Directed by Zack
Snyder
This review of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice will
not be the mammoth dissection that was my review of Man of Steel three years ago [LINK]. This is just going to be a
short statement of my own impressions, with no intent to argue or justify my
points. What would be the purpose? The critics have spoken, and as happened
with John Carter and Green Lantern both, what may have begun
as legitimate criticisms seems to have started feeding on themselves as critics
seem more interested now in outdoing their peers in showing how clever can be
their criticisms than in providing reasoned analysis and evaluation. The
audience seems to have received the movie more kindly. For what it’s worth, the
Rotten Tomatoes scores are quite divergent (approximately 28/72), far more so
than for Man of Steel (approximately
56/76). (I found it really interesting last week how the initial critics’
assessments were quite a bit more in line with Man of Steel than the ones that started coming out later – when the
later critics had had time to figure out which way the wind was blowing and the
piling-on had time to begin.) Don’t
get me wrong. This is obviously not a movie for everyone, and it is a movie
that does have its shortcomings, particularly an uneven pacing as well as a couple of things highlighted below. It is ultimately, I
believe, less a movie for general audiences than it was a movie for me and someone like me – a life-long comic-book fan with a deep love for these characters (one
I do not have for the Marvel Universe, which means I admittedly approach those
movies with a degree of objectivity that is not possible for me in this case).
I can easily see how someone who does not have that love – and the innate
knowledge of myriad story-lines and images accumulated over fifty years of
reading DC Comics – would be left cold by it. All I can ultimately say is that
I enjoyed BVS:DOJ very much and look forward to seeing future
installments in the DC Movie Universe that is emerging from what I consider to
have been a similarly – albeit not to the same degree -- maligned Man of Steel.
