Zack Snyder: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

“There was a time above... a time before... There were perfect things…  diamond absolutes. But things fall… things on earth, and what falls… is fallen.”

Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) is a film filled with turning points, revelations, reappraisals, and reimaginings, both within its storyworld and in terms of what a superhero film itself might look like. Fans and critics at the time were generally displeased with what was seen as an overarching pall of dread and darkness in the film. BvS (as I’ll shorten the film’s mouthful of a title) explores darker themes than most other superhero films, such as loss of innocence, and pushes the level of violence and cynicism beyond what might be expected for the first combined take on DC’s iconic heroes. A time above and a time before indeed.

As the title of the film implies, BvS functions as the “ground zero” of what has become known as the DC Extended Universe of films. Even though Snyder's earlier Man of Steel (2013) is the first film in the series, BvS, with its multihero focus and titular allusion to the Justice League, brings to the screen a more fully expansive DC universe for the first time. It introduces Wonder Woman and teases the existence of The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg. Snyder’s preferred cut, the 182-minute “Ultimate Edition” of the film I am reviewing here, not only fleshes out some of the story beats that left audiences confused and wanting, but also results in the first R-rating for a Batman or Superman movie. Five years later, BvS is still referenced in online discussions as a cultural shorthand for both the worst excesses of the genre and Snyder’s immaturity and lack of understanding of the characters.

And yet, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is my favourite Zack Snyder film. Its excesses are, to me, its strengths; its prioritizing of thematic and visual elegance over strict narrative comprehension foregrounds the best elements of superhero stories and plays to Snyder’s strengths as a filmmaker, including some of the best action sequences in all of superhero cinema. It’s a wild and wide-ranging film that embraces emotional extremes as well as contains strong elements of surrealism, a space for eroticism, and an existential self-reflexivity that sits very well among some of the best Batman and Superman stories of the last few decades.

It’s easy to trace the origins of many elements of the film to some of those various comic book and filmic antecedents featuring the two titular characters. Undoubtedly the greatest influence on the film is Frank Miller’s 1986 mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns, with its aging and cynical Batman aiming to take down a government-lackey Man of Steel by the book’s end. More broadly, given his previous adaptations of Miller’s 300 and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, it’s not surprising that the “grim and gritty” turn in superhero comics in the 1980s and 1990s is felt so strongly in the film, which features, among other things, particularly in its Ultimate Edition, a prison shivving and a slightly more risqué version of a bathtub love scene between Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) and Lois Lane (Amy Adams). As one character (a cameo by previous Snyder collaborator Jena Malone) mockingly says to Lois upon her discovery of potential government testing of weaponry on their own soldiers: “Stuff like this still shocks you.” The same could be said about fans who found the film’s tone so off-putting, since it had been 30 years since Miller and Moore popularized the idea of superhero comics featuring more explicit violence, sexuality, and cynicism.

While that view not only fails to see the complications in such a periodization of comic books—as Jackson Ayres writes in his 2016 article, wondering, “When Were Superheroes Grim and Gritty?”—to read BvS as reducible to those particular influences is to fail to recognize Snyder’s inclusion of influences well beyond Miller and Moore. To see only a unidirectional descent from the Golden Age of comics through a naive Silver Age to the darkness of the 80s and 90s as culminating in BvS, a film so concerned with various falls from grace, of the ways that, as Alfred (Jeremy Irons) puts it, the war on crime can “turn good men cruel,” is to read the film purely superficially.

BvS is much more than the perceived climax (or nadir) of gritty superhero stories. In some ways it is an attempt to bring Batman and Superman back to ignored aspects of their origins, while incorporating elements of their mythos from all eras. Cavill’s Superman is a distant and god-like do-gooder, not yet the embodiment of “truth, justice, and the American way,” a phrase which was only coined in the 1942 radio serial during WWII. As he did in Man of Steel, Snyder embraces a powerful vision of Superman and his abilities. Snyder’s Batman (Ben Affleck) in many ways resembles his very first appearances in Detective Comics, killing criminals and lacking a chummy relationship with the police of Gotham. At the same time, this version of Batman feels more like the JLA comics Batman, who is as comfortable fighting monsters and aliens as criminals, compared to the more grounded Christopher Nolan version. Visually, the Affleck Batman costume draws on both Jim Lee’s illustrations of Batman from the “Hush” storyline, as well as bringing in the Superman-fighting armor from the end of Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

In my review of Snyder’s Watchmen (2009), I observed that with BvS “Snyder was granted the permission to do what Moore always dreamed of doing,” before he resorted to modified versions of the Charleston Comics heroes for his superhero deconstruction: “drawing on the deep attachments that people have built up to Batman and Superman in his story, but then exploring them as satirical analogues simultaneously as he deals with their status as iconic heroes themselves.” BvS is constructed with an acute awareness that these are icons the filmmakers are playing with. Its risks and experimentation are not the result of casual ignorance, but a desire to thematically invest its exploration of the characters as icons, drawing on inspiration beyond comic books and superhero entertainment, from contemporary cultural figures to ancient mythology.

