![]() Likewise, we know that Lois Lane (a thoroughly wasted Amy Adams) loves Superman because a) she keeps saying so and b) that is her principal plot function. And other than a kind of whiny, inchoate envy, that’s all the motivation he evidently needs. We know, for instance, that Lex Luthor (played by Jesse Eisenberg as a young tech magnate) hates Superman (Henry Cavill) primarily because we knew as much before the movie even started. There are endless disquisitions about whether Batman is good for Gotham and Superman good for the Earth, and tedious evocations of the roles of “gods” and “men.” Yet the actual characters themselves never come to life as anything other than symbols to be clumsily bickered over. Such thematic carelessness is on constant display, which wouldn’t loom as nearly so large a problem if Snyder’s film didn’t advertise its aspirations to Moral Seriousness in almost every plodding, humorless frame. The only surprise is that the movie recalls its animating premise vaguely enough to bother explaining that the neighborhood being leveled this time around is “uninhabited.” No harm, no foul. Instead, alas, we have Snyder, whose idea of a moral quandary is should I make this scene grim-or grimmer? Loud-or louder? Violent-or more violent still? It’s thus no surprise that after all its early, ostentatious handwringing, Batman v Superman ends almost exactly as its predecessor did, with another dull, city-smashing duel between super-beings. Is Superman really a hero? Or is he just some alien interloper who brought his extraterrestrial vendettas to our humble planet, knocking down an entire urban skyline in the process? In the hands of another director-the Christopher Nolan of the Dark Knight movies or the Bryan Singer of the X-Men films come immediately to mind-this and other moral quandaries might have been drawn out in intriguing ways. In Snyder’s retelling here, Bruce Wayne (a.k.a., obviously, Batman) essentially becomes the voice of those critics. The Man of Steel director Zack Snyder took a fair amount of grief for the way that movie casually depopulated an American city, however fictional. ![]() ![]() There’s the germ of an interesting idea here. ![]()
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