Really wanted to love this movie ... but I only just liked it

Rating: 5/10 (28 March 2016)

Now I should say that I dragged my wife a long to watch this movie, so I was absolutely pinning my hopes on really enjoying this movie because otherwise my wife would not allow me to do movie selection for at least 2 years.
Visually, the movie is absolutely stunning albeit a bit too dark at times, and I don't mean as in the ambiance of the movie being a dark world ... but the movie was literally too dark in some parts making aspects (at least at the 3D showing I attended) to be quite hard to make out what was going on. It was a bit like watching a dark movie at night, with sunglasses on.
What you should not expect from your 2.5 hours of sitting down before this movie is a rushed introduction to the world of Batman and Superman, in fact, it doesn't really introduce you to them. At least in the case of Superman, we've met this iteration before already. Batman aka Bruce Wayne, at least this version we haven't met before - so he's just kinda there all of a sudden. What's more, he has seemingly been "there" for a long time based on some of the dialogue.
Bruce Wayne's character caused me the most annoyance because there were flashback scenes or dream sequences which just kind of appeared mid movie and they weren't clear that they were dream sequences ... not immediately anyway. There is perhaps some Easter Eggs in some of these scenes, some which were left unexplained. For instance, Bruce wakes up from one of the dreams hearing "Lois Lane is the key" ... but no explanation as to how he managed to attain this information and/or where it was coming from - although speculation is rife about the possibility of it having been the Flash.
The movie crawls through building up the tension between SM and BM, CK and BW, focusing particularly on their values as to why they might be against each other, with BW's being much easier to understand given he was present in Metropolis when Superman and Zod were playing hide the sausage with sky scrapers.
By crawl I mean almost painstakingly so ... it is well into the second half of the movie before you get any real action.
Plot is important and I can understand that, but the issue with this movie is that it serves as an introduction to the future of the DCEU on the big screen and is thus not only an introduction to this movie, but an introduction to the rest of the franchise as well. Without wanting to make too many comparisons with the Marvel EU - where that differs is that Marvel introduced Captain America, Iron Man and Thor in their own movies but created a connection through all of them that made their coming together much easier - this connection was largely created by "Phil Coulson" and "Nick Fury". They cleverly used post credits as well but the movie itself stayed focus on it's key character - even when Hawkeye appeared in Thor, the movie stayed true to it's focus on Thor.
Dawn of Justice is all over the place by comparison. Trying to give us a story but also trying to introduce the wider DCEU within the movie itself. The watching of the videos for Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg clearly shows that - not to mention the lingering focus on their logos when they are first seen (how did Lex Luthor manage to work out their logos anyway?).
Suffice to say, for me, DOJ was a seriously muddled and confuzzled cluster muck. It was fantastic to look at, but you can stare all day at an attractive man or woman and still be bored to death.
In spite of this, I still gave it a 6, for its visual depiction. The last 45 mins of the movie and I actually thought that Affleck was pretty good. Hoping that the next movies make up for some of the failings in this one.