Boring, pretentious garbage

Rating: 1/10 (14 June 2017)

...Where do I even begin. Absolutely nothing about this movie works. I somehow ended up watching the three hour long version, but decided to only subject myself to the torture of the 2.5 hours viewed by cinema-goers, and I tried desperately to keep my eyes pried open during that time frame. Despite sounding uncultured, this film's major flaw is that it's so...boring. If your movie is going to have the gall to be three hours long, you best believe that you have some intriguing characters, plot, and action to make me hold my pee in the theatre that long. The first sign we're going to be in for a long ride--we get a recreation of a scene that is literally the ONE THING everyone knows about Batman already. We get it, his modus operandi is avenging his parent's death! But then, the audience is expected to know everything about Batman, Alfred, and the Batcave; while ALSO having been expected to have seen Man of Steel. Funny, considering this movie's title isn't, in fact, "Man of Steel 2". So after some more of Snyder's snooze- worthy slo-mo shtick, we're thrust into the middle of a plot so incoherent that I'm still not entirely sure what exactly occurred. This 'film' feels more like a string of tangentially related clips than an actual movie. Trying to keep up with the logic of it is exhausting. Speaking of exhausting, the cinematography is so dull and dreary that it makes Watchmen look like Carebears in comparison. It's a perfect suit for the thudding, pretentious, grim script though. I don't think a single affable thing is uttered in the whole movie. I believe it exacerbated my clinical depression.
But moving on to the ostensibly fun part--the characters! Our attention is already taken because we know them; Batman, Superman, Lois Lane, even Wonder Woman shows up for a bit. These characters are iconic and we expect certain things from them. But the issue here is--who exactly are we rooting for again? Do we want Batman to kill Superman, or vice versa? This lack of a clear protagonist is a glaring error, because we have no stake in the action. Most DC fans aren't going to desire the death of one of their beloved superheroes, so...what's the point? Batman's quip that if we have a 1% suspicion of Superman being a threat, then we should annihilate him is painfully dumb. If I have a 1% chance of getting cancer, should I go ahead and begin chemo? So to further our lack of investment in the conflict, we have some woeful acting to accompany it. Henry Cavill's only asset is his sculpted body, Ben Affleck does yet another brooding Batman, and Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor is an impotent, sniveling recreation of Heath Ledger's Joker. It would be amusing, if literally anything at all in this movie was amusing.
By the infamous "Martha" point (and oh dear god is the logic employed there mind-numbingly baseless), I couldn't even maintain a semblance of interest in what was going on. If anyone who enjoyed this film could actually decipher the plot and wasn't just watching to see two beefcakes beat each other up, please let me know the ways of your immaculate intelligence. For this film fails to either entertain, or enlighten (its not-so-subtle motif of godliness is eye-rollingly tired and shallow)--so therefore, what's the point?