In a scene that is particularly instructive of how Snyder hopes to mythologize the heroes in his film, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor meets with Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) in the study of his late father. Eisenberg plays the billionaire scientist as akin to a Silicon Valley “tech bro,” drawing on his iconic performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010). In the conversation between the senator and tech billionaire concerning Superman, Lex refers to what he calls the metahuman thesis, an explanation of the appearance of superpowered beings and the expectation of more coming as also being the “basis for Gods and myths.” The Genesis account of fallen angels mating with human women and producing “the heroes of old, men of renown” roots this idea deeply in human culture, linking superheroes with mythic origins. On the wall of the study above Lex and the senator is a painting of demons and angels, which Lex has turned upside down, inverting the myth of their origin. The devils come from the sky, Lex explains, as the painting’s inversion has been confirmed by the arrival of Superman and the Kryptonians in the first film and their devastation of Metropolis replayed at the start of the movie.

Attempting to make the case for superheroes as the modern pantheon is by now an old rhetorical device used in films such as M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable and by internet fanboys alike to secure a sense of legitimacy for these pop culture creations. What Snyder and screenwriter Chris Terrio cleverly do is make that case within the world of the film, in the regular characters’ responses to such superheroes, not in the expectation of an audience’s reaction to the material. Consider the defacement of the Superman statue erected in Metropolis with the indictment, “Fallen God,” spray painted across it in red. The statue itself is posed with Superman’s hand stretching out to the sky, like Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco, making the religious imagery explicit. BvS builds its story around the larger mythic resonances of its characters.

The film begins with two striking sequences: the first is the opening credit montage retelling of the Batman origin story where we see the murder of Bruce’s parents Thomas and Martha Wayne (with Snyder’s Comedian from Watchmen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, cameoing as Thomas) intercut with the images of Bruce fleeing their funeral and falling into the bat cave under Wayne Manor. The use of an opening credit montage secures BvS firmly within Snyder’s specific filmmaking; its tableau framing and revisiting of these key moments of Batman mythology recall especially the opening of Watchmen, while establishing this telling as participating in the repetition central to myth making, which Anton discussed in his review of Man of Steel. Snyder films Batman’s origin in a way that is both thoroughly his own, while maintaining visual continuity with other versions. Consider the way that he draws attention to Martha Wayne’s pearls, a stock item in the myth, as the mugger catches them with his gun and the drawback of the gun’s slide bursts them across the pavement. Without becoming overly explicit, Snyder returns some visual power to these stock elements. The intercutting of these two moments in the Batman mythos contrasts a fall with an ascent, an ending and beginning, setting up the thematic thrust of the whole film I noted in my introduction.

After the film’s montage opening credits, the film picks up near the end of the previous film, Man of Steel: the moment, as BvS titles it, in which “Mankind is introduced to the Superman.” This stunning and overwhelming sequence revisits the battle between Zod and Superman from the view of a person on the ground in Metropolis, as skyscrapers are destroyed and the city is plunged into smoke and flames. Bruce’s opening voiceover referencing the “time above, a time before,” the “diamond absolutes” and their shattering could refer both to the experience of a child whose parents are snatched away in front of his eyes, as in the montage, or this sequence of a species discovering its relative weakness in the face of alien invaders, the ending of any sense of its specialness and superiority. Both events shatter the bearings of the world for those who experience them.

