A dark force has been unleashed in a new cinematic universe—an enemy of levity, a besieger of vulnerable psyches, a merciless wielder of advance technologies against which ordinary humans sit defenseless. And Zack Snyder is only the director of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” The other two guys are really downers.
This underdeveloped, overlong and stupendously dispiriting duel of unlikely antagonists is the first in a projected series of interconnected films based on DC Comics characters. Ben Affleck plays Bruce Wayne/Batman—he’s impressive, within the script’s limits, even though Christian Bale’s Caped Crusader in the Christopher Nolan trilogy was a formidable act to follow. The Clark Kent/Superman role is reprised by Henry Cavill, who is just as inexpressive as he was almost three years ago in the superviolent, ultraturgid “Man of Steel,” which was also directed by Mr. Snyder. The ending of that film and the beginning of the new one overlap. Gotham is again under attack from the cosmically evil General Zod, and Superman, in fighting him, causes vast collateral damage—to the city, and to Bruce Wayne’s enterprises and employees.
That provides the pretext for the conflict between two mythical figures. For Bruce, “Batman v Superman” becomes a tale of revenge. For Mr. Snyder and his writers, Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer, it’s a would-be dissertation on the nature of heroism—“The Incredibles” without the fun—and on two deeply flawed superheroes. Would-be as opposed to what is, because spasms of highfalutin philosophy, and howlingly pretentious dream sequences, serve only as the thinnest of veneers for incessant action in one of the most assaultive movies ever made. (I saw it on a big IMAX screen—there are not-so-big IMAX screens these days—that upped the assaults into virtual felonies.)
In the philosophical scheme of things, Superman is seen as a good guy in a time of terror—a suicide bombing links the movie’s sci-fi fantasy to current reality—but also a loose cannon, a unilateral interventionist and, when public opinion turns against him, an illegal immigrant. (Who knew that extraplanetary visitors needed green cards?) Batman, by contrast, turns into a brutal vigilante who brands his victims with a bat sign. (He’s an aging vigilante, as we’re meant to see when he takes on younger adversaries in a labored ballet of martial arts set in Africa.)
Yet the contrasts are blurred by the movie’s penchant for equal-opportunity pessimism—“We’re all criminals,” says Batman; “No one stays good in this world,” says Superman. (These are indeed dark times, but so was the Great Depression, and Hollywood in the 1930s gave us Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire along with violent mobsters.) And the conflict between them, far from seeming inevitable, feels exactly like what it is, an arbitrary notion for a big-budget extravaganza that contains trailers—disguised as disjointed action sequences—for sequels to come. Among the characters who surface is Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, played unwonderfully by the Israeli actress Gal Gadot.
The action gets blurry too, not from a deficit of energy—Mr. Snyder, a merchant of bleakness, is also a maestro of high-tech kinetics—but from a lack of variety. After a while everything looks the same, thanks in large part to the ugly blue-and-teal palette the filmmaker favors (the cinematographer was Larry Fong), and everything sounds the same, thanks entirely to a pitiless score, by Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL, that suggests platoons of percussionists high on magic mushrooms. The climactic battle between you-know-who is a slugfest, as inelegant as it is extended. Amy Adams is back as Lois Lane, though she doesn’t have much to do. Jesse Eisenberg has lots to do as the villainous Lex Luthor. This time Lex is conceived as a demented version of the Internet icon Mark Zuckerberg, whom Mr. Eisenberg played in “The Social Network,” but the dementia is more embarrassing than funny. (Oh, for the days of Gene Hackman’s exuberant evil.)
Honor bound as I am to avoid spoilers, I can tell you without fear of divulging too much that there’s a product placement toward the end for Turkish Airlines—an odd if not unseemly aberration in a production that supposedly cost a quarter billion dollars—and that a crucial, and preposterous, plot point turns on mother love.
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