A pointless and meandering mess

Rating: Null/10 (11 April 2016)

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a cynical, ugly, mean-spirited film that completely misunderstands the material that it is trying to adapt. But I could forgive that if the film had a compelling story. It doesn't. Trying to follow the movie's narrative is a nightmare.
Scenes are placed in a seemingly random order. There's never any indication that what you're seeing on screen correlates to any other earlier scenes. Characters will go into dream sequences only to wake up and have another dream sequence. Then the film will never bring up those dream sequences ever again. Characters will say that an event we saw a few scenes ago happened months in the past, but there's no visual cue to let the audience know this. As a result, the audience must question everything that is said and done, and the very basics of the story get lost in the shuffle.
Characters spend endless scenes talking about how much they dislike someone, but they never have any meaningful interaction with one another. For instance, Batman and Superman meet each other a grand total of 1 time in costume and 1 time out of costume (where it's unclear if they both know each other's identities) before they have the big showdown in the end. The rest of the time they just talk to their associates about how bad the other is. How are we supposed to empathize with their positions if they base their perceptions on absolutely nothing?
Lex Luthor is one of the worst villains put on screen in the last decade. His motivations are constantly changing, and the performance is as erratic as Eddie Redmayne's in Jupiter Ascending. His plan makes no sense, and it culminates in creating a creature (that he cannot control) that has the power to wipe out all mankind. Why? Because reasons.
The score is ear-bleedingly bad, too. Overwrought and pompous, the score wants you to notice how great it is, but it never concerns itself with matching the imagery.
With that said, the dialogue is the same way. Everyone talks about gods, demons, heaven, and hell, but the film doesn't actually have anything to say about that subject matter. Everyone has an important speech to give, but these speeches neither sounds like anything a real person would actually say, nor do they move the narrative forward. They exist for the sole purpose of sounding intelligent and padding out the run time. Don't bother trying to analyze this dialogue; the emperor has no clothes here.
The best thing in the movie is Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, but that's only because she's not in the film long enough to have her character ruined by this mess. She's not in it long enough to impact the proceedings either, but you could say that about most of the secondary characters, too. The other actors (Jesse Eisenberg excluded) do a fine job, too. It's just a shame they have nothing to work with.
As a fan of films in general, I'm annoyed, angry, and I want that two and a half hours of my life back. As a fan of superhero films, I'm baffled and vexed; I didn't even think that they were capable of making superhero films this bad anymore. As a fan of DC comics, I'm disgusted. Save your money and do something else instead of watching this.