The obvious visual allusion in the revisited Metropolis sequence is another moment where the literal fall of buildings seemed to usher in a new era: 9/11. It’s almost impossible to invoke the imagery of a smoldering city and collapsing buildings without bringing to mind the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. Some may argue that the use of such imagery in what is essentially a popular entertainment is in bad taste, or exploitative. Perhaps it is exploitative, but it’s also impossible to avoid: 9/11’s iconic power, its role in the contemporary imagination of disaster, has been used to great effect in pop storytelling before, as in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005). The images are so powerfully part of our culture that their effect even travels backwards, impacting how we view pre-9/11 films like Independence Day (1996) or Armageddon (1998). 9/11 itself supposedly ended the seemingly simpler, post-Cold War interlude of the 1990s, ushering in the new millennium with a shock, similar to how the Metropolis battle ends the innocence of humanity, so the reference fits nicely with the themes of the film.

However, Snyder, unlike some of his action cinema peers, such as Michael Bay in Armageddon, consistently treats his films seriously. It’s another example of something I pointed out in Watchmen, how Snyder takes superheroes seriously, and the critique or satire arises from the consideration of the wide range of meanings such characters can generate. To take superheroes seriously means making an attempt to understand the power they represent, and these are questions both the film and its characters treat seriously.

Batman represents power as well, but his is a very human power. In the opening sequence, the people of Gotham watch the disaster in Metropolis unfold across the bay (in Snyder’s film, Gotham and Metropolis are conceived of as twin cities on the opposite sides of a bay, akin to Oakland and San Francisco, an idea that has popped up throughout other versions of DC comics lore). As Metropolis’s population flees the Kryptonian onslaught, Bruce Wayne heads the opposite direction into the very heart of the disaster, driving his SUV through the dust and debris clouds, attempting to get to Wayne Financial Building to save his employees. It leans into the surrealism and disorienting nature of the disaster, with haunting images like a horse covered in the dust of a collapsed building wandering around. It’s a compelling sequence that showcases Bruce’s, not just Batman’s, bravery and will, culminating with Bruce glowering up at Zod and Superman as he holds a young girl whose mother has died in the chaos, her loss recalling his own childhood loss while not obscuring the total scale of the destruction. We can very clearly understand why Batman sees the Kryptonian as a threat.

Flashing forward 18 months after the disaster, the film continues its exploration of a contemporary “realpolitik,” extending the War on Terror allusions from their origin in 9/11, to the deserts of the African continent. Lois is attempting to interview a local warlord general, but in actuality the whole thing is a set up by Lex Luthor in order to frame Superman for using excessive violence in his attempt to keep Lois safe. In the sequence, Superman’s power is implicitly compared to the satellite surveillance and killer drone technology of the United States. Even a version of Jimmy Olsen appears, as Lois’s cameraman, ironically revealed to be a CIA asset who is killed by the warlord’s men. There is no room in this telling for the lighthearted “pal” of the 50s and 60s comics.

The driving plot point is Superman’s role in the world, and it is hotly debated throughout the film. One of its explicit themes of the film is whether anyone as powerful as him can be held accountable. At the same time, some see Superman’s independence from any single national project as an admirable and necessary idea. A key plot point of the film is the testimony of one character, Kahina Ziri (Wunmi Mosaku), a woman from the fictional country of Nairomi, who first testifies to the U.S. Congress against Superman, before ultimately uncovering Lex Luthor’s plot. Still, her critiques of the collateral damage to her nation and the comparisons made to the United States military itself suggest that the film is willing to push our assumptions of what the right course of action is in wielding power. Returning to the mythic implications of Superman’s power, Kahina intones that “He answers to no one, not even, I think, to God.”

If Man of Steel was content to use religious imagery to build up Superman’s place in the collective mythos, BvS takes things in a decidedly ambivalent direction, suggesting that such godlike power, even if it is used for good, may not have a place in a society such as ours. “Men with power obey neither policy nor principle,” as the warlord-general tells Lois in the earlier sequence. Power is one of the film's main fixations, and one of Snyder’s constant preoccupations. The power of Superman in particular to wipe humanity off the face of the earth if he felt like it, as Batman explains, and the anxiety that it creates. Lex tells Senator Finch that one of the oldest lies in America is that “power can be innocent.” When Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) suggests the headline “End of love affair with man in the sky?” about the changing views of Superman, the atheistic implications are clear.

Anton wrote about how in Man of Steel, Clark Kent’s job as a journalist is an afterthought, but in BvS, it plays a narrative and thematic function, as Clark pursues an investigation into the accountability of the violent vigilante Batman, echoing and refracting the broader critiques of power on another level. Clark’s desire to use journalism to hold power to account conflicts with the imperatives of generating popular interest. When Perry tells Clark to abandon his quest and just cover the football game, Clark’s journalistic ethics drive him to violate Perry’s authority. There is a parallel here in the conflict between power and accountability, echoing the challenge that Superman himself faces in acting outside the strictures of government; who does he choose to save and who to ignore? Clark’s journalistic ethics implicate the media in what a reporter chooses to cover and who the media ostensibly answers to.

