PRE-REVIEW: Batman V Superman - Will It Be Everything That I Have Been Dreading?

Movies like this one don't come along very often.  By saying that, I mean movies that I really don't want to see because I am sure that I will hate it, but at the same time I really want to see it because I am hoping that it will prove me wrong.  There was very little that I liked about Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and the over bloated cast and run time of Batman V Superman makes me wonder just how coherent the story is going to be.  If we add on the fact that Warner Bros and DC Comics are years behind where Disney and Marvel are in terms of super hero shared universes, this film could be looking to cover too much distance to allow for some catch up.

With all of that in mind, and the fact that I have been having nightmares about watching this movie (this is not a joke or hyperbole.  I have been having literal nightmares.  The most recent one was a few nights ago when I was forced to watch this film), I have decided to write a review of it without having even seen it.  That's right, sight unseen, and a full review.

I will throw out a few disclaimers, however.  After I have seen the movie tonight, I will write another review tomorrow.  This means if I have to eat crow, I will gladly do it.  As I said earlier,  I am hoping to be proven wrong about this movie.  Secondly, I have read no reviews for Batman V Superman.  I have also read no synopsis for it and my only knowledge of the film is what I have seen in the trailers.  I will base my review on what I know of Snyder's film style, the direction that they seem to be taking with this universe from Man of Steel, and what I believe the studio will be attempting to gain from the launch of this film.

So, here goes nothing.  Let's see just how correct I will be with my crystal ball of scepticism.

What can I say that's positive about Batman V Superman?  Well, the fact that it is over and done with is about the best that I can do.  Sure it wasn't all bad, but the fact that I won't have to relieve this over bloated, CGIed beast ever again is the ray of sunlight that never was to be seen in an overly gloomy and grim movie.

When Christopher Nolan made the Dark Knight trilogy, he focused it on being real world and dark.  It was absolutely perfect, considering the fact that Batman exists as an ordinary man (not needing to come from a world where gamma radiation causes appendages to become all elastic and spiders bite people giving them super cooties).  Thus, the real world application works.  He is also a tormented man, and less of a super hero.  He is a vigilante, which means the dark tone allows the character to toss and turn over the lines that should and shouldn't be crossed.  Just because it worked in that wildly successful franchise does not mean that it is the solution for everything.  It worked because it was true to its narrative, and that is why Batman V Superman fails.

There is nothing here that is true to its narrative, because it fails to have a proper and streamlined story.  At its barebones, there is something here that could have resembled a quality film.  The opposites that are the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel lead to some fascinating quandaries, but the scope of that is lost in the screenplay which wants to be nothing more than a spring board for an entire universe of franchises instead of focusing on the title characters.  The script is messy and jumps around way too often, a bi-product of trying to get people all the way down the list to Aquaman in there.

The really frustrating part of this experience is that Snyder seems to have learned very little from the criticisms that came from Man of Steel.  What that movie missed was heart and personality.  It chose to use CGI massiveness over character.  It also kept actors from being energetic.  How the hell do you have Amy Adams in a movie and her performance come across as bland?  That is a question I will be asking myself for many years, as I never thought that this enchanting talent could ever be forgettable in a role.  Lastly, Man of Steel opted for having a forty minute battle at the end that wasn't used to tell any story, but merely existed to allow buildings to get smashed in enormous ways (which would have killed millions of people in the process, something that Snyder and Superman seemed oblivious to).   'Bigger is better' seemed to be the motto of that film.

Well, here we are almost three years later and very little has changed.  Jesse Eisenberg attempts to bring some personality into his role, but there are few people beyond him that appear to be allowed to attempt such treachery to what should be such a somber film.  Remember, it is all about being gritty and dark.  This leads to a lot of soap opera-ish looks from our on screen talent as they stand under dim lighting.

The special effects do look quite nice at times, but the problem here is that we are exposed to them for way too long.  Snyder once again decides that there must be an exorbitant amount of action, and that it must be big and destructive.  Once again (boy, I am getting tired of saying that), it looses its appeal and effectiveness.  The key is that you don't want sensory adaptation to set in on the audience. You want things to last just long enough to pack the punch and then put them somewhere else.  With Batman V Superman, eventually numbness sets in and each sequence begins feeling like the last.  Buildings are destroyed, civilians must be killed, and there is a complete lack of awareness for the fact that story trumps action.

I bash on it, yes, but it is not the worst movie of the year.  It is simply a movie that is trying to be all things to all people to set up all franchises to make a lot of money.  It is complete studio meddling here, much like what killed Spiderman last go around.  If they kept it as just a story about the two title characters, it would have been a lot more palatable.  You may as well just walk out on the ending.  Spoiler alert, it only functions for the purposes of making more movies, not for satiating the audience.  Oh, and Wonder Woman is barely in the movie.

Rating - 1.5 out of 4 Stars

Song One

Anne Hathaway is terrific, wonderful, and any other positive descriptives that you could dole at her.  She holds within her a great dexterity, charisma, and a charm that flows off the screen and infiltrates the hearts of the audience.  So, what the hell happened in Song One?

Hathaway is the protagonist in a movie that focuses on the intimacy of family and friends while being closely connected through the lifeblood of music.  She plays Franny, a young woman working towards her anthropology Ph.D., who has to return home when her idiot brother gets hit by a cab when he crosses the road before looking both ways while wearing headphones.  Digital Projection Darwin says, 'you have been selected!.'  The dullard is a busker who quit college to... well, to busk I guess.  He also has a creepy obsession with an indie musician named James Forester (Johnny Flynn). Dullard has posters of James Forester on his bedroom wall, and all sorts of doodles in his diary.  When I said it was creepy, I meant creepy.

