Tuesday 29 March 2016

BvS Dawn of Justice review



Understand this.

   I was Batman fan, then a DC fan, now I am an advocate of COMICS.

   I grew up when "grim n gritty" re-imaginings were a thing, Superman remained noble in death and there was a whole experiment to see how readers reacted to a Batman that killed. They didn't like it. I understand the core and history of these characters.

   Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice is better than Man of Steel.

   Mainly because it didn't piss me off as much. It's pompous, boring as fuck and virtually monotone. There's about five minutes more action than the trailers, it takes waaay to long to do anything interesting and the actors look trapped by their contracts.

   Cavil is just as earnest and dull as he was in MoS, Afleck isn't bad but only by virtue that all he has to do is wander about with a distant look on his face, Gal Gadot is quite good, but you've seen most of her screen time in the trailers, Eisenberg is fucking horrible and never stops trying to be the Joker, the rest are pretty good, especially Laurence Fishbourne as Perry White. Jeremy Irons is a delight as Alfred, but so under used it's tragic.
One facial expression to rule them all.
   The plot is over complicated and full of redundancies, for example the desert scene near the beginning, don't need it. The scene would have been fine if Superman had been even remotely heroic in the previous movie, thus justifying trying to discredit him. The destruction of Metropolis should be enough to make the world wonder about an unaccountable god. The story does make a sort of sense but it's too aware of its own enormity and moves at a glacial pace.

you have two choices, it's raining...
   The action is SO dull. There's glimpses of cool, the gas wearing off, the heat vision, the Batman warehouse scene that mostly appeared in a TV spot. The problems come from the quick editing and constant shot changes and everything takes place at night with cyan or sepia highlights, it's like a Victorian rave filmed by an epileptic.

or on fire.
    The biggest problem though is that what it lifts from the comic it clearly doesn't understand. Snyder is just a visual director and Goyer needs a much stronger director/producer to rain in his utter bullshit writing.It's a twelve year old's take on Batman, and that's going to lead into part two of this review.

  There's also the set up for the Justice League. The four other league members are ticked off a checklist and inorganically shoe horned in. The "dream sequence" is a bit cool though but, dammit, that's not the right actor.

   The worst part is this should have been a momentous, celebration of a long standing comic tradition; superheroes meet, fight, make up, defeat the bad guy but it labors every beat like it's a rowing drum on a slave boat instead of pounding out the baseline in the greatest nightclub ever.

   It's overlong, over stuffed and boring but it does at the very least build on Man of Steel and have a few moments of genuine heart. Moments, in a two hour fifteen minute slog through a miserable colour pallet. Give it another few movies and WB might get it right soon.

   The music cues are fucking weird to.


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