RANT | What Went Wrong With Batman Vs Superman

Batman versus Superman, by critical consensus, is a bad movie. It's been called shoddy, scattered, self-important and tedious. But it there are plenty of people who loved it, and besides, who wouldn't? This is what we've been waiting for, Batman and Superman in the same movie! How can it be anything but awesome?

I came away from the movie with a lot of the same complaints as the critics. Overall it was pretty bad, but I still enjoyed the hell out of the second half once the action got going. 

I like bad movies. I'm interested in the craft of storytelling – film, fiction, whatever medium – so I find bad movies more instructive than good movies. A well-told story might show you what to when writing your own story, but a poorly told story will show you what NOT to do. That's a much more helpful lesson. And besides, inside every bad story is a good story waiting to be found.

So let's check out what went wrong with Batman vs. Superman, because I'm convinced there's a good movie somewhere inside.

What Didn't Go Wrong

Part of the reason for the divided opinion about the movie is that there are a lot of things that didn't go wrong.

Ben Affleck Plays A Solid Batman

This may be one of the greatest memes of 2016, and I sincerely hope it's included in holographic schoolbooks a century from now:

Hey, Ben Affleck – cheer up, man! This wasn't your fault. You did what you could. In fact, your performance was one of the bright spots in this mess. I have no doubt that, given a good script, you can make a great Batman film.

Wonder Woman (Finally) Appears

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman steals every scene she's in - it's just a pity she's in so few of them.

This Moment

This is one of the greatest moments in a recent comic book movie. No dialogue, no slow motion, just Bruce Wayne passing by Robin's costume and pausing for a moment. It shows us his pain without beating us over the head with it.

It's such a well-done and understated moment, in fact, that I'm convinced someone must have inserted it into the film without the director knowing.

What Could Have Gone Wrong (But Didn't)

I'm not particularly a fan of Snyder's grimdark Batman-turned-Punisher, but it's a perfectly valid narrative choice.

What Went Wrong

About 30 or 40 minutes into the movie, I suddenly found myself wondering, "What the hell is going on?" There were a lot of scenes with characters doing and saying things, and everyone was acting as if there were a plot in motion. But as a viewer I had no idea where the movie was going. The second half got good, but I was pretty bored throughout most of the first half. The problem here is that the film needed a through line.

A through line is the "spine" of the story, a chain of cause-and-effect from beginning to middle to end. Not all stories need a through line: there are plenty of great films that don't have one, especially movies that are more episodic (think Pulp Fiction). But for an action blockbuster, a through line is pretty useful to keep your audience along for the ride.

Let's look at an example: BvS's Marvel-universe counterpart, the first Avengers movie. The through line of this movie is that a dangerous weapon has been stolen by Loki, so SHIELD assembles a team of superheroes to combat the threat. The team members start out in separate locations, then are brought together, so even the different scenes in disparate locations – Captain America in the base, the Hulk in India or wherever, Iron Man in his tower – are all still part of the same through line.

Let's go through some of my WTF moments:

Martha – it's believable that the name could shock Batman, make him take pause, and shake up his intentions in that scene. But to suddenly team up with Superman strains credibility. Also, if I were Superman, I would not fucking turn my back on Bats for a long time.

Wonder Woman – why is she in this movie? To set up the Justice League, duh. The in-story reason she's there is because she's trying to retrieve an old photograph of herself with some WWI-era soldiers. What are the stakes? What could happen if she doesn't get the photograph? If she's been gone from the world of men, who is she afraid might recognize her? This makes no sense. And besides, at the end is she satisfied with the scan Bruce emailed her? Her plot, what little there is of it, just kind of evaporates.

It's especially dumb because she could have been given the same motivation as Batman, thinking she needs to involve herself in world events because of the Metropolis disaster.

Bruce Wayne's parents getting shot – We've seen this before. Many times. Many, many times.

Stuff was cut out – If parts of the story that were left on the cutting room floor were necessary for the audience to enjoy the story, then that's inexcusable. How many times did we watch shell casings get ejected and hit the ground in slow motion? If the film had to be trimmed for length, then that means that parts of the story necessary to understand it were dropped in favor of slow-motion effects shots. Including during the painfully redundant scene of Bruce's parents' deaths. That's far worse than just making a mediocre picture.

Now, it's worth mentioning that it seems like there's a plot going on – people meet and talk secretively, information is passed around – which makes you think there's actually something going on. (http://actionagogo.com/2016/04/07/the-just-us-league-batman-v-superman-isnt-a-failure-its-unique/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link) Here's one viewer who found the movie so entertaining, he'd be willing to "watch it twice to see if all these moving parts make sense."

Spoiler alert: They don't.

Wonder Woman never gets her hands on the photograph she's trying to recover from Lex Luthor. Batman spends the first half of the film tracking down a substance that can kill Superman and weaponizing it, only to completely reverse himself based on a coincidence. Lois Lane spends the movie researching a weird bullet in yet another subplot that just kind of evaporates. Lex Luthor walks onto an alien ship, tells it to violate ancient Krypton law and create a crazy monster – and the ship just says OK and does it.

What Went Wrong With Batman Vs Superman?

Zack Snyder's movies are visually spectacular yet emotionally and intellectually desolate. This is because, I think, he fundamentally misunderstands the art of storytelling. He apparently thinks a movie is just a series of cool moments strung together. It's no surprise he got his start doing commercials - he never left the style over substance aesthetic behind.

Some people might call Snyder "experimental" or "innovative," but that's giving him way too much credit. A Zack Snyder film is like a cargo cult: it mimics the surface features of the phenomenon it's trying to replicate without a clue about how the phenomenon actually works. Or, as an actual storyteller once wrote, "it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."