Well, surprise, surprise.  Franny meets her brother's hero and a relationship ensues.  The relational chemestry between Hathaway and Flynn is about as dry as five saltines crammed into your mouth at once, with very little happening through either dialogue or action to create a dynamic of charm or ye old stomach butterflies.  This is one of the most frustrating aspects of Song One, as it would be quite a feat to get such a flat performance from Anne Hathaway.  It reminds me of what Zack Snyder accomplished in Man of Steel, when he took the vibrant Amy Adams and transformed her into a mere placeholder character.

This is the feature film directorial debut of Kate Barker-Froyland, who also penned the script.  The last thing I want to do is to write someone off immediately, so don't think that I am going to curse down brimstone and the like over this.  From the feel and tone of Song One, I get the sense that perhaps this was just not the story that she was meant to tell.

It comes from the aforementioned drab relationship, but also the lack of influence that the music actually has over the audience.  In the very first scene we are greeted with the dullard busking (moments before he fails to look both ways.  Always look both ways, kids!).  When he sings, there is a passion and drive that emanates from both his strumming and vocals.  And then he is in a hospital bed, and we are unfortunate enough to then hear the music of his obsession, the one and only James Forester.

Forester's music is without life.  It sounds generic.  It feels like it could have been written and performed by anyone, giving no sense of how it would turn him into an indie sensation.  There is nothing recognizable about his songs, other than the fact that he uses a loop pedal during the performance.

This is where I feel the script fails the film.  It appears that the loop pedal (used by many performers and buskers in much better ways) is what the audiences flip out over, one of the instances in the film where it appears that Barker-Froyland does not fully understand the moving components music.  Another example of the misunderstanding of music is when Hathaway's mother, played by the wonderful Mary Steenburgen, talks about how when she dated a famous rock star, he taught her one of the hardest songs ever to play on the guitar, Blackbird by the Beatles.  This is like me trying to sound smart about food and mentioning that spreadable (or sprayable) cheese is as good as the real thing.  Blackbird, be it a nice song, is actually extremely easy to play.

It may sound like I am taking the music aspect too seriously and that I am just being a curmudgeon because the songs are not my cup of tea.  I really am not being that.  There is just a major disconnect between what the director believes music to be and what it is to the audience.  If you watch the movie Begin Again, which I highly recommend you do, you will see a terrific example of how music is made to tell the tale and capture the emotions and journey of the main characters.

With the two major components of what we are supposed to connect to and become passionate about, the relationship and the music, existing without life, there is little more to say about this movie.  I could mention the sound editing, which cuts with every camera cut, leaving a jilting feeling to the audio with very little continuity, something that may be helpful in a film where sound is so important.  What was needed was a flow, was a beat to Song One, for it to feel like it was music being made before our eyes.  What it was in actuality was a poorly edited and curated mix-tape that misses out on the over abundance of talent that the actors possess.

Rating - 1 out of 4 stars

Sucker Punch

If you were to read my review of Limitless on Wednesday, you may get a slight sense that I do not harbor all of the world's best thoughts and feelings towards Sucker Punch, the 2011 movie directed and co-written by Zack Snyder.  It is about a girl who experiences some pretty severe trauma and is sent to a mental institution.  While there, she works towards an escape plan before her evil stepfather has her lobotomized.

Now, it sounds like there might be some female empowerment in that description, and I fully believe that Snyder was going for a movie about female empowerment.  Unfortunately, when you name your main character 'Babydoll,' you perhaps show a lack of understanding towards the matter of the empowered female.  Yes, I know that this movie is extremely stylized and that the names fit into that structure, but I plan to take a good look at the style used to show just how strong a female can be.

While Babydoll (Emily Browning) is institutionalized, she forms an alternate reality in her mind where she is the new arrival at a brothel (because that is where a woman's imagination would take them, and is not at all just a reflection of the male fantasy of where a woman's mind would escape to), where the other patients are 'dancers' and the staff are mobsters who run the brother.  Babydoll soon realizes that she has a very magical dance that can hypnotize the horny men.  While doing this seductive dance, Babydoll once again forms an alternate reality in her mind where there are always a lot of special effects, swords and explosions.

It is in these scenes of escapism that Zack Snyder goes totally off the rails with the special effects.  Whether she is fighting giant Samurai or battling against the Third Reich in steampunk WWII, it is a non-stop visual ride.  There were some moments where the visuals looked quite nice, but there were other times where the it fell apart and was unable to be consistent.  While some people may enjoy this, I found that it fairly quickly became way too much.  Fight scenes are great and fun, and so are explosions.  But when that's all you have, constantly bombarding you with no real connection to the characters or plot, it can become boring.  This is exacerbated by the fact that all of this action happens in a dream within a dream.  When the action is that detached to reality, it is hard to give a damn.

And this leads back to what I see is the biggest problem of the movie.  The premise seems to be that the strength of the female to overcome the nasty things in the man's world is to imagine they are somewhere else.  Seriously.... that is what this movie says.  That is Snyder's vision of the strong woman... someone who can create an alternate reality because they are too unfit to cope with real life trauma.  So, while we have scenes of Babydoll being brave and taking down mammoth sword fighters, we are also shown that this is the only place where she is strong.

This film, in all reality, is just a male fantasy of what a strong woman is.  She has to retreat into her mind when the men own reality.  She has to be identified by names like Babydoll, Rocket, Sweat Pea, or any of the other names that believe were being used stylistically, but ultimately just show the male fantasy side of this picture.  The strong woman also, while creating an alternate reality for herself, puts herself in a role where she is sexually subservient to men, and dresses in short skirts, short shorts, or any other sexy outfit.  Thank you, Zack Snyder, thank you for showing a generation of young woman that if they are ever treated poorly they can escape in their minds into a more degrading reality, and that is where their power is.

Rating - 1 out of 4 stars