A Dark Knight Capsizes, his fans with him

Rating: 2/10 (4 April 2016)

Yes, Alfred does get some dialogue. Unfortunately, it's nothing quite as oracular or quotable as "some men just want to watch the world burn" or even humanly quizzical as "you could tell me the Russian for 'apply your own bloody suntan lotion'." Jeremy Irons conveys ripe wisdom like, "Thermal imaging is showing me two-dozen hostiles on the third floor" and, "batman you can't win this war!" "Oh Alfred, Siri could've told me all that!" should-have replied Batman. Butt-head has made more profound observations to Beavis.
Christopher Nolan understood, for the film experience to be rewarding on repeat viewings, you can't transplant the cultured-in archives of affection for comic book characters off the panels into the frame, they need to be portrayed with disarming humanity on the screen. Snyder doesn't uphold this, and on a second viewing, I'd have been comatose to care less what happens or doesn't really to Kal-El. All I see is Henry Cavill, and all he shows is a doll-like, plastic lack of thespian talent. Not even good plastic, more like, Thermosetting Bakelite, which won't so much as re-mold itself to temperature changes. What kind of Super-man are you if your acting can't cut it in a Little-kids' play?
It is the least-witted super-screenplay in and on either side of written-history: On top of all the gangrenous Basic English impersonal dialogue, actions are galvanized by gummy extrinsic motives...when the eventual Batman/Superman showdown comes along, it's not driven by an irreconcilable disaccord between the characters' elemental attributes, but, Snyder explores, a gross mutual misunderstanding of their quantum-probabilistic similarities; if they had known their grand-mommies had both been fingering along the same page of the same Baby-Girl Name Book, they wouldn't-a even gone (along) and done all that CGI uber-vandalism.
The screenplay is indefensibly dumb even on a non-thematic level, Bruce Wayne doesn't comprehend apriorisms like "an absolute certainty", and Lois Lane says a prototype-bullet isn't sold Anywhere-In-The-World(!)..."even black market". "You see, Loi, the raison d'être of the Black Market is so no one with a fully-formed cerebrum can ever confess such naïveté out loud," nobody offered.
Superman flies-off-to-Mexico, and he...saves-a-little-girl, out-of-a-building-burning-so-hot.. it's-collapsing-under-its-own-weight. Does he then swoosh-her-off-to-a-nearby-hospital, owing to a provisional diagnosis of pulmonary-alveolar damage from smoke inhalation? Nah, he just sets her down at the hypo-oxygenated center of a crowd so they can feel up his costume, designed by Michael Wilkinson. Ya know, maybe these meta-humans (and screenwriters) ought to earn at least a paramedic's license before flying-around-doing-stuff. That would be my Bat-beef.
A bad screenplay doesn't even have to yield a worse movie; when your moronically-written characters throw-up such fecal lines as "the world only makes sense if you force it to!!"..you don't track into their faces to corroborate their fascistic whims, you show it in a wide shot (better; off-screen) and indicate the film has a larger perspective than their crack-narrow minds. A post-pubescent director knows when to assure his smart audience about on-screen psychopaths; "...I'm not with these guys!"
Exempting Affleck, you want to hold your nose away from the acting. When Jesse Eisenberg yips on about "bat of Gotham man vs god blood of my blood this is your doomsday!", he sounds like a nut that's tripped out of a cult, like a fly you ought to swat. Oh, he's getting a Razzie for that. Even his browbeating-braggadocio trailer-famous line: "The Red Capes are coming", just slathers out of nowhere and for no reason except he's got a mouth.
Snyder was last seen wallowing in the Superhero/God dual-theism with Watchmen, "god exists and he's American." Dr. Manhattan, compared to Cavill's superman, was an infinitely complex character (and a damn-right pitch for God), one that we found ourselves caring deeply for, perhaps because he was portrayed by Billy Crudup..who's an actual Grade-B+ actor, not a perfectly-muscled blow-up doll that's been pumped with words such as; "Find..Him..Save..M.A.R.T.H.A!!" "Waz tat mean?", wonders Snyder's Batman upon its deflation.
Regarding spectacle, one thing actual filmmakers--not explosarios--understand is, to create iconic imagery in your action scenes, and not shouter-fodder for Multiplex-screwballs, the amount of flash has to be rationed. In the Super-vs-Super and Super-vs-Doom fight scenes, he has dome-shaped energy surges and sojourns to Outer Space..and he glosses over improbabilities like they were day-to-day quotidia...rather than do what Kurosawa or Spielberg or Cameron would do; employ visual-scaling to emphasize the mystic absurdity of it and invoke awe rather than elicit yawns.
I don't subscribe to the DC/Marvel oil-wrestle, I only require that a movie be good cinema. If I leaned more towards DC, it'd owe to The Dark Knight, and one of the pillars that elevates it into art is its ergo-hermetic sense of narrative: Virtually every line in the first half pays off in the second; "I hear they have a different name for me down at M.C.U", "You either die a hero. . . . .". These-and-more lines are given an ironic knife-twist by the film's end that leaves you in an adiabatic mood of contemplation; you've just witnessed a Chekhovian masterpiece. In Synder's feature-video (no, it's not a movie), you get unwoven strings-of-words like, "Things fall..things on..Earth. What falls...is, uh,...fallen?" "It's HIS mother's name, x2!!" Reductio ad absurdum; the screwy writing implies Batman--if Ma Kent was instead a "Molly"--would let a collateral hostage die.
The experience is such a mechanist vacuity that when Diane Lane comes on-screen to take out the garbage at night...we're aware it's not because of the human need to do house chores, it's just, the plot needs her to be violently kidnapped, then to wail and squirm. She got more dignity unwrapped, propped high-up to the toilet-wall in Unfaithful. She earned an emotion/two then.
A perfect meta-metaphor for the whole mess; in Watchmen, Nite Owl saves Bruce Wayne's parents from getting murdered. In this putrid muddle, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, once The Comedian, plays Thomas Wayne, only to get gunned down. Way to undo your own work, and everyone else's.