Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice": Meet The Bizarro World Avengers

Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by Chris Terrio and David Goyer

(PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 33 mins) 

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING

Alo Party Peoples.

If I were an executive at Warner Bros that had any hand in signing off on building the studio's next decade of summer tent poles around this movie, I would be on the roof demanding that heads start rolling by Monday.

Yeah, this movie sucks. The direction sucks, the cast mostly sucks, the screenplay really sucks, the art direction and cinematography... actually isn't half-bad for what it is, but it's so grim and morose and lacking in form or function that it's impossible to care about or even make sense of the action onscreen, which really sucks. It is increasingly evident not only that Zack Snyder simply does not understand the pop-iconography he's been assigned to work with, he may actively despise parts of it and Warner Bros simply doesn't give a shit so long as what he turns in is technically recognizable as a DC Comics adaptation. 

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is one of the worst blockbusters in recent memory, and I'm getting all of that out of the way now because going into exactly why requires massive spoilers, and I have no intention to write a piece that ceases to be relevant a week after the movie opens. Do I sound pissed off? Because I'm pissed off, I just had to watch two and a half hours of DC fan service world building that exists not to retell a beloved old story, not to tell an exciting new story, not even just for fun, but for the soulless task of franchise management. It's bad in a way that blockbusters generally haven't been since the late-90s when Batman and Robin nearly killed the entire genre for a while, and it only spares itself being that terrible because expectations were so low after Man of Steel. It's the kind of bad that can only be faithfully expressed by just describing the movie and letting the sheer stench of its stupidity permeate through the room.

To wit, "Lex Luthor hates the idea of Superman, so he's delighted when he finds out about Batman, who also hates Superman because some people that worked for Wayne Enterprises died during the ending of Man of Steel, so he tries to bait Batman into killing Superman by egging Superman into engaging in reckless escapades in North Africa and setting off a suicide bomb during his Congressional hearing with a jar of piss (seriously), but none of that was necessary at all because Batman was already trying to kill Superman because he's been having psychic dreams about a dark dystopian future and also because The Flash popped out of a time hole to warn him about Darkseid (I think?), so Lex lures him into building Kryptonite weapons and a suit of battle armor so he can maybe actually have a chance of killing Superman, but Lex didn't need to do that either because he used Kryptonian science magic to turn General Zod's body into Doomsday, essentially a giant orc that's more powerful than both of them put together, but fortunately this woman that Bruce Wayne has been seeing on and off thought the movie is actually Wonder Woman, who shows up at the last minute to help them punch Doomsday to death, which they succeed in but Superman dies in the process so Wonder Woman and Batman think about maybe trying to put together the Justice League just in case anything like Doomsday ever happens again."

It makes even less sense when I'm writing it out than it did when it had two and a half hours to happen. The script is built out of a ham-fisted attempt to smash The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman together into one story, and I almost want to see that reported R-rated three hour Blu-Ray cut, because in order to fit all of that stuff into a feature-length running time, Dawn of Justice had to be hacked to pieces and so haphazardly reassembled that it feels less like a movie and more like one of those YouTube fan tribute videos with the whiny emo rock soundtrack stripped out. The plot is so overly complicated yet insultingly simplistic that it wouldn't pass muster for a fourth grader's creative writing assignment; you'd find better material scrawled in the margins of a bored fourteen year old's textbooks in between whiny amateur poetry and Fall Out Boy lyrics. Not even Zack Snyder's visual styling works; he remains a top tier technical talent, but it's clear that when left to his own devices he simply can't tell a story. He's trying for big epic grandeur, with the intense color saturation and hyper-stylized feel of a Romantic painting or an Alex Ross splash page but it comes across more like something you'd see airbrushed on the side of a van outside a tattoo parlor. All accompanied by the crushing sonic weight of an even more oppressive than usual Hans Zimmer score.

