The greatest gladiator match on earth - Son of Krypton
against Bat of Gotham, this is not one to be missed, this one has to be
witnessed on the big screen. If Marvel redefined the scale of Superhero movies
by bringing their biggest characters together, DC has now begun rolling out its
own version of heavy duty multi-superhero flicks, and it is reason enough to
get excited. But the hype ends the moment you enter theatres. From that point
it is only the quality of the movie that can decide whether it wins over the
viewer. Does this scripting coup win the viewer?
It starts when Superman is first introduced to humanity,
from Man of Steel. We have Bruce Wayne
watching from the sideline as the new
hero gets the adulation. What does he feel? The Bruce Wayne from Nolan's
universe would have been relieved that he can finally retire, rest his cape and
mope around in peace. But this is Zack Snyder's universe and we are not sure
about what Bruce feels. Is he insecure, is he confused, or is he jealous? We
are not sure at first. Turns out that is how the entire world feels about
Superman. It is this insecurity that Lex Luthor wants to prey upon.
Batman vs. Superman starts slow and is in no hurry to pick
up the pace. Both Batman and Superman view each other with suspicion, and
someone's stoking the fire quite strategically. This though takes quite a long
while. The proceedings are dull and we are left searching for moments of
adrenaline. The story does keep moving ahead, you can see the isolated dots
coming together slowly, but very few moments get the excitement going. That
Batman is someone with deep seated psychological insecurities due to a
childhood tragedy is well known. Zack Snyder probes that hard, giving us a
couple of sequences that are obviously dreams, which seem to slow things down
further. You begin to feel that things are taking too long, when finally the
Bat and the Superman come face to face. That is really when the film clicks
into gear after a fair amount of drifting.
The plot thickens and comes together soon after that.
If Bruce Wayne’s haunting childhood
memories are inseparable from Batman movies, so is Krypton inseparable from a
Superman movie. The Kryptonite angle is built up slowly and surely around Lex
and then there is the final showdown. The usual graph of a superhero movie!
What should appeal here is the Batman vs.
Superman angle, which one feels is explored more at a psychological
level rather than a more entertaining popcorn level. That could have been very
interesting in the hands of a skilled director, more Nolan territory. Subtlety
is not Zack Snyder’s forte and so much of it looks more forced than fluid.
And once we are at the business end
of the movie, that is when the protagonists have all come to the
right side and
are now up against the anatagonist, Zack Snyder jumps onto his style of film
making – large scale destruction. If you think he had peaked with Man of Steel,
think again before you see this one. We don’t know how many cities he has blown
up in the final showdown, frankly we lose count because it movies all the way
from some port to Gotham city, burning almost everything in its path. For
audiences who are accustomed to the usual Hollywood superhero movie, this is
more yawn-inducing stuff as there is little or no originality in the way these
confrontations are conceived. Die hard Batman and Superman fans can whistle for
a while, but even they go quiet after a while. DC needs someone more inventive,
not a technical behemoth like Zack, at the helm of things.
It is obvious that the plan is to
dazzle us with a lot of action - big, bombastic action. But with so many
superhero movies these days, it is a hard thing to impress audiences that way.
What we do enjoy are the little moments, like the ones we saw in the trailer,
the ones where the Batman smartly takes down a dozen or so guys, like the one
where Batman and Superman fistfight each other, or the small game of wits
between Bruce Wayne and the Wonder Woman. The Script, however, does not allow
enough room for more such moments because the big action cannot wait. Also
disappointing is the complete lack of cheer or brightness in the movie. The
Nolan shadow of grim and dark superhero movies hangs on over DC – get rid of it
already, please. That’s something only Nolan can do well. Here, we get a movie
which looks and feels like it is always waiting for doomsday to happen, as if
it is inevitable, as if there is a sword hanging over the world, when the audience
can’t frankly see it. We are here to have a good time, but the movie just won’t
have any of it, it is too busy being serious. Hardly anyone smiles on screen,
except of course for the megalomaniac villain.
That brings us to Jesse Eisenberg who
gets to play perhaps the first big ticket character of his career
after
Zuckerberg, that is. He is required to play someone one dimensional, and even
though he tries to do that with subtlety it doesn’t look that great, the shadow
of the Joker lingers on, one guesses. The thoughts that he echoes are also
quite similar to what the Joker said, like how someone all powerful cannot be
all good and vice versa. Someone who does abominations for the sake of it,
someone who couldn’t escape the abominations of his father! The set up of
Wonder Woman too has fleeting similarities to that of Selena Kyle from the Dark
Knight Rises. These observations just show how big a shadow Nolan cast with his
trilogy and how hard they are to forget. This script does not challenge its
lead players much. Henry Cavill has to look morose or angry, while Ben Afleck has
to look pensive or angry, and there is nothing much in between. The epilogue,
even though stretched a bit, gives us glimpses of how the Justice League is
going to come together in the coming years and who their adversaries are going
to be. The way it panned out gives us hope that this franchise will get better,
that this was just the first act of a grand play, the one that sparked off
bigger things. But DC will have to rethink its strategy of making superhero
movies. If they are going to go all out on heavy duty VFX action with cities
crumbling like packs of cards, they must remember that they are very close to
saturation. Watch Batman vs. Superman because it is a dream union of
superheroes, there are moments (even though only a few) where you can scream
your lungs out, there are genuine goose bump moments, but it all does not add
up into a great movie. Worth a watch nonetheless.
2.5/5
Dream duo, grim setting, heavy VFX,
middling movie!
