A Waste of Time

I went into Batman v Superman expecting a very bad movie. Maybe one of the worst movies in recent memory.

I was not prepared for how bad it actually is. Nothing can prepare you.

You are not prepared. You never will be prepared.

I kind of feel battered, like I was wearing a tin bucket on my head and somebody was banging on it with a hammer for three hours. Not because it was loud. Or there was too much cgi and too many explosions… All that stuff is just boring in the movie. Battered rather by the sheer stupid of this pile of garbage.

Every pointless scene, each too long and yet missing pieces that would have been required for them to feel consequential. Every ugly, gray, poorly composed shot. All 500 slow motion shots. All 5,000 speeches about gods and devils, each one a dumber word salad of haplessly combined, meaningless platitudes than the last that could only sound profound to the very dumbest person in the audience (or David Goyer).

There is a lot of talk about things done with the characters that aren’t true to how people think they should be portrayed, but let’s ignore that for a moment. Let’s just pretend this is an original movie not based on any source material. And it is still just a very, very bad movie. It is badly edited, badly directed nonsense. The scenes have no beginning or end, no reasons for being, and the characters’ motivations are the same. Everything is just tossed into the blender like stock footage in an Ed Wood film, only I love Ed Wood films, so apologies to Mr. Wood for the unflattering comparison.

And then after we talk about that, we can talk about how it treats the characters and source material. It does every single thing wrong. Everything that you can possibly think of. It can’t even manage to show Bruce Wayne’s parents getting shot, the most over-repeated event in the history of pop culture besides maybe Uncle Ben biting it, without fucking it up.

Joe Chill has the gun in their faces… And Thomas Wayne makes a fist and goes to punch him. Yeah that’s right, man, Imma punch you right in your loaded gun! says Thomas. Making the moment when the Waynes get shot less sad due to it happening because of Thomas being a total fucking belligerent moron. Although that does establish the template on which this total fucking belligerent moron version of Batman bases his actions, I suppose.

The Snyder version of Thomas Wayne, who we only get a few shots of, within that short time becomes the dumbest, least inspiring character we’ve seen in these movies, aside from the Snyder version of Pa Kent. Pa Kent shows up too, by the way, in case you were thinking Snyder might not want to revisit the most egregiously awful missteps of Man of Steel, especially when they’re totally irrelevant to this movie and he has no reason to go there. If you thought that, you would be wrong of course.

Pa Kent shows up in a dream or hallucination or some such nonsense to tell Clark a story about how once, when he was younger, he helped stop a flood from ruining their farm, only to find later that by diverting it they had somehow caused it to flood a neighbor’s farm, and had drowned all of the neighbor’s horses. Now, this is totally impossible for several reasons, like the child version of Pa and a few other people within the space of a few hours somehow being able to manually divert a large enough flood that it destroyed an entire other farm. Even if they did do that, it also wouldn’t have been their fault, because they couldn’t have known that, and where was this other farmer who apparently wasn’t even paying enough attention to his farm to get the horses off of it when it started to flood.

That doesn’t stop Pa from hearing the screams of the horses in his nightmares for years, he says, even though he didn’t find out about the flood until after it was over, so he wouldn’t have heard any horses screaming. The entire thing is nonsense bullshit, but Pa apparently feels it’s worthwhile to make up this entire story to drive home the key point that he’s been trying to tell Superman for two movies- doing heroic things and trying to help only leads to bad stuff happening. Better to just let yourself be carried off in a tornado, because life is pointless and there’s no reason to do stuff. You know, the sort of inspiring message Superman has always been known for.

But you can’t really blame Pa this time, because it’s Superman’s dream, so how is he learning this new story about Pa’s childhood that he never heard before? He’s not talking to Pa, this is all in his head, so this deep belief that trying to do good stuff leads to imaginary screaming horses now comes from Superman’s own head. Or maybe it comes from a fucking sub-literate screenplay where nobody thought of the fact that this was a dream sequence so Pa couldn’t be telling Clark anything new, they were just on their autopilot, doing their Alfred tells a story about a ruby and men wanting the world to burn scene or whatever the fuck they think they’re doing when they have this scene with the older character telling the hero some long anecdote from their past in each of these films.

Not the only long, meaningless dream sequence, though. Actually there are about five. There is easily a half an hour of the film that could be cleanly lifted out without any impact on the rest of it. Actually the entire movie is like that. Just one pointless dump after another, and there isn’t any story whatsoever tying a single bit of it together.

After a while, it just all beats you down. At the start, I was thinking of fun sassy things to say about the especially egregious bits. But it’s not just parts, it’s every single thing in the movie. I make fun of the Pa Kent shit, but that’s just an example. You could say even more about the Perry White character, who in this version apparently hates newspapers and thinks that reporting on things is pointless.

In the end, it just rolls over you like a tidal wave of stupid, and you’re left wanting to curl into a ball and sleep. Sleep for days. Sleep until the next epoch of civilization, because why would you want to open your eyes in a culture that finds this entertaining?

Or, as Lex Luthor says in the movie, “When man kills the devil and God kills man and the devil comes from the sky and man kills the sky and there’s a pit and I’m gonna kill that pit but God kills a Labrador, and it’s upside down and something something power hope heroes then something something purgatory and hey look guys it’s Aquaman! Ringringringring.”