rffrydr’s review published on Letterboxd:
MOVIE OF THE WEEK: "MAN vs GOD" "The only sense in this world is what you can make of it--by force!"; "God is Dead"... Clearly our comic book action figures have come a long way. Turns out they weren't running out of ideas when they foistered up that inane title; turns out they knew what they were doing releasing on Easter.
When I posted up the Tarantino quote on Superman I was trying to tease out something, anything, in what promised at best an Abott&Costello vs. Warewolf retread. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Critics disparaged the fragmented story: the big man himself is introduced tossed across the horizon fighting some modern-day equivalent of a Godzilla suit and the whole thing treated like just another day at the office. But isn't it? I've been BATboozled since 1985--tv long before that. All I know is fragments of this and that joker jack-n-the-boxing in and out of my memory. --A long recurrent dream really. And isn’t that's what good cinema is all about? Night. Alone in a communal darkness. No-one gets out unscathed. And this is what Zacky Snyder does best: a grim swirl of slo-mo tableaux, drifting in an out fugelike, overlapping meanings, new meanings--all whirling apart. What’s the sense of it? Answered that in the first quote.
Indeed the beginning and end of "Batman vs. Superman", the driving force through it all, a traumatic childhood memory...a “resurrection” really. And the requisite lies and self delusions that go with it. The movie would just be product without it. Primal sin gives "the Dark Knight" not only his hue, but his humanity.
So it's no tease, nothing up the sleeve, the Makers take it head on: what kind of hero is it that can endure no pain, suffer no loss, endure no failure? Batman tells it like it is: "No 'superman can,' only man can, be brave." And so too that one little piece of the economy, Hollywood, where it's not just one's duty, but one's job... to play God.