User blog:RRabbit42/Review: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Here's another review I just wrote for that other site and it's for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I saw Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice during the week after it premiered. I had read some of the reviews that amounted to saying it was okay but could have been better. One I agreed with is that the movie did a good job of setting up why Bruce Wayne hates Superman, though I think that line of "if there's even a 1% chance he could be bad, we have to take him out" was a bit extreme. Another review brought up some fans' objections to Batman using guns, even if some of it was in a dream sequence, but I didn't have a problem with that. My take on this Batman is he's practical enough to use guns if necessary, rather than the previous stances of "my parents were killed by a gun so I'll never use them".

The biggest part of the movie I was pleased with is the Batman voice. The past couple of movies have had the actor growl the Batman voice, which makes it harder to understand what they are saying. When it's really bad, you begin to wish the theater had closed captioning so you can read the dialogue on screen while you're watching the movie. This Batman uses voice-changing technology and I didn't have any problem understanding him. It was a nice touch that during the final fight when Batman's helmet got damaged, the voice changer kept cutting in and out.

Though I did enjoy the movie, it left me confused in several places. The first was the title. They made a big deal of changing it from "Batman vs. Superman" to "Batman v Superman", and that's the way lawsuits are titled. Plaintiff v Defendant. The closest they ever got to any kind of legal procedings was when Superman has to show up in front of the Senate, but that didn't involve Batman or Bruce Wayne and was overshadowed by what the Senator played by Holly Hunter was doing.

The way she was coughing or choking or whatever it was made me think Lex Luthor had released some kind of airborne poison or biological agent into the room. But I don't think he did that because that would have been wasted effort due to what he did do. Or did he do both just to be thorough or just a jerk, more than when he makes his point with the jar of "Grandma's Peach Tea"? Or was that evaorating and becoming the airborne poison/agent, to give her a nudge that something big was about to happen?

In regards to Lex Luthor, it's a given that he's going to be bald at some point, so people objecting to him having hair during most of the film is a lot like that old Saturday Night Live skit where an actor is being interviewed about being in The King and I and all the reporter can focus on is that he isn't bald like Yul Brynner. It gets to the point where no matter how much the actor tries to point out that in the play it's not a factor, she's fixated on it and he then breaks down and tears the wig off his head, showing that he's stuck playing the character bald because Brynner did in the movie. In the theater I went to, I heard a couple of teenage girls giggling at the scene where Lex loses his hair, but I couldn't tell if they were giggling at Jessie Eisenberg the actor getting his hair cut off, or if it was at Lex Luthor the character getting his hair cut off.

I think my issue with how Lex Luthor was portrayed was the same reaction I had when I saw Sam Rockwell play Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2: "What is this guy doing being in charge of a company?" Lex inherits it from his dad, but still. If I worked for him, I'd be looking for a different job quick.

Another point of confusion is where the two cities are located. I always thought Gotham and Metropolis were a lot farther apart. In this movie, they're just across the river from each other. If that's the case, then Perry White's comment about crime in Gotham being standard comes across as a bit elitist. It's like he said, "Gotham has crime, but Metropolis doesn't." Really? Your next door neighbor is a cess pool of crime but your city is a paragon of virtue? All of the criminals stay on the other side of the river? Somebody dressing up as a bat and being a vigilante to fight crime is meaningless because it's happening two miles away?

But as I was typing this, I did a search for how close they're supposed to be. The answer is that it's changed over the years, but it's essentially both are New York City, but Gotham is the NYC you see at night and Metropolis is NYC you see during the daytime, or Metropolis is the better parts of NYC and Gotham is the worse parts. Or according to an article on Quora, the "DC Heroes Atlas" puts Gotham in New Jersey and Metropolis in Delaware. But according to an article on CinemaBlend, this Metropolis is both a city and a District/State, kind of like Washington D.C. Whichever one it is, Perry White still sounds like a snob.

If I had to pick one scene I was most disappointed in, it would be the one where Batman stops fighting Superman. That was a really weak reason. Batman stops the fight because of a coincidence? Who came up with that?

But on the positive side, DC did better with setting things up for future movies than I thought they would. My concern was that DC's about five years behind Marvel in terms of changing their movies from independent films that have no connection to each other, to a more cohesive whole. They've still got the fundamental problem that they're going for a "multiverse" approach so they won't be copying Marvel's Cinematic Universe where the versions of the characters we see in the different Marvel movies are all the same characters, whereas with DC, if the Joker shows up in more than one movie, it may be a different Joker from a different universe.

Because this "it's a multiverse" approach sputtered four years earlier when _Green Lantern_ didn't do so well, I thought DC was going to have to cram everything about the upcoming movies into _BvS_. CinemaBlend says that the way they did do it derailed the movie, but I didn't see it that way. It was presented as "here's a little bit of info about the characters you're going to see more from shortly".

So overall, I thought it was okay but confusing. If you haven't seen it yet, it will be at least worth renting.