If you mean villains then David Tennant and Vincent D'Onofrio may beg to differ. They didn't play movie characters but at least the long form TV format allowed them room to develop.
I haven't seen any of the television series, though I have heard good things about Jessica Jones.
I suppose that one of the reasons I avoided Dawn of Justice for so long is that I never really took to Superman. As much as I am a fan of Batman, I am fussy as to which stories I like. Anything that relies heavily on the supernatural, mystical or really anything from space doesn't really interest me as I find the appeal of the title to be in the psychology of the characters.
That said, there was merit in the core story idea of Dawn of Justice. It was just so mis-handled by the mad desire to make it an effects-driven spectacle rather than let the story breathe. The film fell into the trap of never siding with either character: because both are heroes of their own titles, both of them must be right; therefore, they must have an external threat to fight. The film simply doesn't want to pick a side.
I watched the UC last week, with no history with the theatrical release. It's looooong, and feels it. It's been a problem with every CBM this year other than Deadpool, IMO: while Civil War was great, it was a butt-number by the end, and X-Men easily felt like it was left in the oven 30min too long.
The reason BvS drags on is because so little actually happens. From my understanding, the longer cut rights some of the plotholes the theatrical edit had, and that's super... but I could've summed up the basic premise in a few sentences. Lex goes out of his way to create a needlessly complicated plan, and while I can see the why behind it, it's all superfluous based on his final move:
I get that he wanted Superman to feel alienated. I get that he wanted Batman to see Supes as a serious threat to humans. I get that he wanted Batman to seem more ruthless than he really was to push Clark to want to stop him. Yeah yeah yeah. It meant the world would see this alien as selfish and compromised if he killed Batman to save his mom... but that could've been achieved without the first two hours of the movie, really. We would have arrived at the exact same conclusion had he started with kidnapping Martha, and I think that's what bothers me.
Especially when I remind myself that despite this plan, he went and created Doomsday too. Why?! Also, are we going to gloss over how Doomsday is immediately doing exactly what Lex wants?
There were parts I like: as ever, Snyder knows style (though I suppose that's more down to his DOP). I really liked the credit sequence: it was a tidy way to deal with the inevitable Wayne-murders. Gal Gadot certainly works as WW (though I don't get all the hype about her score). Just as it was with the original announcement of Ledger's casting, Affleck moves past the original criticisms and delivers a great character. Anybody can be Batman: he brings a superb Bruce Wayne to the table.
That warehouse fight scene. Yes please, more of that.
I did get a kick out of the granny's peach tea thing. Yeah, it's a little silly. But I mostly enjoyed it because of how Holly Hunter put it together.
But talk about a misleading title. Civil War might not have featured as many characters as the story it borrows its name from, but at least it had a consistent string of action set pieces, that also moved the story forward. This had two hours of scowling, a five minute fight, and then the almost immediate move into the final battle. Other than the Batman car chase, there was barely any other action: the desert I suppose, and Batman's parademon-filled vision. That's about it.
Because of the film's unrelenting darkness, it made the jokes seem all the more inappropriate. Martha's quip about the cape after Batman literally dives out a burning building with her? That fit about as well as Chris Farley in one of David Spade's suits.
Marvel's films may be criticized as light and airy, and more "kid-friendly", as if Snyder's darker, dour films are more mature. The opposite is arguably more true: BVS is a lop-sided, poorly-paced film where those aspects are misconstrued as 'challenging' or 'deep'.
I have much higher hopes for Suicide Squad, especially with Ayer behind it.
"Batman vs Superman is where you go when you admit to yourself that you’ve exhausted all possibilities. It’s like Frankenstein meets Wolfman or Freddy vs Jason. It’s somewhat of an admission that this franchise is on its last gasp."
I don't think anyone really misconstrued Snyder's work as being "challenging" or "deep" as you put it. I'm sure Snyder would like to think of his work that way, but given his all-style-and-no-substance approach to film-making, I don't think the finished product came as any surprise to anyone. It was entirely avoidable, given what he did to Watchmen. I cannot for the life of me think of why he was even chosen to direct, except maybe a desire for the next set of Batman films to be as separate from Christopher Nolan's as possible. Which is ironic, considering that Snyder touted Sucker Punch as "the thinking-man's Inception".
