Hmm ... not as good as Man of Steel

Rating: 7/10 (26 March 2016)

Bit disappointed, but I did like the movie. It's a mixed bag of great and not so good. Ben Affleck did an excellent job of Batman. Gal Gadot was excellent as Wonder Woman ( and tough, I like it ). Some very good cinematography and the beginning sequence is very well done. The 2 big failures were casting Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor - he's a spot on cast for The Joker, not Lex. I blame the directing on this, Lex was portrayed as a Joker style character high up in Corporate America. Eisenberg's genius is that fast talk, fly by your head insults going too fast for you to catch it before he's on to his next sentence - very cool in so many of his movies/rolls, but in this movie he's making Lex to be mentally unstable, which is not Lex and not believable such a person could put together a massively powerful/wealthy corporation, just isn't plausible. Lex Luthor is a sociopath megalomaniac with a foot in psychopathy ( he doesn't enjoy mass murder as much as using it as a tool to wealth/power ). My comment isn't that Lex isn't authentic, but that the artistic license to match the character to the actor's strengths/charisma simply doesn't work in this film. The 2nd big letdown is the ending with the energy monster - this is simply lazy writing. Hulk tried it and sadly ended a very good movie with a simply stupid ending. The whole attacking him makes him stronger was poor. Writing for Superman is very challenging, hard to come up with compelling scenarios where his life is at risk. But this ending was just bad and a quick excuse to show off massive destruction special effects. What's interesting is I was expecting the Superman arc of the story to be the strongest given how good the director did with Man of Steel - but it was the opposite, Batman was much better. The Batman/Superman confrontation was too quick ( could've been more interesting/clever opposed to just a boxing match - the comics were much better in this regard ) and the ending fighting sequence was too long and too over the top. You're simply not going to pull that amount of destruction without massive casualties to be completely overlooked with the funeral of a single person ( god? ) - contradicts the beginning of the movie. Anyways, I loved 1/2 and felt let down by 1/2. Gave it a 7 given it's better than average compared to movies out today.