There’s a strange sense of wariness in BvS. Many of the characters find themselves chasing phantoms, from the “White Portuguese” Batman is seeking in his pursuit of Kryptonite, to Lois’s investigation into what happened in Nairomi to frame Superman. Ultimately, both of these investigations end up linked to Lex Luthor’s plot. In one of the most fatal deletions of the theatrical release, scenes were left out where Kahina Ziri admits she didn’t tell the whole truth to the Senate committee investigating Superman and discovers she was being manipulated by Lex Luthor. This sets up a classic suspense sequence where Lois knows the truth and races to stop Superman from going to the Capitol to testify. But of course, she doesn’t get there in time. Luthor manages to engineer a terror attack on the Capitol building (a building whose symbolic importance to Americans must surely be more clear to us now), using the disgruntled and paralyzed Wayne Enterprises employee Wally (Scoot McNairy), who was injured in the Metropolis fight sequence, to unknowingly detonate a bomb in the senate chambers, leaving Superman the sole survivor and prime suspect.

These plot points in the Ultimate Edition confirm that BvS is actually quite neatly structured in moving its various pieces into place: Lois, Clark’s mother Martha Kent (Diane Lane), Bruce’s Kryptonite spear, the earlier threads all leading to Luthor’s attempt to depower Superman by putting him in a situation where he must choose between his girlfriend and mother. While it relies on the machinations of an evil genius character like Lex Luthor, it isn’t any more outlandish than most superhero film plots, and actually shows thematic unity in drawing together the various threads. 

This focus on thematic unity over strict realism, even as it engages in emotionally realistic fears, is present in the film’s most infamous and widely-mocked sequence later in the film, during Batman and Superman’s climactic encounter. Batman, armored and wielding his Kryptonite spear, only refrains from delivering the killing blow to Superman when Superman lets out the cry of his mother’s name, “Martha,” prompting Batman to snap, “Why did you say that name!” While it’s melodramatic, thematically and structurally it nicely calls back to the first lines spoken on screen not in voiceover, which is the cry of Batman’s mother’s name, “Martha!” during the Batman origin tableaux. The shared name of their mothers awakens a realization in Batman of Superman’s shared “humanity.” While perhaps too “neat,” it’s hardly laughable. During the action scene where Batman goes to save Martha Kent while Superman returns to Lois, it is as if Bruce were retroactively and symbolically saving his own dead mother by property of psychological transference. Frankly, I will defend it as a great example of Snyder’s emotionally serious storytelling, as well as finding it psychologically compelling as it explains Batman’s drastic change of heart as being rooted deeply in his own childhood trauma.

All of the melodramatic plotting is served by Snyder’s gift for striking imagery and excellent action scenes. But rather than go too long and over the top, as in Man of Steel, in BvS, Snyder indulges and embraces a sense of surrealism, with various moments providing us with strangely haunting images such as Superman being surrounded in awe and worship by Mexican Day of the Dead celebrants in skull makeup, but none more striking if initially confusing than the film’s showcase “Knightmare” sequence. In this sequence Batman has a dream/premonition of a future in which Lois has died and Superman rules over a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun with extraterrestrial “parademons”. Batman, strikingly clad in a duster and sand goggles over his costume, must battle armed soldiers with Superman logos on their arms, fighting his foes in a style reminiscent of Hong Kong action films and the speed ramping kineticism of Snyder’s earlier films like 300 and Watchmen. It’s a temporally disorienting yet thrilling sequence that shows Snyder’s willingness to take risks and play with iconography.

Sequences like the “Knightmare” make BvS perhaps Snyder’s most evocative and thrilling film. It’s a pleasure to see Snyder give viewers some of the best superhero action on screen. The set pieces and fight scenes are genuinely excellent, reminiscent, as I noted above, of the kind of clean Hong Kong-style choreography that one might find in the films of Yuen Woo-ping, eschewing the shaky cam and lackluster framing of most other superhero films. In particular, the warehouse fight shortly after the “Martha” scene, as Batman tracks down and eliminates Martha Kent’s captors, is a standout. In addition to the actual fights in the sequence being visually unobstructed and viscerally thrilling, it showcases Batman’s intellect in fighting, as he sets up opponents in sequences, returning for instance to a henchmen strung up as a means to launch boxes and items at other combatants. Batman smashes through walls, a force of nature, but never beyond human. All the while Junkie XL and Hans Zimmer’s electric tones on the soundtrack rise to a pitch as we anticipate Batman’s descent into the warehouse.