I think the problem also doesn't rely on Snyder alone, BVS is tasked of setting up a million things that it no way can it succeed, they could have done live action TDKR but again that wouldn't have worked without setup.
the whole idea of let's not do what Marvel's doing is biting them in the butt, set up the characters first then have them enter conflict/teaming up. A solo Batman Movie was an absolute must before that one and dear me if they're trying to do Injustice then wow
I still have hope in the universe and I'm really excited for solo Battfleck in particular.
I think the best thing to come from the film is that it clearly separates the new continuity out from the Nolan films, and in doing so, it opens up possibilities that Nolan wouldn't have considered simply because they were incompatible with his vision (or at least less compatible than other villains) of a realistic approach.
I think he was referring to the fan backlash against critics, the general public, and comic fans who actually understood everything about the movie and came away with the same conclusion as the rest of us sane people.
Well, I think the issue is that Snyder's film is a very literal interpretation of the source material. And so long he's beholden to it, he doesn't get the chance to do anything interesting with it. He's been ultra-faithful to it, and it still came out a mess. Comics are a static visual medium, so a lot of the creative choices are designed to work within the limitations of the medium. Just because they work on the page, that doesn't mean that they work on film.
When Nolan wrote Bane into TDKR, he fundamentally changed elements of the character. Gone were the Mexican wrestler mask, the super-soldier serum and the exaggerated muscle mass, but the character's essence was retained. Snyder just doesn't have the capacity to re-imagine the characters to compliment the medium and the story.
It didn't seem a very literal interpretation to me, rather that disparate classic comics stories like Dark Knight Returns and The Death Of Superman were filleted for the most visually juicy parts which were thrown together on screen devoid of their original context.
If the direction seemed flat I suspect it's because Zack Snyder isn't a fan of the source material - not enough prison rape in it from the looks of things - preferring instead to relax with a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead if reports are to be believed.
This is my biggest issue with people going to watch these films, and I think it's because I've learned (correctly so) that these movies are up to the people making them. They're not making play by play comic to screen stories, and I'm fine with that. The MCU has taught us all that the universes these all play into aren't the same and shouldn't be expected the same, they're parallels and I see the DC version being the same thought.
So I see it as Snyder making a story using the source material as a reference frame, not something that is absolute, and that's the way it should be.
If it were up to me, I would be inclined to introduce some of the secondary or more obscure villains - like Firefly, Anarky or Owlman - to the films. It might open up some flexibility in terms of what can be done on screen. It would also help to have Batman do actual detective work, like the scene in The Dark Knight where they reconstruct the bullet to get the Joker's fingerprints. But they also need to get the look and the feel of Gotham City right; Burton did a really good job of it, as did Nolan. Even Joel Schumacher's vision of the cityscape had more character than Snyder's.
Bought the 3h version. Makes more sense with the added clips. Still, too bad the Batman dream sequence wasn't actual. Don't know if it was an alternate universe before Flash appeared, but made things interesting.
Bought the 3h version. Makes more sense with the added clips. Still, too bad the Batman dream sequence wasn't actual. Don't know if it was an alternate universe before Flash appeared, but made things interesting.
It does actually make a linear sort of sense, but it's a very long movie.
I guess I'm lucky that it's the ONLY version of BvS I've watched. Still not great, but good enough to keep my attention.
Still, I can't help but grouse over the fact that both the main players were absolute idiots, and the plot was terribly contrived. Even with the extended cut, you can't get around the fact that the press and politicians blaming Superman for events that were clearly outside his control or actions that were counter to his nature is puzzling.
The "clues" Lois Lane discovers, as well as the planted "clues" sent to Bruce Wayne and left for the police are puzzling. The set up of the conspiracy nutter evidence in the bomber's apartment would take more time than it would have taken to get a search warrant... was the guy actually insane but unaware that he was about to commit a suicide bombing? And the long con would not work without Bruce Wayne being the Batman, so Lex knew he was without doing anything about it?
And the idea of Batman killing Superman... like the set-up of Civil War at the end... neither set-up made any sort of sense as a "brilliant" plan. Both required massive amounts of happenstance and coincidence and lucky breaks... also doesn't make sense that if Luthor wants Batman to take out Supes, that he would be upset at Batman stealing his kryptonite.