The cast doesn't get off much better, Henry Cavill is somehow even more of an unbelievable stiff than he was in Man of Steel, this Superman is supposed to be one that's conflicted about being a hero and a savior figure (in case the Jesus and/or Moses parallels weren't subtle enough), but we never get to see this theme elaborated upon outside of general brooding. Ben Affleck is actually a pretty convincing Bruce Wayne, he plays him as a charming old money scoundrel with hints of James Bond, but he's a terrible choice to play Batman, or he at least can't pull off the gruff, scowling Frank Miller Lite version he's been cast as; if that solo Batman movie can still happen, something good might come out of this mess, but that's a big if. Gal Gadot gets nothing to work with as Wonder Woman, it feels like she was only cast because Warner Bros told Zack Snyder that he had to include Wonder Woman, but she at least gets off better than Amy Adams as Lois Lane, who the screenplay tries and fails to find a place for. During the climax she nearly drowns retrieving a Kryptonite spear from a caved in pool, which sounds interesting and heroic until you remember that she threw the damn thing into the pool herself ten minutes ago for seemingly no other reason than because the script says for her to do that.

Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor... is one of the worst comic book movie villains ever. He's instantly obnoxious and not in an off-putting way, his face is made entirely out of awkward ticks, his cadence is too off and idiosyncratic to deliver the theatrical lines he's been given, and he's hamming it up like he thought the villains on the Adam West Batman show were too subtle. We never get a sense of who he is, what his motivations are, or even what LexCorp is supposed to be or do when he isn't being a supervillian. Even his reason for hating superheroes changes from scene to scene, one moment he just does, then it's because he has hangups about religion, then it's because of his abusive father, then he's screaming about some offscreen future horrors that must be prepared for at all costs.

Speaking of which, if you were wondering about tie-ins to Justice League, we get them. Oh dear god do we get them. There's a reason that Marvel tends to relegate their more fanservice-y bits of world-building to after the credits, that way they don't get in the way of the actual movie. But Zack Snyder looked at that and decided "I can top this!"; so halfway through the movie, Bruce Wayne sends Wonder Woman stolen files from Lex Luthor's servers that document not only her existence, but also The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman, who he's not only documented but named and given individual logos to. Really, that's how they do it, they stop the movie halfway through so they can open up a press kit and show off teasers for the next four movies. But where Marvel's teasers feel like a promise, this feels like a threat; "How dare you think that superheroes dominating popular cinema for over a decade wouldn't have any downsides! Look upon me and despair!"

Dawn of Justice is like the Bizarro World inverse mirror of The Avengers, where that was a triumphant finale to years of buildup of an unprecedented experiment in faithfully translating the shared-universe shenanigans of comic book superheroes to the silver screen made by people that clearly understood and cared about the characters they were working with, Dawn of Justice is a cynical attempt to set up a shared universe that was slapped together on the fly and handed to a creative team that couldn't care less even if Disney had secretly paid them to cripple any potential Justice League project before it could even get off the ground. And if news breaks tomorrow that that's exactly what happened, I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 1/5

Let's Talk About Movies: "10 Cloverfield Lane" and Mystery Box Marketing

Alo Party Peoples.

I am not opposed to film makers naming their films after unrelated existing things inting  order to get their vision off the ground. So if you want to make a nasty little thriller like an extended Twilight Zone episode, and you have to name it after a found footage kaiju movie from eight years ago to get it made, I'm fine with it; you do what you have to in service of your art, but that is not the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. 

10 Cloverfield Lane started production as an under the radar indie script called The Cellar, and it was picked up by Paramount and placed  under lock and key for months before getting a surprise trailer a couple months before release along with a viral marketing campaign hinting at possible connections to Cloverfield, so instead of thinking "Oh, this looks like a nasty little thriller, I might buy it on demand one day", you think "Oh, this reminds me of that found footage Godzilla movie that I sort of remember,  I might go see that." in service of the Mystery Box marketing shenanigans of producer J.J. Abrams.

If you don't have to know what the Mystery Box is - then I envy your superior life choices - but it's J.J. Abrams' twee little Ted Talk name for the way he makes/markets his movies, it boils down to "audiences like to be surprised", so he hides as much about his films as possible, in hopes of recapturing the pre-Internet experience of seeing films sight-unseen, remember the trailers for The Force Awakens? We saw almost every big moment of the film, but we had almost no narrative context for any of it, so we were free to speculate, which created terabyte after terabyte of free advertising.

