A deeply flawed start to a larger story.

Rating: 7/10 (26 March 2016)

This review does contain spoilers regarding specific plot points.
I wonder if the longer version planned for the home release will fill in some of, what I felt, were massive glaring plot problems. How the hell did Luthor even escape the very first Doomsday explosion? About Doomsday, I really don't think he looked as good as the Hulk does in the Avengers stuff. In fact, a few sequences, like virtually every one of Diana's, consisted mostly of reaction shots and then what looked like pure cg, without the smoother blend you get in the more expensive MCU films. I need to study the home release to really see how clean that was, because on first pass it looked weak. Perhaps having a lot of this take place in the dark was a terrible idea.
My favorite sequence was the opening. Pretty sick, actually. I'm not sure how strong I felt the rehashed Batman background worked, but all of the stuff in Metropolis during the Man of Steel sequence was pretty scary. The film starts out fairly strong, but then meanders all over the place while simultaneously glossing over major shifts in character motivation along the way.
How Cavill was directed to act when he shows up to "kill" Batman was really cringe worthy, I felt. He was kind of gritting his lines, I felt like I was watching professional wrestling at times. Everything Batman says to him during that sequence is equally so as well. Truth to tell, I was having a hard time believing in any characters actual motivations throughout the entire film, the longer it went on. It's an occasionally bland and occasionally confusing film, with odd narrative choices.
I am supposed to believe that Alex Luthor was just nuts, and he got worse after he grabbed the Kryptonian archive. OK, fine, but I still find his scenes with the Senator extremely tedious. and a seeming waste of time in this story completely. What about Alex writing Batman all of these little notes, just to anger him?
Batman suddenly being contacted from the future, where he had this "vision" sequence, was very clumsily handled, I thought. It kind of comes out of nowhere, and while the sequence itself looks cool in the beginning (aka Apokolips furnaces and Parademons), the entire sequence just felt, off. Are they implying that Superman comes back as a Darkseid servant? The story has been done before, of course.
Here's some comedy, a number of people in the theater applauded. I certainly wouldn't go that far, but I didn't hate it. I find it flawed, more so even than Man of Steel, which maybe I liked better, but I don't know.
I wonder how many parents are going to regret bringing really young kids to see this.