This is not a review. I haven't seen Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. If I were to say this was a review, I'd be obligated to see the movie before I started talking about it. But this isn't a review. In a way, it's an explanation for why I'm not interested in seeing it. The reviews that have come in have seemed to confirm my suspicions about the movie. There's another big movie coming about a conflict between a clean-cut guy with super-strength who represents an idealized version of old-fashioned values fighting against a genius with no true superpowers who still manages to go toe-to-toe with those who do because of his vast wealth and ability to use that wealth to arm himself with gadgets, and I sure as shit am going to see that one.
Why is Marvel so much better at film adaptations these days? You can basically go into any Marvel movie and at least have fun (ok, maybe not in the Incredible Hulk, and the Thor movies just barely squeak by thanks to Tom Hiddleston.)
The popularity of Dark and Gritty style was a clear reaction to 9/11. For a brief period before then, The Matrix had defined the look and feel of action movies - dark, yes, but slick. This was in a period where the biggest threat seemed to be boredom and malaise - a society where people weren't feeling challenged. But once we started this era of terrorism, people weren't going to be satisfied with action heroes looking like they had just come from a fashion show. Jason Bourne was the new action hero (despite coming from novels written well before that period.)
The Dark and Gritty led to two very influential reboots. Casino Royale and Batman Begins took two series that had plummeted into excessive camp (their immediate antecedents were Batman and Robin and Die Another Day.) In both cases, they hit the reset button.
Casino Royale and Batman Begins are both origin stories for characters who had been part of film series with vague continuity. James Bond had been played by five actors over about 40 years at the time (not counting the original Casino Royale, which was a weird parody of the series.) Sometimes the series admitted the existence of other movies, but usually only within the same actor's tenure. Still, Casino Royale began a reboot that truly erased all previous Bond movies from its continuity (though the continued casting of Judi Dench as M confuses the hell out of any attempt at figuring out a timeline - unless you just imagine that her Brosnan-era M and Craig-era M are from entirely different continuities and she was just such good casting that they kept her.) The Bond movies pre-reboot had gotten into a deadly escalation spiral, where gadgets had to be one-upped until we had straight sci-fi like the invisible car. Rebooting allowed them to get rid of that embarrassing stuff, with the only science fiction element being Bond's continued sanity, apparent lack of venereal diseases, and the fact that he's not dead (in Skyfall, there is no explanation for how he's still alive after Moneypenny accidentally sniped him off of a train off of a bridge into a ravine other than "he's Jame's Bond.")
Tim Burton's Batman is very much a product of its time (the Prince soundtrack... I won't say it hasn't aged well, in case you're into that sort of thing, but man does it date the movie.) Still, it was a genuine attempt to replicate the feeling of the comics on screen, and the heightened reality of Burton's Gotham was fun. He did another movie, but then we got Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, where they seemed to take the idea of a heightened reality and just blew it all the way into camp. Christopher Nolan wiped the board clean and started anew, attempting to ground Batman in a version of Gotham that felt more like the real world. I wrote a few months ago about how the first of the "Dark Knight" trilogy actually had more of that heightened feeling - not quite Burton-level, but not our reality - and then pushed the Dark Knight into a realm that felt very much like it could be a real city dealing with a real terrorist threat.
Nolan's Batman trilogy stripped things down so that we could see the most stone-cold badass version of Batman. It had its flaws, of course. Nolan suffers from convolution disease, which sometimes serves him well (The Prestige is one of my favorite movies) but sometimes leaves you with a bit of a mess on your hands (Dark Knight Rises.)
Nolan co-produced Man of Steel - DC's attempt to do for Superman what Nolan had done for Batman. There was one recent Superman movie, directed by Bryan Singer of X-Men fame. Singer actually deserves a lot of credit for the current popularity of superhero movies, given that his first X-Men kind of kicked it off (Sam Raimi's Spiderman was a big deal as well.) But for whatever reason, Superman Returns did not do well, and never really led anywhere in terms of franchise.
The problem, though, is that Man of Steel (which, full disclosure, I haven't seen) took "do for Superman what Nolan did for Batman" way too literally, creating a bleak, colorless world where Superman is a force of destruction. He doesn't go out of his way to hurt any innocents as far as I know, but given that Superman is supposed to be the epitome of the lawful good, always strives to do the right thing kind of hero, it's pretty surprising that he doesn't seem to be doing much to actually save people. There's cinematic precedence in the Marvel movies, after all. The Avengers spend most of their time in the Battle of New York protecting civilians and getting them out of harm's way. In Age of Ultron, there's a huge amount of screen time in the climax devoted to getting people onto the little hover-skiffs to get them out of the city before it is destroyed. Captain America has out-Supermanned Superman.
