Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice

Zack Snyder, 2016, USA

Of course, the subheading really doesn’t mean much apart from its own bombast and the promise of The Justice League as an upcoming franchise. ‘Batman vs Superman’ is more concerned with the question of vigilantism and heroism than justice (although in this genre these are ordinarily conflated). At least initially. You have Superman and Batman and the film takes a long time to set them against one another and making this an even fight. When one of Superman’s epic battles, smashing aliens and bad guys through the city, kills those in Wayne towers, Bruce Wayne sets on a path to bring Superman down.

But the world of the Batman has already won: Superman – the supposed antithesis of Batman, representing brightness and hope and overcoming disasters, a general colourfulness, etc – has been placed in the bleak world of the Dark Knight. He no longer wears his mantle of godhood with ease. The colour-scheme is so drained that it might as well be in black-and-white (which makes the appearance of the Batmobile a little hard to make out). The running theme is Destroy Your Gods: in Batman taking on the Man of Steel, to Lex Luthor’s nefarious plan to the people’s protesting at Superman’s supposed wrong doing. And surely there’s a little envy in the way Batman knows he can never do as much to save people as Superman? The film touches on this but never quite uses this to flesh things out, to make Batman’s motivation a little hubristic.  

There is so little humour here that when these guys wonder aloud who Wonder Woman is with, this lighter touch comes as somewhat a surprise: no one is expecting an ‘Avengers’ roster of quips, but the glimmer of a lightness-of-touch reveals how monochrome the approach is and that a little humour would have gone a long way to adding texture. For example, treating the fact that Lois Lane always gets saved by Superman – indeed, this is a major plot point – with a little knowing humour might have helped mitigate how problematic this is for a contemporary female character. This is a continuation of the darker, angst-ridden depiction of Superman as introduced by Snyder in ‘Man of Steel’. In that sense, Superman already met ‘The Dark Knight’. No one stays good all the time, says Superman before flying off with this apparently now part of his ethos. This might appeal more to my particular taste (I prefer things a little jaded) but I am also not certain this is correct for Superman.  

But what I can’t quite see is why ‘Batman vs Superman’ would have a harsher reception than ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ which was surely just as guilty of clunkiness, pomposity, bad moments and franchise appeasement. I felt ‘Ultron’ was as undemanding and… well, diverting but not perpetually good, covering up its flaws with perpetual quips; just as Snyder covers them up with faux-seriousness. Although I continue to admire how JJ Abrams balanced all the characters/franchises without dropping the ball. It demanded as much from me as the much-loathed ‘Fantastic Four’ (2015) film, for example. ‘Batman vs Superman’ is indeed guilty of being overstuffed (which I don’t necessarily mind) and there are several moments where things don’t get to breathe properly – for example, the speed with which Diana Prince gets an email and discovers other metahumans and just immediately shuts her laptop upon viewing the videos is unintentionally humorous. It takes a while for Batman to steal the Kryptonite, etc., but the speed with which other metahumans are introduced feels very much Oh, and this too! You can almost feel the joins of the studio demands of a franchise introduction being pasted onto Chris Terrio and David A Goyer's ready-written script (or, as a general joke goes, a half-finished screenplay that got filmed).

So, no, I don’t really think this is the worst superhero movie ever. It’s true that it’s hard to take its po-faced “superhero landing” seriously after ‘Deadpool’ and it’s true that it has some dodgy dialogue; that it speeds over some areas of narrative so fast it produces potholes and labours over other points; that Jesse Eisenberg is allowed to let all his annoying tics run wild as if he is channelling Lex Luthor via The Joker. Or do I have this wrong and Eisenberg, as A.A. Dowd has it, actually the only one having fun. And for what it’s worth: Ben Affleck makes good Batman; Henry Cavill looks good but is saddled with a mopey Superman that he can’t do much with; Gal Gadot as Diana Prince doesn’t get to do much here except look good in red in a washed-out world and hog the most slo-mo poses.

But what does it get right? If you think things are too easy to resolve for Superman, then most of his action gets brief screentime. There is a great Batman fight (featured in the trailer but late in the film) that is given time to play out and, although it’s not quite ‘The Raid’ or the kind of fight we see in the ‘Daredevil’ series, it goes some way to showing how this one man can beat gangs of bad guys. There are fanboy Easter eggs, such as Batman’s battle-suite being blocky a’la Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight’; or an appearance by what looks like Zombie Superman.Then, when the Doomsday plot kicks in (and the shift to this different film is surely major evidence why people think it’s overwritten) Batman is relegated to the sidelines more to let Superman and Wonder Woman – the invulnerable ones – take centre stage, which is certainly sensible. It’s a Zack Syder film, which means it is often as good as it is bad and only as good as the script. For example: ‘Watchmen’, good; ‘Suckerpunch’, bad bad bad. And if the opening credits are trying to ape the technique of ‘The Watchmen’, the fact that it’s simply summarising Batman’s origin story – again! – surely makes it too familiar to be in any way exceptional. This is a director that has helmed two of the best openings in genre film: ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘Watchmen’. He has also brought us ‘300’ and ‘Suckerpunch’. So with ‘Batman vs Superman’ I found I always had an eye on the flaws, but since my expectations were so low that I was surprised that it wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe.