However well explained his motivations are, Batman still comes off as an illogical, emotional nutter with the detective skills of a six year old. And Superman is hardly any better.
Lex Luthor is supposedly the smartest of the three, but he's no Einstein, either. His plans make no sense.
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Gal Gadot was a saving grace. Affleck was good, and the Wayne-Alfred chemistry worked for me. Some of the dialogue was clunky. Snyder still doesn't know how to direct human interaction all that well or to choreography a moving dialogue scene. But his action cinematography and camera work is beyond reproach, and there are some truly gorgeous action set pieces in the movie. If nothing, it's worth watching for that, but I'm glad I didn't drag my wife and kids to the cinema to watch this thing.
Thing is, Superman is never portrayed as the brilliant Kryptonian his father was. Even though he was educated on his journey to earth and had the Fortress of Solitude, as well as knowledge od known galaxies, all of that was negated having grown up in Kansas.
In BvS, it's worse. He's a news reporter and doesn't know who Bruce Wayne is.
Luthor was all wrong. I think I mentioned somewhere, WB should have called the guy who played Yellow Jacket in Ant-Man.
This is a pet hate of mine in fiction: a villain who can accurately and fastidiously lay plans to the point where they can not only predict the heroes' actions, but factor them in so that the heroes are ignorantly helping the villain. This is presented in such a way as to make the villain seem cunning or clever. In reality, you might as well make them a Nazi or a cannibal - it's lazy because you don't have to work very hard (or very much) to make the audience hate them.
Thing is, Superman is never portrayed as the brilliant Kryptonian his father was. Even though he was educated on his journey to earth and had the Fortress of Solitude, as well as knowledge od known galaxies, all of that was negated having grown up in Kansas.
In BvS, it's worse. He's a news reporter and doesn't know who Bruce Wayne is.
Luthor was all wrong. I think I mentioned somewhere, WB should have called the guy who played Yellow Jacket in Ant-Man.
Much as I hated the script, I thought that the character himself was not entirely bad. It was just not Lex Luthor.
Change the actor, same script, you run into the same problems. BUT: If you remove the "Lex Luthor Boy Genius" tag, you can expand your horizons... I can imagine Kevin Spacey reading that script line for line and getting it right, if allowed to play the version of Luthor he portrayed in Superman Returns.
Hell... let's just admit it... for all that movie's problems, they got Luthor (and Superman... and Lois) dead right in terms of tone.
This is a pet hate of mine in fiction: a villain who can accurately and fastidiously lay plans to the point where they can not only predict the heroes' actions, but factor them in so that the heroes are ignorantly helping the villain. This is presented in such a way as to make the villain seem cunning or clever. In reality, you might as well make them a Nazi or a cannibal - it's lazy because you don't have to work very hard (or very much) to make the audience hate them.
The problem is, lazy writing is easy to cover up if you keep the movie going quickly enough to keep the audience from noticing... but the plodding pace and extreme length means that they are forced to... gasp... think... while watching BvS.
I get the feeling that the studio sold the role to Eisenberg as his chance to create an iconic Heath Ledger style take on another classic villain and and that he misunderstood and just copied the Ledger character's floppy hairstyle instead.
I also got the feeling that the movie wasn't made for the general audience, or for long-time comics fans like me, but for a subset of comics fans only. In my case being intimately familiar with the source material just made watching BvS worse as it was all the more apparent how far the movie fell short in story terms.
It felt similar to the New 52 comics reboot to me in that they took a lot of pre-existing concepts and just jammed them together in a random fashion, as if someone had thrown the dictionary on the fire and tried to recreate the whole book using definitions they'd made up on the spot themselves (see illustration below). The result is a movie which looks great but whose narrative fails to convince compared to competing franchises.
The results are in! Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice has picked up four Golden Raspberry Awards, tying with Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party for most wins. While Hillary's America took the inglorious awards - Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Actor - Batman vs. Superman won Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel, Worst Screenplay for David S. Goyer, Worst Supporting Actor for Jesse Eisenberg, and Worst Screen Combo for Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill.
While the Golden Raspberries have been about finding any pretext to attack one particular film in recent years, this year every film that got nominated in every category deserved the award, so it's actually been pretty balanced.
