be a finan­cial­ly sound path­way for block­buster cin­e­ma, and in the end, it’s the mar­ket that decides. But what will hap­pen when peo­ple get wise to the ruse? Will they even see it as such? It’s like call­ing a ser­vice helpline, and just when it seems your query is about to be dealt with, you’re passed on to some­one else and have to relay your whole sor­ry tale again.

By design, a trail­er has to con­dense infor­ma­tion and pro­voke ques­tions through images. Bat­man V Super­man has so lit­tle time for pause or reflec­tion, it’s as if Sny­der has decid­ed to nudge the film dan­ger­ous­ly close to this cal­cu­la­tion. We don’t get ideas and emo­tions here, but vague sug­ges­tions of ideas and emo­tions. We have things shout­ed at us that are sup­posed to be con­strued as a weighty the­mat­ic dis­course but, when placed under the lamp­light, are lit­tle more than emp­ty slo­gans and cod the­ol­o­gy. There’s a big show­down on the cards, Bat­man ver­sus Super­man! But the con­text of this big mon­ey prize fight remains obscure.

The shady busi­ness mag­nate Lex Luthor, once a svelte, roll-necked degen­er­ate, now a twitchy Sil­i­con Val­ley brat c/​o Jesse Eisen­berg, offers no valu­able rea­son for his evil­do­ing beyond some vague desire to destroy God (aka Super­man, played by like­able charm tun­dra Hen­ry Cav­ill). He ties him­self up in knots with his ver­bal tirades, and we can infer from his body lan­guage that he intends to do some­thing bad, yet we have no idea why or to what end. Maybe the fun­da­men­tal thing here is that being strict about defin­ing those terms and try­ing to show why peo­ple makes deci­sions is the essence of what dif­fer­en­ti­ates a trail­er from a movie. It’s com­pas­sion and sen­si­tiv­i­ty, val­ues that have been entire­ly redact­ed from this story.

The film also offers the trail­er­fi­ca­tion of romance, cut­ting back on impor­tant love sub-plots to the point where sim­ple view­er sat­is­fac­tion turns into a tedious game of fill in the blanks. Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is sup­posed to be the glim­mer­ing bea­con of hope who pre­vents Super­man from slip­ping into the frosty chasm of exis­ten­tial despair. And yet the pair are pre­sent­ed as strangers, two peo­ple in love with the idea of one anoth­er rather than the reality.

A great film­mak­er can furtive­ly embed the seed of romance into the plot of a movie with­out the view­er even notic­ing, but it doesn’t hap­pen here. Snyder’s self-imposed lev­i­ty restric­tion means that it’s nev­er clear why Super­man ded­i­cates so much time and effort to sav­ing this women. It’s not a won­drous tale about the human con­di­tion or a heady reflec­tion about our place on Earth, it’s a busy flash mon­tage of half-formed thoughts which dash­es towards a sequel-shaped fin­ish line. Ben Affleck also stars. As does Gal Gadot as Won­der Woman, though she has no real func­tion in the film so maybe we’ll talk about her next time.

Still, Bat­man V Super­man is at least a marked improve­ment on 2013’s atro­cious Man of Steel, the hack­neyed Bib­li­cal cut-n-paste job in which the sim­i­lar­i­ties between Supes and Christ were rammed into our face like so many expired com­mu­nion wafers. Where that film didn’t even oper­ate as a sat­is­fy­ing trail­er, this one at least gets the lev­els right and duti­ful­ly escorts us from A to B (or should that be from L to M?). For Sny­der, it’s among his bet­ter films, even though it doesn’t offer a sin­gle mem­o­rable image or idea. It’s a scary thought. Any­way, see you at the next one. How are those excite­ment levels?