I found I had a lot to say on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, so there’s two parts to this little diatribe – a Concern, followed by a Cinematic Onslaught. Linkage to Part 2 is at the end.
Different is good.
I’m glad DC have tried to show Marvel this; I’m sorry the critics have missed the boat on it; and I genuinely hope audiences continue their long tradition of Ignoring Movie Critics.
Because Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is clearly not, to me, the film the critics have been watching and writing about with such vitriol and damnation.
There is so much subjectivism and bias within criticism anyway…and very little film theory training, meaning a lot of what you get is journalist opinion, with no real priority over audience opinion. That’s why reviews often have very little influence on a movie’s box office; they can, especially if they shout loud enough, but look at movies like 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – that wasn’t a work of art but it was a fun film, audiences loved it. Critics hated it, but did that stop its $400-almost-$500 million box office haul?
Dawn of Justice isn’t Avengers Assemble. DC isn’t Marvel. Dawn of Justice is not what critics have come to expect of a superhero movie.
I like Marvel movies, do not get me wrong here – Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of my favourites. It’s brilliant. Avengers Assemble is also brilliant.
But film journalists, critics, whatever you wish to call them, are very quick to stand up and declare that the genre has outstayed its welcome, that it has become bloated, that it needs resting.
I don’t agree, but I can understand their perspective – and I believe it’s down to Marvel.
They are the cookie cutter production line of superhero movies, churning out one or two or three movies a year, every year, within the same world, the same narrative, striking the same tone with the same — or very similar — characters. Unchallenged.
That isn’t to say that their films are all the same; far from it. They are all different shapes and flavours…but their recipe is the same. At their core, they are essentially identical. The same tone, the same humour, the same mix of equally fan-boy and family-friendly ingredients that give you a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Wise cracks and super powers and origin stories.
The market has been saturated with them; riding critical tides of good will which have been gradually diminishing as the MCU grows and becomes more laboured with an ever-increasing breadth of characters and advance planning.
One of the reasons I loved Man of Steel so much — despite not liking Superman much as a character — was because it was different.
It wasn’t what Marvel were doing; it wasn’t even what had been done in the past with Superman. I’ve never liked the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies; they’re devoid of practically everything, aside from camp. I didn’t hold out much hope that a new cinematic Superman could be something I would enjoy – as a character, the American Boy Scout, the God Amongst Men, has very little drama inherent in his personality.
He’s perfect. He’s practically indestructible. He has no conflict, just the sense of right.
But Man of Steel did conflict him. It made him question his place as a human or Kryptonian. What should he do for the best? Why was he doing what he was doing? Was his sense of right…always right? Did he have the right to do what he thought was best?
Should he kill for the greater good? We all know Superman’s moral code, but where did that come from? A sickeningly pure sense of moral rectitude, or from something he did to learn the wrong amongst the right?
The more interesting character direction, the more interesting spine of a narrative movie, would be to ask the latter part of the question…which is the road Man of Steel took.
It was serious and it was grim. A movie that asks that question would have to be. Some dark humour would have served it well — a lesson learnt by Dawn of Justice — but as an antidote to the smell of freshly baked Marvel cookies, it was stand-out.
I think Man of Steel did change how I looked at Marvel’s output; how I looked at superhero movies in general.
Having waited so long for the genre to come to life and become a sustainable Hollywood model, it was clear that, with Marvel’s dominance, good movies would continue to be made but that genre fatigue was undoubtedly going to catch up to the wake.
The more involved and dense the MCU becomes, the more obligated the MCU audience will begin to feel – I haven’t seen Ant-Man yet, largely because I wasn’t really interested in seeing Ant-Man. But, as part of the MCU, I feel I should watch it, to get the broader picture. It doesn’t matter if Ant-Man is a particularly good movie or not; what matters for this conversation is that it very much feels like The Next Episode In The MCU Saga.
I feel I should watch it. To keep up. Not because it looks great or I love the idea, but because I need to keep up. It’s an episode that doesn’t really interest me, but it’s a piece of the broader puzzle, the larger, more involved storyline that has developed over the past few years and that it has become more and more necessary to keep up with to remain clued in. It’s another Marvel movie with the same tone and the same humour and the same kind of origin storyline but that will lead into the one I really want to see — Captain America: Civil War — and so it feels like a necessary preamble.
That isn’t to say DC/Warner Bros. will avoid this pitfall of franchise obligation – they won’t. Not by a long shot. But they do provide a foil. They do have an advantage in the arena.
They’ve done it differently. Just because Marvel established the first successful, broad-scope shared cinematic universe by building individual characters, then joining them together, then throwing them in and out of one another’s films to the point where the third Captain America is only marginally a Captain America movie, doesn’t mean that is the only way to do it.
But I believe their dominance and saturation of the genre, their blueprint for the shared universe franchise notion, has influenced many people — and many critics — on what to expect of a movie that attempts to do the same or that simply calls itself a superhero movie (I’m glad the term “comic book movie” seems to have died).
Man of Steel was DC’s pre-amble; Dawn of Justice is their entrance into the genre.
And it’s done the inverse of Marvel – to join them together, then split them apart. It strikes as opposite a tone as possible with as different a pair of characters headlining their entrance as is possible.
That is what is important. That is what will make Marvel refine the cookie recipe. That is what will keep DC and any new contenders in the arena trying to keep it fresh – new options. The lack of a monopoly.
Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s bad – and Dawn of Justice is not bad. Far from it. There’s opinion and there’s prejudice; there’s criticism and there’s appraisal and I think a lot of the negative reviews of Dawn of Justice come from a certain prejudice against a certain type of movie — that oft-mentioned misappropriation of the term “genre fatigue” and the particular stylistic quirks-over-substance of a Zack Snyder film which I must admit I was guilty of pre-empting myself— and a reaction to what is seen as Not Doing A Superhero Movie Right.
It isn’t Deadpool, which did the superhero movie a favour by turning it on its head within the familiar realms of what we had come to expect from a Marvel character. It isn’t a Marvel Studios film by evidence of its violence, darkness, narrative approach and tonal disparity from what you might have seen before.
But it isn’t a bad film. Grabbing my film theorist hat off the shelf — not that I take it off that much, to be fair — I can…and will, in Part 2…tell you why Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a good film. I can tell you why the “mess” of sub-plots are neither sub-plots nor a mess; why the character motivations are so beautifully executed and why you don’t have to be a genius to spot them, so why so many reviewers have missed Lex Luthor’s motivations is beyond me; why Zack Snyder has created a comfortably paced film that starts tentatively but builds strongly and has actually held back nicely on his tendency to fill every moment of the running time with explosions.
It is louder than what you’re used to, perhaps; more aggressive; more character-led and introspective. More sincere and serious.
But why is that a bad thing? The Batman and Superman comics take themselves sincerely and seriously. Why shouldn’t the films? Just because Superman isn’t wise-cracking every five minutes or Batman isn’t talking to his inventions with a wry smile doesn’t mean there isn’t humour or that there is no levity in the film.
I Have A Concern. 
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