31% on Rotten Tomatoes
Chloe's thoughts: Low-energy entertainment
Watch it if you: Have friends over and need something playing for ambient music or maybe even to laugh at; Are drunk and/or high and just need something to satisfy your eyes; Really really REALLY want to see Batman fight Superman (even if it's only for 10 minutes in a 2.5 hour film)
This film follows the events of Man of Steel after the city-wide destruction caused by the Superman-Zod fight. In fact, at the start we see what Bruce Wayne was doing during this fight, so it was really interesting to see it from his perspective. Ben Affleck's great acting really helped this film. In fact, I will venture to say that the Batman/Bruce Wayne scenes were the only redeeming factors of the film.
Let's talk about Batman for a bit first.
As I said, Ben Affleck was a good Batman. I had my reservations, but he did a great job at it.
The actual character of Batman was a bit... unusual. He was very violent. A lot older than the typical Batman that we see, this Bruce Wayne isn't the fun, witty and playboy Bruce Wayne that we're used to. But that wasn't a big issue; it was handled quite well because at least the serious tone of this movie was well established.
My main concern with Batman is that it didn't even really seem like he cared much about morality. His one code is that he doesn't kill people, but suddenly he just wants to straight up kill Superman, and along the way just kills several people?
I don't really want to go into describing the plot of this film because it keeps changing, so I don't know if I will be spoiling something for you, so let's just move on to Superman.
Henry Cavill is an alright Superman. He's got the good looks and he's a good enough actor to portray him, but there's something about either his portrayal of Superman or maybe Zack Snyder's depiction of Superman that results in something being just a little off. There is not much character development for Superman, which is a shame because they raise some really interesting issues, such as, "Do we need a Superman?". There are a lot of really good discussions on this, and they do affect Superman and Lois Lane quite a lot, however we as an audience don't end up caring too much about how it affects them. When we see news about people hating on Superman, Henry Cavill's face is a bit sad, but nothing more. We get more emotion out of Lois Lane (who doesn't just look sad, she looks CONCERNED, heck, DEVASTATED even!), which is unsurprising since Amy Adams is such a great actress, but damn it we should be able to get emotion out of Superman!
The dialogue in this is also quite bad. It allows us to feel nothing, and it didn't allow us to respond in any way except maybe cringe or chuckle a bit. At one stage of the movie, a character was reading an email that was so stupidly written, I turned to Alice to chuckle about it... only to find Alice asleep! That was probably one of the best experiences of the movie... seeing Alice asleep.
But back to the dialogue. You can tell that there would be a moment where Superman's mum is trying to say something inspiring to him, but it doesn't really translate. Superman is trying to say something about saving people, but it doesn't really translate. These are moments where we are supposed to feel something from our hearts, but they don't make us feel anything. In the end I don't care for the characters, because nothing they have said or done has made me want to care for them. Even when Lex Luthor says something diabolical, it's like very low-level diabolicalness, so it doesn't even affect you; you don't feel scared, or worried, or concerned. At most, you are left confused, and a bit uncomfortable.
Which brings us to Lex Luthor.
My main concern with this film was that Jesse Eisenberg was cast as Lex Luthor. Once the casting announcements were up, all my hidden doubts about the film came to surface. I started imagining all kinds of weird, socially-awkward scenes with Jesse Eisenberg trying to portray a villain, and I was already very very fearful.
And you know what?
It's even worse in the film.
Yes, that's right. The scenes of Lex in the trailer are probably his best scenes.
I doubt that it was Jesse Eisenberg's idea to portray him like this; Zack Snyder probably had this portrayal in mind, seeing that they cast Jesse Eisenberg in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Einsenberg's acting, but he is fantastic as a socially awkward loner, not as a villainous... well, villain.
They kind of tried to make him like a weird Joker, or like a Jim Carrey-esque villain. It was pretty weird.
He went all out though, he had little twitches, he had weird high-pitched non-human voices, and it was just all very cringeworthy. Every single scene he was in removed about 1 year from my life span just from the stress of seeing him on the screen.
Next up, let's talk about Wonder Woman.
The actress was great, I mean she did a great job at portraying Wonder Woman. But was she necessary?
Nope. She didn't add much to the film except to set up the next film.
It was a pretty bad shoehorn, and even when they shoehorned her in, she still didn't do much. Which is a big statement to make since her appearance pretty much rendered Batman useless, left to sit in the corner behind a wall twiddling his thumbs and playing around with his gun if that helps to boost his ego.
Speaking of shoehorns, though, the universe building was really really lazy. Like really lazy. Like I can't even fathom how lazy it was. It doesn't really get you excited for the next film because it is so badly done.
You know what? Right now I'm just going to apologise for this shockingly put-together blog post. It's all over the place, my mind is running wild with ideas and criticisms, and there's not much of a logical flow in this review.
But you know what else? This is how the film is. There was too much going on.
With my main concern being Lex Luthor, my second concern was just how many characters and how many things were in this film. And once again, I was right. Just like this badly-written review, this film was a mess.
The first half of the film was actually somewhat interesting solely for the plot, as it focused on Batman and Superman emotionally, mentally and physically going up against each other. But during the second half, the already bad first half of the film got even worse as it looked like a 13 year old boy took over the controls once Wonder Woman was on screen. The Wonder Woman theme song that comes up tries to make it epic, but it's just so cringeworthy and annoying and overdone.
While there were some really good fight scenes (there is a good ole Batman rescue scene in there that was fantastic, and the actual Batman v Superman fight was pretty good too), most of them are made for the eyes and not for the brain. There was one car chase scene where there was just too much happening. Random obstacles would be popping out of other places and it all happened way too fast for me to understand any of it. Also, the very first Batman fight scene was terrible. I didn't know if it was just me, but I was looking at it and thinking, "Man, for a Batman fight scene, this is very VERY subpar." But it wasn't just me, because Alice turned to me and said, "This fight scene is so shit!"
Apart from that, there were too many plot elements. I already said I won't go too much in detail with this, but I mean if you really want to, just go ahead and watch the second trailer again, it pretty much told you the entire film. I'm not even exaggerating, that trailer gave you a summary of what you were going to see in the film. You know why? Because they COULDN'T DECIDE ON WHAT PLOT TO STICK WITH, so they just SHOWED YOU EVERYTHING!!! Just like them, I'm having trouble with telling you what the plot was because there was no single plot to cover all these small stories.
Now what about the music? Surely the music was at least alright?
The music was terrible.
Just completely terrible. None of it seemed to match the scene, and at one stage when Batman was entering the Batcave, there was this really epic drum-beating occurring, and Alice turned to me and asked, "What is it beating up to?" It turned out, it was beating up to nothing.
He entered the Batcave in like two seconds; they didn't even build up the suspense and awe, and in the end I didn't even care about it which is stupid because one should ALWAYS care about how Batman enters his cave.
In the end, this film is a complete mess. Some fight scenes are good, and some of the visual effects were done really well, but Zack Snyder has a real problem with actual PLOT and STORYTELLING. The film ended up being really long because it was trying to focus on way too many things, the dialogue was lazily written, the soundtrack did nothing to the film, and everything was just really lazy. It's not worth seeing it in the cinemas, and it's probably only worth it if you've got friends over for some drinks and want something on the telly to laugh at and be rowdy about.
A few side notes:
No comments:
Post a Comment