Insufferable

Rating: Null/10 (5 June 2017)

It's hard to even know where to begin. . . .
If you liked this movie, good for you. You can enjoy it to your heart's desire, and I'm not here to stop you. BUT, I am here because the objective quality of this film is to me, insufferable in its entirety by nearly all criteria I can fathom. I can't possibly go into detail about every flaw in the movie with this cursed 1,000 word limit, but I'll do my best. It's fine to disagree, but please do try to understand where I'm coming from before you turn sour about it.
I'm sensing a lot of denial about this movie, much like with the Phantom Menace, which I consider Batman v Superman on par with (that's a bad thing). Everything in this movie is incoherent, boring and obnoxious, but for so many people this movie represents a dream come to reality, and the flaws are understandably hard to come to terms with. There are decent concepts dissolved within the movie, first of which being that inherent of the comic books, and second, the idea of the story building off of a court/trial structure (hence the "v" in the title). However, the overall execution misses the mark by a long shot.
This is the second directorial work I've seen from Zack Snyder, and is where I see his greatest flaws as a filmmaker manifest. Most prominently is the struggle he has between balancing scenes and moments (credit: Evan Puschak). The time spent with and establishing the characters and settings are so fleeting that when the movie tries to amalgamate to something, it falls completely flat. "Scenes" are traded in favor of "moments" as Snyder tries to constantly "wow" you. But the characters and themes aren't given room to breathe. Every moment feels unearned and completely underwhelming. This makes the film boring, and endlessly tedious. This was a minor setback in Man of Steel, but here it consumes nearly every frame of its two-and-a-half hour runtime.
Unlike in Man of Steel, Snyder's visual flair here comes off as far more obnoxious and aggressive. The ramping shots and slow-motion and snap-zooms not only look bizarre, but come off as an outright assault on the senses. It feels like something a child would do for the sake of mindless, fleeting entertainment. The action and battle scenes are completely overbearing as well, and hence become uninteresting and exhausting. Though Zack Snyder's direction is very poor on its own, a movie's basic quality comes down to its script.
The screenplay by returner David S. Goyer and newcomer Chris Terrio is very poor, and is no doubt a substantial detriment to this movie. There are multiple sub-plots that don't contribute anything to the film, but maybe would have with any semblance of focus or convicted direction. The writers simply just don't know what they're doing. The story doesn't feel impactful or important, and the plot is nearly non-existent outside of seemingly random occurrences. The showdown concept wasn't written with any thoughtfulness, but rather as a completely forced set-up for the Justice League in what is by far the worst sequel-baiting I've seen in any blockbuster franchise, ever. Wonder Woman by the way, has no semblance of a reason to be in this film besides marketing, and wastes your time on contrived, studio-bred subplots. Furthermore, the court/trial concept (which is the only interesting part of the movie), adds up to nothing of interest. The characters throughout not only lack basic, consistent personality traits, but are mere vectors that change as the plot needs them to, if there is any characterization happening in the first place, which I couldn't discern.
Now for something that needs mentioning: I'm not opposed to religious allegories so long as they have a reasonable level of self-awareness to them. However, the Jesus analogy is just plain insulting. It's nothing but a fallacious, self-indulgent, self- aggrandizing ego trip, and I spent the better part of an hour trying to find a more scathing way to say that but I gave up.
And let's talk about the "Martha" moment. Yes, I realize it's used as a device to undermine the dehumanization Batman feels for Superman. And no, it's still moronic and laughably bad. I'd call it anti-climactic, but the rest of the movie wasn't building up to anything anyway, so really it was just dumb.
I'll be glossing over the performances, which were functional considering what the actors were given. I can't even blame Jesse Eisenberg for his loathsome portrayal of Lex Luthor, considering that kind of performance could only fly if the director/script were completely incompetent in the first place.
The score by Tom Holkenborg, Hans Zimmer, four others without forefronted credit, and X additional ghostwriters. . . . is bad. At best, the score was minimally serviceable, bland and unmemorable (enough to fool some general audiences these days). At worst, it was abhorrent and distractingly poorly-spotted. For example: the over- presence of the choir was oblivious to the tone, and the Wonder Woman theme is obnoxious and bears no resemblance to her character whatsoever. I picked up thematic development on maybe two cues otherwise, both of which sounded like they were plagiarized from a bad temp score. This score is an abomination of a following act in the footsteps of John Williams and Danny Elfman.
The CGI looks like gameplay footage from a PS3, but even if it was passable by any measure it can't come close to making up for the films blatant incompetency.
Batman v Superman is one of the worst "films" I've ever seen. I went in with hopes that it wouldn't be as bad as I expected, and it actually turned out worse. Also, I'm going to ask you to consider not seeing Justice League. Same writers. Same director. Odds are it'll be the same mess all over again.
Score: 2/10