Batman Vs Superman took a nosedive in the second weekend box office numbers, giving critics some sense of vindication. Nevertheless, I’ll continue from last week’s post, telling you what I liked about the movie.

A lot of people are blaming the negative reviews and reactions on its darkness and cheerlessness. I learned a new word – grimdark – that means dark and gritty masquerading as serious.
But doesn’t it have to be pretty bleak for these guys to be necessary?

Without a fearsome enough antagonistic force, isn’t Batman just a rich psychopath? Is he chasing a pick pocket in his nuclear powered jet car? If the police can handle it, there’s no room for him. The citizens of Gotham and the police wouldn’t secretly tolerate him; they’d be afraid of him.

My fictional universe requires the same distortion of reality, just yanked way back on the spectrum. The number of bodies that drop is way out of proportion to reality in Toronto. And because I’m writing a PI story, the cops have to take a back seat. So extraordinary circumstances are required.

And the more amped up the hero, the ever more extraordinary the circumstances and the attendant fallout must be, as in the case of Batman and Superman and the like.
In particular, there are many voices unhappy with the darker Superman.

I think it’s wholly consistent with reality to think that if a guy like Superman showed up on the planet, we’d love and fear him in equal and at times schizophrenic measure. And wouldn’t that be tiring for him? Wouldn’t he be thinking, Hey, I’m trying here. I’m doing everything I can which is more than any single one of YOU can, but I still can’t be EVERYWHERE.

There’s a scene where Superman is shown hovering over flood victims waiting to be saved. He’s about to perform a task that a fleet of helicopters could do better and more efficiently. But the point is that people are awaiting their saviour and Superman is the messiah.

He looks pretty grim hovering in the light as they reach for him.

Jesus had bad days too (even if most Christians would disagree with me). Here’s a quote from one of my favourite books, Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman:
Mark 1:41 originally indicated that when Jesus was approached by a leper who wanted to be healed, he became angry…. (Ehrman 2005, 200)

And the reaction Ehrman states is pretty similar to the fanboy reaction to the darker Superman: “Scribes found it difficult to ascribe the emotion of anger to Jesus.”

In The New Jerusalem Bible, Jesus sends the man away after healing him, telling him not to tell anyone. The man promptly does just this and the result is Jesus can’t go into any town without being mobbed.

If Jesus can seek anonymity from the meek and the ill, can’t Superman be a little mopey about his tepid reception?

The problem Christians have with the angry Jesus is the same as the fanboys with the darker Superman. Too human when neither are supposed to be.

In my opinion, human is interesting and relatable. The other plane of existence doesn’t work for me.

The Superman fanboys want is pretty bland. Selfless and righteous and powerful and kind and good and – retch. And his only weakness, the green rock, is just as boring. It’s the only way he can be brought down, but it’s like flipping a switch; one minute invincible, the next, at death’s door.

At least in this movie, Superman’s love for Lois is so strong it’s a weakness reaching for a par with Kryptonite. He pauses, mid-apocalyptic fight, to go save her. And when she and his mother are threatened by Lex Luthor, Superman reacts with a murderous rage.

Nevertheless, he didn’t come off like Batman’s emotional twin. He had moments of hope and optimism where Batman had none. But the world he and Batman were shown in didn’t give him much to smile about. He shows up in Africa to save Lois and the village is wiped out by the local government. He shows up on Capital Hill to answer for the village and the whole building is blown up. And he gets to stand in the middle of the inferno and hang his head because he missed it while everyone else died – because of him. Nice. Give us a wink big guy.

I’m not sure why Batman Vs Superman is getting such targeted criticism about its take on the fallout of epic super-battles. This is not the first time that superheroes have been shown to come with dangerous consequences. Even Marvel’s sunnier universe is about to put its heroes on the hot seat in Captain America: Civil War. Hell – Pixar spun the entire premise of The Incredibles around the idea. And that was a kid’s movie.

References:
Ehrman, Bart D. 2005. Misquoting Jesus. New York, New York: Harper Collins.

I liked Batman vs Superman:  Dawn of Justice.  I saw it twice, in fact.  The second time was with my kids who are still devastated about the Robin rumours and are eagerly awaiting the appearance of Kid Flash and Aqua Lad and other such bubble gum fantasies that will not stand against the dark, cynical world that DC is constructing on the screen.

I must point out that I’m no fanboy.  I didn’t grow up with comic books – reading, collecting, going over the latest with my friends.  Just wasn’t my bag.  But I love superheroes.  I just don’t know all the iterations of the stories, couldn’t tell you what story line from what year and what reboot each director has chosen to emulate.  And I don’t care.  I just know them and enjoy them as the characters I receive in the movies I watch.

And that’s what most intrigues me about superheroes – the characters.  Here “super” means everything is amped up.  Extreme situations; extreme reactions – extreme characters.

In that light, this article in Salon about Zack Snyder’s failures at characterization grabbed my attention.  The author goes on about Ayn Rand and objectivism and how Snyder mangles characters, simple and complex, because of his warped ideology.

I thought Snyder did alright.

I’ll start with my take on BvS’s Batman and maybe I’ll look at Superman another day.

***Spoilers follow***

Batman is my favourite superhero.  He’s just a man, no chemically or radiologically induced powers.  Just lots of money and brains.  And the key ingredient for me – darkness.  Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy are three of my favourite movies because he grounded Batman and all the constituent characters in the real world and made it dark and gritty.

Snyder, of course, can’t avoid the supernatural given he’s got Superman in the title and the rest of the Justice League queuing up, but he brings Batman to his darkest level yet.  (For me, anyway – I’m sure someone can tell me what comic book he’s adapting from – remember, I don’t care.)

Batman is all but broken in this movie.  He drinks, has nightmares and meaningless trysts.  Wayne Manor is literally crumbling, Robin is dead and it’s been twenty years of fighting crime and Gotham is still a sewer.

And then Superman shows up and Metropolis (just across the bay, it seems) crumbles.  Bruce Wayne’s reaction is to deploy the One Percent Doctrine – “If there’s even a one percent chance that he’s our enemy, then it must be taken as an absolute.”  It rings madly irrational and unbecoming a noble superhero.

And it was governing policy for the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  A time when people were scared shitless and the end of days felt nigh.  I remember it well.

I think it’s made pretty clear that Batman/Bruce Wayne is in that same mindset.  And he is no noble superhero in this movie.  He brands his victims and sometimes even kills them.  Alfred spends the whole movie fruitlessly trying to reign in the rampaging Bat.  Bruce Wayne has looked into the abyss and been swallowed whole.  But that’s because Batman is so broken, he’s the bad guy.

It’s only the notion that Superman, this alien-god, has a mother (who share’s Bruce Wayne’s mother’s name, by the way) that shakes him from his destructive trance.  And then only Superman’s death that fully shakes him awake and brings him back to the path, a path that will now lead him to assemble the Justice League.

I thought that was great.  Superman had to die for Batman to be reborn.

Does the movie “mean something”?  Is it communicating some important facet of life and humanity?  C’mon, it’s not an arthouse movie, and it’s not pretending to want an Oscar.  But I think the characters were made complex and interesting and believable and went in a direction that was new and darker (yay!).