And I think it's because there's some sort of disconnect between WB, DC, and Zac Snyder, who has been given the reins to what they're trying to make into the DCCU.
Marvel Studios, even after being bought by Disney, has always striven to make sure that the superheroes feel right. Captain America I think is their biggest success. They manage to make him a good person with "Boy Scout" values that nevertheless knows how to handle himself in complex situations like the threat of Hydra in Winter Soldier. But while the Captain is a beacon of reservation-free Red White and Blue in a series of movies that test that patriotism but ultimately affirm it, Marvel can also have characters like the Punisher exist in the far darker and more disturbing segment of the world that exists within their "Netflix-verse." The Captain can have his relatively bloodless combat against clearly evil villains while Daredevil aspires to that while finding himself in a much darker and gruesome setting.
The point being: you can have both, but you should know which tone works for which character.
I've only seen two Zac Snyder movies. The first was 300, which I saw in college before it even came out in theaters. It was clear that Snyder had seen Robert Rodriguez's (and Frank Miller's, who got a directorial credit) Sin City and basically just did 300 in the same way - a kind of direct comic book translation. But I've got problems with both films, to be honest, because I think there's something fascistic about Miller's obsession with violence and domination as the sole ethical constant in the universe. 300 in particular bothered me because of the unsettling parallels between its story and the contemporary state of the Iraq War - in which the Spartan senator who doesn't want to send more troops to back up the 300 is actually a cowardly traitor, this being at a time when George W. Bush was trying to secure a "Surge" in Iraq and there was still a culture of jingoism that labeled anyone critical of the war as "letting the terrorists win."
The fact that Snyder wants to make a movie of the Fountainhead certainly backs up my theory that this is a guy who wants to tell America extreme-right-wing fables.
The other I saw was Watchmen. To be honest, I thought it was a decent adaptation. I was even fine with the way they handled Doctor Manhattan's role in Ozymandias' plot. I only saw it the one time, though. I don't think I could tell you precisely what Alan Moore was going for in that story - in truth, he was probably going for a whole lot of things - but I know there are some readers who erroneously think that Rorschach - the crypto-fascist who has a Punisher-like facility with brutally murdering the "bad guys" - is the book's true hero. My interpretation has always been that the book has no true hero, and that every one of the superheroes ultimately fails the people they intend to protect.
Having only seen the movie once, I probably projected my interpretation of the book onto the movie, and so the fact that most of the plot points were translated pretty directly was enough to satisfy me.
So is Zac Snyder the problem here? It seems that what draws him to these comic book movies is the idea of clashing Titans - figures that are larger than life and more exciting than the little people who can't destroy buildings. There's a place for that, but I'd argue that it misses the point of, perhaps not all superheroes, but certainly its two most iconic examples.
Superman, I think, represents a being who is greater than any person, but within that greatness is also a greater capacity for compassion. The fact that he is so much more powerful a being than we mere mortals is counter-balanced by the fact that he has a superhuman power to care about us. That makes him the paragon, and that's why he deserves to be in stories that affirm the message of optimism he represents. A lot of filmmakers have interpreted him as a Christ figure, which works fine for this. But I think it's important to remember that his creators were Jewish, and Superman's origin story was based on Moses. This is not a guy who suffers through misery to shoulder our sins (as an aside, I actually think the teachings are way more important than the Passion for Christianity,) but a guy who does his best to live as an example for the people who follow him, with the hope of a promised land somewhere down his path.
Batman works in a dark setting. Nolan proved that. But that's what makes him a good foil to Superman. Batman has a strong moral code, but he's not a role model. He's there to make the people who usually strike fear into the hearts of the innocent feel that fear themselves. The problem is that if Superman's already living in this bleak and depressing world, then what does the darkness that Batman brings really add to the story?
I think that there was this switch that got flipped in 2001 where we decided that a story couldn't tell us anything important unless it was dark and gritty, and that upbeat and colorful storytelling was just a kind of opiate to distract us from the truth. But in the time since then, surely we've learned that this dark and gritty stuff can be just as much of a distraction. Convincing us that everything is terrible can be just as useful to some people as convincing us that everything is perfectly fine. Nuance requires a consideration of both of these aspects of life. And if we're talking about comic book movies, I think Marvel's getting the balance right while DC is not.
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