Reflects corporate need

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2017)

This was probably never going to be a very good idea to begin with. Having a vs film with these two be a watchable version of itself must be a nightmare of logistics of story and world. By now you know they failed, bitterly so.
You probably knew the moment they announced Affleck. It was the strangest piece of news, the kind I would expect to read in an Onion parody. I remember wincing at the time. Someone like Depp who has actual acting chops wouldn't do either so it's not acting ability. It's because actors are embedded into contexts of how we've known them, how they've been defined by prior work. Sometimes that's why you cast them, hoping to mine that context.
So when he's your choice and no one in the room bats an eye, it's the kind of creative choice that to me presages a certain way of doing things in that room. It told me that executives in charge thought any known face would do or he was the best they could land on short notice. It told me they had no idea what they had in Nolan's Batman. They weren't going to extend that world or work with Nolan's blueprint of prolonged anticipation. It promised a Joel Schumacher style debacle.
It's really as bad as this. You're going to read more acerbic barbs in other comments. I'll just rest with the observation that it has all the marks of a film where company employees sat through meetings trying to come up with a film for no other reason than the company decided it must have this particular product to sell. No one is particularly in charge of overall vision or has some particular creative interest in bringing it to life. Everyone is an employee who simply has to deliver by Friday on the company memos of Monday. Affleck will do. All they probably had in front of them was a timetable of when they had to launch.
What actually happened is their arch rivals beat them to something that proved lucrative, opening up market possibility they were late in noting, so they're now rushing a product to market to avoid falling behind. It's as simple as this and the sole reason this whole filmic world exists. It's the cinematic equivalent of Microsoft realizing they've been squeezed out of the new ecosystem of mobile connectivity and trying to quickly patch their own together, throwing around mountains of money to make up for lost time.
They tried to squeeze a bunch of things in here at the same time as patching together the platform; reintroducing Batman and his world, the story arch the title promises, an Avengers of sorts with joined heroes trying to avert doom while also setting up an Avengers proper for down the road. They bungled it up so bad that Wonder Woman was squeezed in here as introduction while her own film proper was a year away. But that's how rushed they must have been.
I even hunted down for the longer version. No dice. I do happen to think of Snyder as a dull mind; Michael Bay with simply different lists of movie and music favorites. But I don't think him to be this incompetent. This is the work of management.
You'll see the circumstances of its making in the fabric of the film itself. It feels as if different segments have been carted into place upon completion while other departments are still working on theirs; the assumption being that when everyone's finished, the result will be a film.
Everything we come across has potential to enlighten. Watch this to see the result of trying to substitute creative concentration with committee work, how something looks when born out of need rather than immersion. They should have had the patience to sit this round out. Me-too-ism is the path to gaffe.