This is Abrams' specialty, he's probably one of the best marketers ever, and it's a technique that was pioneered with Cloverfield itself, a campaign that was so low key that for months the film didn't even have a title, and it worked there because it was an original property that wasn't tied to anything else, so when people thought "A found footage Godzilla movie? I haven't seen that before, I'll check it out.", there was enough there to satisfy them. Now, however, Abrams appears to be trying to take that kind of marketing and turn it into branding for a loosely connected anthology

If that's the game, getting funding for rising indie filmmakers to make low-budget but high-polish genre pieces with relative artistic freedom so long as they have some mention of the word "cloverfield", I'm fine with that, that sounds awesome, but it would have been a better idea to use something a bit more general like "J.J. Abrams Presents...", because between the name and the marketing, anyone going to see 10 Cloverfield Lane that doesn't follow entertainment news isn't expecting an extended Twilight Zone episode with a larger than usual budget for the finale, they're expecting a kaiju at the end, so when they don't get one it's going to feel like a letdown.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a good movie, if allowed to stand on it's own merits it might even have been a sleeper hit that got director Dan Tractenberg a dedicated following, but now that it's been absorbed into Abrams' sphere, it can only be remembered as another example of the Mystery Box.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Zootopia" A Muddled Mess of Mixed Metaphors

Directed by Bryon Howard, Rich Moore,
and Jared Bush
Written by Jared Bush and Phil Johnsoton

(PG - Disney - 1 hr, 48 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

Disney Animation's recent resurgence has been marked with stark shifts in approach and subject matter with each subsequent film. Frozen was a big flashy musical in the style of their 90s' Renaissance... that was also careful deconstruction of the Disney fairy tale and it's warped perception of romance and family dynamics. Big Hero 6 is a superhero adventure... but it's also a study of grief and how people deal with the loss of a loved one. Zootopia follows in this path in that it's a silly cartoon about talking animals, that's also a fable about diversity and acceptance.

Thousands of years ago animals (or at least mammals) became sentient and abandoned their predator-prey relationships in aims of creating a place where "anyone can become what they want to be", and through the Mayor's new "mammal inclusion initiative", Judi Hopps has achieved her dream to become the city's first rabbit police officer, but she soon discovers that the promise of opportunity is rather limited when she's assigned to be a meter maid, until she gets the chance to prove herself by investigating several disparate cases of animals "going savage", losing their intelligence, walking on all fours, and attacking anyone around them, for which she teams up with a sly streetwise fox, and they discover that only predators are going savage, which leads to increased targeting of predators by the police department and suspicion and fear by the general population.

All the pieces for another Frozen are there; a great voice cast, fantastic animation and character design, symbolic use of cartoon staples to make a point about the real world that created them, but they don't quite click in the same way that they did before, if anything it's because Zootopia is trying to do more. It's less focused on character dynamics and emotional payoffs than it is on allegory, and not particularly subtle metaphor, something that a cast of anthropomorphized animals is particularly well suited for. Problem is, Zootopia doesn't seem to have put that much thought into it's central metaphor, they're trying their hardest to make a serious statement about racial profiling, that it results from fear and ignorance at its core, that once it gets ingrained in a culture it's increasingly difficult to get out, and other things that would involve spoilers to go into, but their visual coding for "persecuted minority" is literal lions and tigers and bears, which more than undermines their point.

That's the thing about using animals as symbolic figures, the more complex an idea you're trying to convey, the less it works because we get the idea of a sly fox or a timid sheep or a powerful lion, almost on an intrinsic level. They go out of their way to include a little beat of a tiger sitting next to a rabbit family on the subway, and the mother quietly pulling her child away. We get the fear in the mother, the heightened alertness of the tiger, and the increasing tension on both sides, but it's a tiger, so of course the audience is going to want her to pull her child away. I'm not accusing Disney of doing anything nefarious, this is probably just the result of thinking "Okay, city full of animals! How does that actually work?" I'm accusing them of not thinking their visual language before they committed to it.

It's not all bad, the cast is a lot of fun, I'm sure the animation sets new records for rendering whiskers and fur, when they try for visual humor it mostly works; Zootopia is a good movie, but the Mouse House is definitely coasting off the success of Frozen at this point, it's a serviceable family film on its own terms, if the script had been put through the wringer a few more times it probably could have been great, but the muddled mess of mixed metaphors at its core keep distracting from the things that work.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5