A serious and gorgeous Comic Book film, that really needs multiple viewings in order to fully understand and appreciate

Rating: 10/10 (25 March 2016)

First let's address some of the more controversial aspects of the film: 1. - Lex's plan and motivation didn't make sense. First lets star off with his motivation on why he hates Superman, it's very subtle but it's there when he tries to give a speech at the his house-party where he got flustered. He showed visible contempt at the idea of having total knowledge but no power. This is Luthor in the face of the Superman. He's a genius. He's unparalleled. And here comes a being who makes him look pathetic and feel powerless despite his knowledge. He needs to bring god down low - god will obey Luthor, and Luthor will have knowledge and power.
Now let's move onto Lex's plan on tricking Superman and Batman to fight each other, well not so much in tricking them, but in pushing them over the edge, Lex already knows that Batman hates Superman for the events that happened at the end of Man of Steel, so by blowing up the senate while Superman is there, he pushes Batman over the edge, and by kidnapping Superman's mother and forcing him to fight Batman, he hopes that at least one of them will end up dying, because both of them are a hindrance to him.
2. - Batman kills people. Batman kills because he's hopeless at this point in his life. That was the point of his first interaction with Alfred, the "...turns good men cruel" exchange. Alfred tells him something has changed, a fact Bruce denies. Superman's sacrifice is what he needed to get his hope in humanity back, evidenced by him deciding to punch the wall instead of branding Luthor.
Batman killing was kind of simple to justify for me, seeing as how many of the deaths he fired warning shots beforehand. Especially in the batwing. To me, the core difference here was that although he gave time for characters to get out of the way, he was willing to cross the line if it came to it. For example in the warehouse fight he grabbed a machine gun and fired a spray to get everyone to duck. If they hadn't, he was going to shoot them, but he gave time for them to react. Same with the Batwing, he started way off the mark and gave them time to move, but they didn't. But he HAD to get rid of those trucks to infiltrate the building like he needed to, and he was on a time table so he couldn't do it more tactically. His relationship with the Joker seems to be Joker was simply able to escape Batman and that's why he's still around. Which makes sense to me, Joker gets away in large explosions and similar physic defying logic in the animated series all the time.
Another thing was I felt that batman's fight against Supes was very justified and explained. The "You let your family die" scenes, and then right after that the guy who supposedly sent them back died in front of him on TV and Affleck portrayal of anger there really came across to me as "okay, no more play time I need to stop this guy NOW".
Now let's discuss on why I say with the title of my review that this is a film that needs multiple viewings so that you can truly appreciate it, on my first viewing the first hour felt a bit off with some of the editing, like you may say that some of the scenes pop-out right out of nowhere, but when I came back from a second viewing those scenes that seem to pop up out of nowhere actually don't, at all. There's something weird about this film. I feel the first time you watch it you're absorbing so much info that you get lost and it feels like you're dropped in the middle of a scene but you're not. With a second viewing you already know how the movie is going to go and things you missed will pop up so much and it'll make the movie so much better. The Knightmare scene pops up because Bruce is decrypting Lex's files and you see it's going to take a long time because the percentage moves very slowly. Then the Knightmare scene pops up, we see what we see, and then Bruce wakes up, still in front of the bat computer where we left him and we get the cameo and then Bruce wakes up again in the same spot. During the first viewing it made no sense, but when u see it a second time it does, and the flow isn't bad at all. The setup of scenes is there, sadly it takes multiple viewings to catch em.
And a lot of the character motivations and actions can be better appreciated and understood with a second viewing, like the way Batman decides to help Superman after learning that his mother was kidnapped, he didn't stop just because his mother has the same name as his, he stopped because he realized that Superman isn't just some all-powerful alien, he's also a man with humanity in him, and after realizing this he doesn't want him to end up feeling the same pain he has experienced of losing his mother, that's where the future Flash's warning comes into place, because you really don't want to see an angry Superman that has lost his mother all because Batman didn't listen.
This is truly a remarkable film that is getting a lot of hate that it doesn't deserve, this is a film that challenges its audience by making them think and infer on a lot of things, and with a second viewing it just gets better, because you catch a lot of things that you may have missed on a first viewing, I truly like this film and I recommend that you give it a chance.