Of all of Snyder’s superhero films, BvS comes the closest to 300 in its visual ambition, especially during the final fight in which, after thwarting Luthor’s distractions and rescuing both Lois and Martha, they must team up to fight the Kryptonian monster that Luthor has engineered in the crashed Kryptonian ship in the middle of Metropolis. It is none other than the infamous Doomsday, whose name, appearance, and function are drawn from the early-90s Superman event, “The Death of Superman.” Anyone familiar with those comics knows that it bodes poorly for Superman.

The Doomsday sequence plays much like the T-Rex in San Diego sequence in Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, as it extends the movie beyond a logical endpoint, and yet is ultimately the film’s raison d’être. Doomsday, an alien monster whose appearance recalls elements of the Cave Troll from the first of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, provides an opportunity for a fully superpowered action scene, as Doomsday’s Kyrptonian origin makes him Superman’s physical equal. The sequence also provides the first costumed appearance of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. Diana Prince is introduced earlier in the film, attempting to gain access to Luthor’s files at the same party that Bruce Wayne is at (and proves Gadot and Affleck each as comfortable looking glamorous in evening wear as they are fighting monsters and villains). But it is her sudden arrival to the strains of electric guitar on Junkie XL and Zimmer’s soundtrack that offers a thrill to those comic readers who may have long wanted to see the DC trinity in action. With her glowing lasso and Grecian armor, Wonder Woman is one of the film’s most successful visual elements.

I have long decried the way the final fights in other superhero movies seem to devolve into a CGI mess of characters dashing and leaping at each other against a virtual background. Even Man of Steel and the end of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017) lose my interest in the final moments. Thankfully, in BvS the final fight against Doomsday is more successful in maintaining this viewer's interest, in no small part due to Snyder’s genuine eye for composition that lends it visual variation and a sense of texture that few CGI slugfests do. Single frames could be viewed as splash panels in a comic book, as Snyder takes full advantage of the digital backlot he pioneered in 300 to cast characters against bolts of lightning, and play up the shadows and outlines of the figures with a clarity that even his subsequent Justice League rarely achieves.

While BvS doesn’t always make logical sense—take for instance the fact that at the film’s climax, Luthor is arrested and placed in prison on the same night and has his head shaved, more as a kind of obligatory need for a bald Luthor, than for any logical reason—Snyder still never completely falls into self-parody. As I’ve noted in my other Snyder reviews, he’s too self-serious for that. But it’s a self-seriousness rooted in earnestness. Snyder believes that even through all the darkness and violence there is something great about these characters. He displays genuine enjoyment in playing with them, even if he goes against what some self-proclaimed fan gatekeepers think is acceptable. And he truly believes in their greatness.

At the film’s conclusion, Bruce Wayne seems to have learned a lesson. His cynicism has been tempered by the force, the moral power, of Superman in his grand sacrifice. As he tells Wonder Woman at the funeral in Smallville, “Men are still good. We fight. We kill. We betray one another. But we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.” It neatly sums up Snyder’s work in this film, and perhaps his actual governing philosophy. Through all the fighting and brutal violence, even as we fall and find our world’s shattered, we can get back up. And together we can help each other do it, whether the Spartans at Thermopylae or a trio of heroes against a Kryptonian monster. But there will be sacrifices, and those sacrifices spur on others, whether it’s Leonidas or Superman.

In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder pushes his filmmaking skills to their fullest expression, with rich action, expressive emotion, and thematic unity, displaying the best of his distinctive talents while exploring a number of the last century’s most iconic comic book characters. I began this piece by noting all the ways that Snyder draws on the darkness of the Miller and Moore Batman stories, but, like the film itself, I end by showcasing his optimism and hope. Like the dawn of the film’s title, it’s always darkest before it arrives. Snyder consistently makes films that show a belief in people in the midst of the worst situations, rather than seeing them as victims. He isn’t always completely successful in selling the authenticity of his stories, but his emotional belief is beyond doubt.

9 out of 10

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016, USA)

Directed by Zack Snyder; written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer, based on characters from DC Comics; starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter. 

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