In short, I liked it.
It wasn’t great. I’m not fawning all over it like some of the fanboys out there. But it also wasn’t as terrible as some critics will have you believe.
It was good. Maybe a little better than okay. That’s about it.
There’s a pantheon of great comic book movies – The Winter Soldier, Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight, The Avengers. This movie falls WAY short of those. There are a number of curious script decisions and some editing and directing failings, and I’m still a little confused about how the actual Batman v Superman happened in the first place.
(All he had to do was explain to Batman about his mom, right? I’m not the only one who realizes that, am I? Or use his super-speed to check every warehouse in the city. He’s Superman! And he had a whole freakin’ HOUR to find her! He found Lois Lane in a freakin’ African desert!)
Anyway, none of it was enough to make me hate the movie. I was entertained, and the plot was essentially about as convoluted as some of the source material Zack Snyder was drawing on, anyway. So I didn’t really hold any of those failing against it. It is what it is – a movie about two superheros fighting each other under some very strained logic, realizing how dumb that was (about 45 minutes too late), then banding together to defeat the real enemy, a monster whose main power was to overwhelm the viewer with flashy CGI.
(Not so) Strangely enough, it also didn’t aggravate me with its potential. I’ll do that with a lot of movies. I’ll see greatness in them that just wasn’t quite realized, and I’ll rewrite the movie in my head to take advantage of certain beats or moments that I thought were underutilized. A good example is Skyfall, which I thought was a frustratingly good Bond movie that could have been a GREAT Bond movie, almost on par with Casino Royale (one of my favorite movies period). It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, so I’m racking my brain here, but I remember the scene in the second act where Silva had escaped and Bond was chasing him and his henchmen through the tunnels. I wanted to see to some examples of Bond being a bad ass there, moments like the ones in Casino Royale where he bursts through the drywall, or kills the guy while falling down the stairwell. A boring, by-the-numbers gunfight/chase scene could have shown us SO MUCH MORE BOND BADASSERY, but it didn’t. Thus making the movie good, but not great.
But in watching this movie, I felt none of that. I haven’t spent a moment afterward thinking “if only they changed this scene, or did that one differently.” The whole movie was all just… there. It was bright, and pretty, and loud, and Wonder Woman was cool, but nothing about the movie blew me away, and nothing made me think “that was so awesome I need to see it again!” Which probably tells you all you need to know right there.
The more I think about it, thanks to the horrible early reviews, I probably came in with really low expectations, which means I was pleasantly surprised that the movie didn’t suck my life force away for two and a half hours. In fact, the more I think about it, that’s probably a pretty good summary.
“Didn’t suck my life force away for two and a half hours…” – Kris Kramer
DC and WB, feel free to put that on your posters.