Clumsy and obvious

Rating: 3/10 (19 February 2017)

I saw BvS under protest, because a friend wanted to do it for his birthday weekend. I think I may have set a record for how many times I checked the time on my phone, wondering how much longer this movie was going to go.
This seemed to me like nothing more nor less than a clumsy attempt to catch up to Marvel's Avengers franchise and get a jump on Civil War. The problem is that, unlike the Marvel cinematic creative team, Snyder and the rest of DC's cinematic brain trust haven't done a thing to create the dichotomy between Superman and Batman that exists between Captain America and Iron Man. Superman, as he's been portrayed in the Snyderverse, is almost as dark and brooding as Batman, and when one character complains that "(Superman) answers to no one," she could just as easily be talking about Batman.
Three dream sequences in one movie is at least two too many, and three "is he really dead" moments for the same character is worse. I have to wonder if Snyder felt that the name recognition on the characters was high enough that he didn't need to delve too deeply into his bag of storytelling tricks, because he certainly didn't do so for this.
Ben Affleck is very good as Batman--which shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone, Daredevil notwithstanding. Henry Cavill is just as good as what passes for Superman in this movie. But whether because of his own choices or because of how he's been directed, Jesse Eisenberg as Luthor delivers the most toxic performance I've seen since Tori Spelling in Trick. It is bad enough that every DC hero these days is trying to out-grim Batman; I do not need every DC villain to start trying to out-psychotic Joker.
Another thing that bothers me is Wonder Woman--specifically, how she's been used in the DC Cinematic Universe. Gail Gadot is fierce as all hell as Diana, but I'm really not happy that Wonder Woman is in this movie.
Marvel, in setting up the first Avengers movies, first gave us solo movies for what they considered to be their big guns--Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk, the ones even non-comics readers would recognize. Hawkeye and Black Widow did not get such movies (although they both debuted in one of the aforementioned big guns' movies); they are considered to be secondary characters not on the level of the Big Four.
Wonder Woman has not yet had a solo movie; having her make her cinematic debut here, in my mind, demotes her to the Hawkeye-Black Widow level, and the character, as one of the handful of superheroes to survive the Great Implosion of the late 1940s (when most superhero comics were either cancelled or reformatted) and as the most iconic female protagonist in any form of literature, deserves far better than that.