And if the first half of the film stems from the genre problem of what to do with all the fall-out of mass destruction from a super-fight, this self-analysis is all washed away in the third act when surely hundreds and thousands died in the showdown. Talk about carnage. In fact, all the time (in the fiction as well as in actual watched minutes) it takes to set up the premise seems redundant when it amounts to a final act that undoes any thinking or themes that came before. Snyder apparently cannot help but be enamoured by super-beings being punched through a sequence of sky scrapers, or characters moving bad-assly and heroically in slo-mo towards the camera.  In that sense one can see why he has been chosen as a superhero director of preference, happily delivering the clichés and managing the enterprise with some hard-faced fare even as the most successful Marvel entries are those with large wodges of tongue-in-cheek. 

It would seem that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films have cast a long shadow still over the DC Universe. As a friend of mine said, it’s probably not what Snyder was aiming for, but it’s fine. ‘Batman vs Superman’ isn’t special in any way, but it’s not nearly as some would have it. And I guess that's damning with faint praise.

VALHALLA RISING

NICOLAS WINDING REFN
2009 - Denmark/UK

In some ways, “Valhalla Rising” feels like a debut from a director come from making experimental short films which have been successful due to a triumph of atmospherics hung upon an ambitious but thin story. Director Nicolas Winding Refn is in fact a Danish director that has a commendable list of films exploring male violence which are both naturalistic in characdterisation and given to stylistic tics: “Bleeder”, “Pusher” and its sequels, “Bronson”. “Valhalla Rising” is a superficially different beast, taking a Viking drama and conveying it through a fog of dour atmospherics and often pretty visuals; again, like a young director exceeding the limitations of budget by sheer aspiration and verve. And, like many student films, there is a certain uncertainty of performance, despite the experience of the cast, threatening to sabotage the illusion of a visit back through time. Viking dialogue - which is a chief weakness - is conveyed in low, undecided tones as opposed to what we might mostly be used to: those grand gestures and intonations of other historical epics. But, despite the visuals and the grand intentions of this journey into the heart of darkness, there is something in the space left around the dialogue that leaves it feeling weak and searching for a hold. Refn’s intention seems to be to produce a neo-realistic tone, but the performances seem un-buffered whenever dialogue is spoken. It feels adrift somewhere between Harmony Korine’s guerrilla aesthetic and Zack Snyder’s infamous “300” stylisation, with a reach for Werner Herzog and even Tarkovsky’s elemental fascination.

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Nevertheless, there is Mads Mikkelsen, who gives a wordless but magnetic performances that keeps the film grounded. Part ravaged hunk, part super-killing machine, an enslaved warrior robbed of one eye and his humanity. One-eye is kept caged and let out only to win fights: scarred up and seemingly forever on the verge of slaughtering anyone in front of him, initially his tale promises an study of the mystery and violence of this silent killing machine. The British Momentum Pictures promotional packaging uses cues familiar from Snyder’s “300”, giving the impression of a blood-soaked war epic with Mikkelsen leading a helmeted army, and none of which represents the film at all. Although “Valhalla Rising” is arguably just as stylised, it is far from the pulp absurdities of “300”. Almost all the gore and violence is up front in the film - including an unforgettable evisceration - for when One-Eye is free and we might presume a tale of extended wrath, he acquires a friendless boy (Maarten Stevenson) as a kind of spokesman and finds himself joined up with a small gang of crusading Christians. They are setting out to create a New Jerusalem - or rather, their apparent religious leader is and the others seem along for the promised treasures the conquered Holy Land will bring them.

