A genuinely well-executed bad idea.

Rating: 7/10 (26 March 2016)

To sum it all up: a lot of very talented artists did their very best to execute a very bad idea. I found it fun to watch, but it could have been so much more.
First the positive... Like I said this production was full of great artists, and they definitely were not phoning it in. Everyone involved in this movie gave it their all, and it shows with great photography, music, visual effects... And acting. Affleck in particular- his Batman is possibly the best live-action one yet. He's awesome, and I kinda feel bad for ever doubting him. I think a LOT of people will, if they approach his role in the movie with an open mind. Even Eisenberg's Luthor was the picture of an actor giving it everything he had, as much as it wasn't a Luthor I expected.
The thing is... This should have been a Batman movie instead of the ensemble piece it was. Or maybe Superman's second. Or Wonder Woman's first. There was plenty of characterization and concept to support any of those. That's the huge failing of this film- it tried to do way, WAY too much before it was time. That made it seem disjointed and cluttered and makes it really hard to get the motivations of the characters straight. It was kind of the opposite of The Hobbit, where a movie worth of material got inexplicably drawn out into three. This could have been a GREAT three movies, or maybe even four- but instead it was a jumbled one, especially with a terribly ill-advised climactic battle that felt like every major decision was made based on some kind of bland studio formula.
You can feel the fingerprints of the studio all over the film. This was an executive-built movie, born in a boardroom, I think, instead of a writer's room or a director's head. The writers, the director (who is going to be called to task on this, I am sure, but maybe not deservedly so), the actors, EVERYONE involved seemed like they gave it their all and tried to make the movie work... But it wasn't enough. You can't hide that it was a bad idea. You can't make something unearned seem earned. It just doesn't all work together, jumping into it cold like this.
It was a genuinely well-executed bad idea.
I'm torn on whether to say "see it and enjoy it for what it is, and hopefully we'll get a great Affleck Batman-only movie out of it later" or "don't see it, because studio executives need to learn that their over-involvement has consequences, don't reward them."
So I'm going to have to leave this one up to you. Overall, though, I enjoyed seeing so many people do their jobs so well and I think everyone involved in the movie deserves a lot of praise, even if their apparently weirdly disconnected bosses up on high may not entirely deserve theirs.