This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
P/I/Z/Z/A’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
The biggest problem but also the biggest strength of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is that it’s trying to do the entire Marvel Phase One in two hours and a bit, only with DC characters and stories. As such what you get is a really fast paced, tight and intricate story packed to the brim with content which inherently causes in its wake collateral damage where certain pieces need to be there, but there simply isn't the room for them because of everything else going on. This is most apparent with the booking of Superman himself, given that half the title is Superman’s and given just how important the battle between Superman and Zod is to Snyder’s wider universe… Superman really does spend most of the movie with not a lot to do and the fallout from the Zod battle doesn’t carry the same weight as say… the battle for New York in Avengers (even if I found the actual action sequence and movie itself much more lacking, the pacing of the Marvel Cinematic Universe really is tough to argue with).
But like I say, it’s a strength too. This movie is clearly a love letter to fans and Snyder goes beyond just nodding at fans favourite panels, he’s crafted the best live action Batman we’ve ever had on screen and provided quite possibly the best comic book action finale ever realised and probably one of the best action sequences of all time too because he's literally throwing EVERYTHING into the mix here which just makes the film completely off the fucking chain.
Where I think he sadly lost a lot of people is when he ends up going possibly one step too far in introducing elements of Flashpoint Paradox and Injustice. As a massive dork I personally loved these aspects because I knew what he was doing but I can completely understand why people found this movie completely incoherent at times. Rather than organically interjecting these aspects into his narrative, he just sort of overlaps all of his universes and timelines on top of one another and gives very little warning before deviating off on multiverse tangents. He uses a sort of vague prophetic dream device to try and cheat his way into playing cards that haven’t really been earned but it doesn't work very well. Still, Flash dressed in what looks like Injustice Armour, evil Superman and a gun wielding, trench coat clad Batman fighting Parademons is just a few spoilers amongst many, which suggests to me that we have a very bright future ahead of us. It just might take us a while to explain it all to a general audience.
Ironically, where the movie lost me a little bit was Batman’s place in this world. From what I could establish, by this point in the timeline Bruce had first put on the Batman suit twenty years ago. Somewhere along the way Joker kills Robin and he retires, with it taking the desire to kill Superman being the motivation to want to put the suit on again. This is all fine in itself, the way we relive the Zod Superman battle on the ground from Bruce's eyes is pure genius but like, shouldn’t all of this… have y’know, come up in Man of Steel? The movie presents Gotham and Metropolis as two cities separated by just one bay and so I appreciate that finding out aliens are real is a little different, you would think that if literally a few miles away a family of people dressed as bats and birds were locked in a battle with a killer clown and his mistress, you would think it would come up in conversation along the way. I get what Synder is trying to do and I admire the ambition but he’s just made it too complex for his own good and it’s become a little too muddled. It would have worked better in my mind to just suggest that Bruce Wayne becomes Batman at the end of Man of Steel in response to Superman and Zod’s battle, but whatever.
Bottom Line? There is a sense in Batman v Superman that absolutely anything can happen. I loved this movie, warts and all and cannot WAIT to see what he does next.