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Then follows what may be, the gut-wrenching and bleak early passages aside, the film’s most successful sequence. The boat journey combines the elements of odyssey, otherworldiness, silence, naturalism and formal experimentation with pace, plotting and location that Refn otherwise struggles for elsewhere. Others may find this sequence interminable, for it is here that Refn goes from brooding, slow-paced doom with spasms of violence to a more dissonant sense of plot and increasingly abstract meaning. The claustrophobia of the boat is tangible, seemingly stranded in fog and undergoing a passage into another world as surely as the Bowman going through the light-show of “2001”.
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“Valhalla Rising” is an antidote to the bombast of so many other historical warrior epics. It is not grandiose like a Ridley Scott recreation; it’s visuals and beauty rely not upon set-design but the natural world, the foggy mountains and damp rock faces, the doomy and drained landscapes, accompanied by a heavily ambient soundtrack. It is a brief tale: gaining his freedom as a slave for fighting, One-Eye goes to hell, those around him find nothing and go to pieces, and he finally meets red Devils. It is a exercise in anti-climax, a heart of darkness that goes nowhere and probably signifies very little. Had Refn lost many of its modern stylistic affectations, it may have headed in the direction of, for example, “The Valley of the Bees” in recreating a long lost era in a realistic manner. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, “Valhalla Rising” remains a fascinating experiment throughout.

Buck vs. "300"

300

Zack Snyder, 2006, USA

Finally, I get to see "300", a film so fuelled by testosterone, it made me want to oil myself down and photoshop my abdominals. It's one big shout for manly war filtered through blood red, gold and slo-mo. As an army promotional tool, as a call for the arrogance, self-righteousness and sacrifice of kamikaze soldiers, it scores highly. There are also, famously, lashings of homoerotica, homophobia, a little racism, a little misogyny, a little nod to feminism (behind every great man… etc.), a little sneering at the soldiering pretensions of the proletariat, an annoying mythologizing voice-over, some scary stuff about making boys battle-friendly the day they can play-fight, acres of blood and slaughter, shouting… It's like being tea-bagged by a fascist.

There is little refuting the passionate and widespread criticisms of Zack Snyder's adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel, and it barely wears a posing pouch of subtext. It is not pacifist-, leftist- or liberal-friendly and like any happy hawker, it shouts its way into war, bellowing "Victory!" even when its forces are very visibly being wiped out. But such seriously politicised evaluations do seem to wane in the light of fabulist beasts and an artificial aesthetic every bit as consummate at that other Miller adaptation, "Sin City". While "Sin City" had the virtue of being pure pulp with nihilistic frission and pull of noir plotting, "300" lacks true substance. It does not hold up to scrutiny: it's not hard to discredit its seeming use of the Spartans as the American underdogs fighting for liberty, fraternity and warmongering against mysticism and tyranny. It is not hard to make a leap to more appropriately imagining the Spartans as, say, Vietnamese or Muslim radicals. Why, I am not sure there is ever really a sense of three hundred Spartans at all… a few dozen, maybe. While its superficial agenda is unprogressive, reactionary and arguably reprehensible to any moderate, it is also such a work of superficiality and absurdity that it is barely worth taking seriously. It is, very much, a dumb action film and, moreover, pure hyperbolic fantasy.

As fantasy, it has more lineage with Harryhausen Sinbad romps than typical Hollywood historical epics. It has all the usual trimmings: an outrageous, slightly monstrous villain advocating genocide and bling; an association between ugliness and Evil so obvious, a five-year old could elucidate upon it; a dominant but ultimately substance-free hero who can crack wise, avoid villainous queer-tinged come-ons, lead his men to the fight and appreciate the occasional moment of disingenuous pathos; a little courtly intrigue and betrayal; some state-of-the art monsters; a few gorgeous visuals… and all of this in that blood red, gold and slo-mo. All politics (i.e. diplomacy and debate) are proven as antiquated (as lecherous old men, for example), weak and corrupt - meanwhile, the beefcake soldiers get on with dealing with the threat with their fists, like real men. In red capes and thongs. But the political subplot really is filler, and the monsters seem to be carrying on careers from Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, dropping in for cameos that barely register (as a potential monster movie, it is also a bit of a cheat). There is nothing here as truly gripping, thrilling or carefully staged as the opening of Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" remake.

Being a product of the post-9/11 climate gives "300" that much more impetus as a battle cry, with its portrayal of bad guys as literally inhuman and its presentation of war as the greatest of inevitable glories and deaths and, indeed, as unavoidable and part of the system. All with a dash of occasional electrifying metal-edged guitars for extra cool. But, again, once submerged wholly in the artificial landscapes and beautifying slow-motion (my favourite being the impossible storm at see laying waste to Persian ships), long before we get to the CGI monsters, the whole pantomime is so preposterous that, for all its lack of substantial story and deplorable politics, it can be enjoyed on dumb fantasy and aesthetic levels. With its bursts of beauty and occasional inventiveness, it can be tolerated like an entertaining, loud-mouthed, probably deplorable but intermittently talented asshole with whom one has no qualms at humouring and laughing at.