An overblown, disjointed start of a franchise

Rating: 4/10 (24 April 2016)

This movie has been something of a milestone in my life in that it has been the first time I've intently followed a film's development and then seen it fall flat. It's honestly a bit jarring to see something with so much hype and so much good material as its basis crash and burn so badly with so many problems.
Continuing the story that began in "Man of Steel", "Batman v Superman" shows a changed world. Superman (Henry Cavill), a god among men, is treated as much with reverence as he is with suspicion. And among those who wants him destroyed is Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), for vaguely defined reasons I couldn't remember with a gun to my head. Meanwhile, in Gotham, Batman is waging a personal war on crime, leaving branded criminals and terrified bystanders in his wake. His violent approach catches the attention of Superman, who tries to tackle him as a civilian through his job at the Daily Planet. Bruce Wayne, on the other hand, witnessed the destruction of Metropolis during Superman's fight with Zod and is concerned that Superman will turn against the world and rule it.
Just to get to the casting you've probably been wondering about: Ben Affleck wasn't at all bad as Bruce Wayne and Gal Gadot was good as Wonder Woman, even if her part in the movie was a bit small and I didn't care for the way Batman was written here. Sure, he has a cool look and good fight scenes and a background faithful to the original story we all know, but he is ridiculously brutal, even by Batman standards. Between his use of firearms during fights and the fact that his Batwing has more heavy weaponry than a fighter jet, plus he actually means to kill Superman, not capture him, he is such a departure from the principled Batman of the comics.
I had very mixed feelings about Eisenberg as Luthor. On the one hand, he gives a very entertaining performance that captures the comic book Luthor's planet-sized ego and contempt of Superman and he adds some humor to many Superman-related scenes that would have been mind-numbingly bleak without it. Unfortunately, Eisenberg's Luthor has a seriously psychotic streak that makes it hard to see him as the head of a major corporation; instead, he comes off as more of a highly funded, slightly saner Joker. While Bryan Cranston, whom many wanted for the role, would probably have been great as the comic Luthor, Eisenberg makes a good fit for whoever the hell the guy in this movie is.
While there were some other acting performances here that I enjoyed, such as Laurence Fishburne as a no-nonsense, tough-talking Perry White, Jeremy Irons as Bruce Wayne's snarky, yet caring butler Alfred, the movie as a whole is a total mess. Many of the scenes are fine on their own, sometimes even good, but they have no real flow when they are played together. It's like Snyder just put effort into a bunch of cool scenes, shot additional scenes based around them and then just patched everything together like a quilt. The scene where Batman takes on a warehouse full of armed thugs, for example, was completely mind blowing. It was intense, it looked amazing, it was elegantly edited and was the kind of action I like to see in a Batman movie. Unfortunately, this scene is clumsily inserted into the middle of the climax, while the big final battle is happening elsewhere. While Batman is fighting for something vital to the plot in the warehouse, that bit could and should have been placed somewhere else in the movie, such as the introduction scenes.
The visuals of the movie also fail on several levels. While I mostly like Zack Snyder's sense of visual aesthetics and some of the more low-key fight scenes, like the warehouse fight scene described above, are pretty good, the bigger ones during the climax are a pure assault on the senses. They are loud, flashy and run more on the sight of buildings being destroyed and violent close-quarter fighting than conflict. The climax basically boils down to lots of flashy blasts and explosions and not much else.
In case you haven't before seen the possible pitfalls of a superhero movie that's setting up way too many sequels (looking at you, "Age of Ultron"), this movie stomps into all of them. In case the subtitle didn't hint it, "Batman v Superman" gives us a first look at the new cinematic Justice League, but it does so in the clumsiest and most ham-fisted way imaginable. For starters, there's the visions that Bruce Wayne has, such as the one of a future where Superman is a tyrant, that obviously teases the future Justice League movie. Then there's the way we are first introduced to the new Justice League members: putting the plot on pause and having Wonder Woman watch a bunch of video clips of the future members. Because what's more fun to see in a superhero movie than a character watching video clips? With its questionable writing and overblown, effect-driven action scenes, "Batman v Superman" is enough to not just make me worry about the future of DC Comics on celluloid, but worry about filmmaking today. The film is everything that's bugging moviegoers and film critics alike about big movie franchises; planning ahead for countless future entries at the expense of the current one, relying on special effects rather than storytelling, and banking on the high profiles of the characters it adapts without concern for what fans actually like about them. If you're still interested, "Batman v Superman" makes for a passable few hours in a movie theater, but not much else.