many little problems

Rating: 5/10 (30 January 2017)

This starts with the climatic 'Man of Steel' battle from the point of view of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) as he runs into the destruction. Eighteen months later, Bruce as Batman has turned into the darkest of vigilante. Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) is investigating Batman while Superman is treated as either God or the ultimate threat. Lois Lane (Amy Adams) gets into trouble in Africa and Superman's rescue has raised questions about his omnipotence. Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) has gained access to Zod and the spaceship. He's looking to create anti-Superman weapons but Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) resists him. There is a new mystery woman (Gal Gadot) in the mix.
Batman against Superman is a compelling idea which with a little finesse, should be a great story. The destruction of Gotham is a great starting point for Batman's distrust and hatred of Superman. Affleck in the midst of the destruction is a harrowing call back to 9-11. Instead of eighteen months later, Batman could be experimenting on ways to defend against aliens in the ruins of the city. The story is basically written already but for some reason, the various rewrites have mangled the story into a mess. Sticking Lex Luthor into the middle simply siphons out the intensity. The dialogue is also clunky. It may work better on a comic book page but it doesn't work when it comes out of the mouths of living, breathing people. More over, the editing is jagged. This could have been a comic book epic but there are too many little problems.
EDIT: It took a couple of years but I finally got to the Ultimate Version. The extra thirty minutes allow the movie to breathe and the flow to be less jagged. The movie has all the pieces from the writing team of Terrio and Goyer. Instead of blaming all the many little problems on the disjointed editing, the plot is revealed to be full of conveniences, contrivances, and overblown melodrama. In a word, it is cartoonish which could fit a comic book movie. However, there is something more here. It took half the movie before I realized that this movie is written by the same self-important, conspiracy nuts who run their own YouTube channels. They know a lot of big words and big ideas but they string them together stretching logic to the breaking point to come to outrageous opinions disguised as common truths. It's a movie written by Lex Luthor with a crazy scheme that would never work in the real world.
While I have ideas to restructure the whole movie, I do have one small change to fix one of the worst problems in the movie, the Martha conundrum. Superman should be saying, "Save Martha Kent." Nobody actually calls their mother by her name but Superman would say her full name so that Batman can have any hope to save her. Batman wouldn't be dumbfounded by the same name thing but he would still find the humanity in Superman that he would have a mother just like himself. If Martha gets fixed, at least the movie wouldn't be laughable. This version is better but it doesn't fix the deeper problems.