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!).