If you like being depressed, this movie is for YOU!!

Rating: 2/10 (23 September 2016)

My favorite response to my thoughts on Batman V Superman came to me from a friend of mine that said watching Batman and Superman slug it out was awesome, and that it was totally worth it.
They slugged it out for maybe fifteen minutes. In a movie that was almost three hours long.
That means that for the rest of the one hundred sixty five minutes of screen time we get:
Superman being inept.
Batman killing random people (except for Lex Luthor For some reason).
Jeremy Irons wasted playing Alfred. Seriously, he had no scenes in which I was moved. And that's just crazy. If you have Jeremy Irons in a movie and you can't make that mean something, you have yourself a crappy movie.
Gallons and gallons of depression, mixed with a wide variety of flavors of hopelessness. Even Superman can't save us now. From a bomb that is less than fifty feet away from him. X-Ray vision and all.
Terrorism. You know, because it's something we need to be constantly reminded of every second of every day in everything we watch and everything we see.
So yeah, this was about as much fun as going to the dentist to have a root canal without the Novocain. Almost three hours of gritty, dark, brutal depression topped off with paranoia, fear, and idiocy on levels I can barely comprehend.
"What's that? Superman is fighting the alien in space? NUKE THEM!! NUKE THEM NOW, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!!"
"But sir, shouldn't we see if Superman can stop him first? I mean, what happens if we kill the good guy and then the bad guy's still alive? Wouldn't that mean we we'd be totally screwed and nothing could save us??"
"DID I ASK FOR YOUR OPINION?? FIRE THE NUKE BEFORE THE SCARY ALIEN COMES BACK DOWN HERE!! FIRE IT NOW!! FOR THE GOOD OF America!! FOR FREEDOM!! FOR DEMOCRACY!! FIRE IT FIRE IT FIRE IT!!"
"Um, sir Superman is dead."
"What?"
"The nuke killed Superman, sir. The alien has fallen to Earth, and it's still alive."
"Your saying the nuke didn't kill the bad guy?"
"No, sir. It just made everything worse for everybody."
"Are you sure?? Nukes are supposed to save us from the bad guys. Are you sure you fired it correctly?? Maybe we should fire a few more, just to be sure."
"Um Sir If one had no impact on it whatsoever, why would more than one have any effect? And then even more innocent people would die"
"I think we should at least consider it. Nukes are supposed to kill bad guys. That's what we made them for. Maybe you fired a defective one? After all, they've been in the silos for a really long time"
"Sir, I've just heard word Superman is alive and is returning to Earth."
"Phew! Well, we dodged the bullet on that one, huh? But you know what Have the other nukes fueled. You know, just in case."
I don't have a problem with the actors and their abilities. They did their best, considering what they were given to work with. I even didn't mind Jesse Eisenberg, despite the largely negative reactions to his portrayal of Lex Luthor. I actually thought his scenes were probably the most theatrical in the movie.
But the overall plot makes no sense. If you've read the comic books, it just makes it all worse. I can see where they tried to use parts of The Dark Knight Returns, but Jesus did they miss the point. It's like they quickly thumbed through the book and gave us a C minus book report of what they didn't really read.
And I'm sorry, but I'm sick to death of this level of film-making. We're talking about ridiculously large sums of money spent on making these films, and yet we have some of the worst storytelling imaginable on display here. It's great if you're only paying half your attention to the movie while you're talking on your cell phone for the other half, but if you actually watch the movie you see it as a huge, depressing, mess of a film that is uninspiring, miserable, and overall terrifying to watch. I never thought I'd see a superhero movie in which the superheroes were completely ineffective at making even the slightest impact toward any kind of hope. In the end, a whole lot of people died, Batman killed people, Superman bounced back and forth between savior and standby, and even more destruction and wreckage happened to the surrounding cities involved. In short, a great disaster happened. Again. And the superheroes contributed to it, instead of stopping it.
Christopher Nolan's take on Batman may have been dark, but at least in the end Batman saved the city. He took the bullet, and we were left feeling hopeful.
There was no hope in this movie. The only message I received was this: Even superheroes can't save us from terrorism. And if that's the only message you've got for us, you can keep it. I wanted to watch a movie, not be reminded again that life sucks.