In Batman v Superman…<groan>…Dawn of Justice, billionaire Bruce Wayne is a constantly enraged, murderous meatman twenty years into his beat as Gotham City’s premier vigilante, mostly keeping to the shadows and staying out of the newspapers. When Superman shows up on Earth, Bruce Wayne becomes even more enraged because here is a man who is as misguided and violent as Batman, doing exactly the things Batman would probably do if he had the power to do them. For Batman, this kind of aggression will not stand, man, (to borrow the immortal words of the Dude) and so Batman decides to kill Superman.
While Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent have all the trappings of adult men, they are not, so talking out their issues—namely, who gets to be the one and only unrepentant murdering psychopath in Zack Snyder’s Murderverse (TM)—is out of the question and instead they must attempt to murder one another like superpowered children on a playground.
Mind you, Batman is right to want to take out Superman and vice versa! Both men have shown, in words and deeds, that they are woefully unfit to be superheroes. What’s worse, at least in Superman’s case, Superman doesn’t even want to be a superhero! So much screen time in both Man of Steel and BVS is devoted to showing us that Superman simply does not give a shit. So on the one hand, you’ve got a very bored, unengaged solar god causing 9/11-scale destruction because he doesn’t have the foresight to take a fight to the moon and on the other hand you have a hyper-maladjusted terrorist running around murdering people with his car. Who was I supposed to root for again?
At least Marvel had the good sense to take two heroes you like (Cap and Iron Man) and give you a compelling set of circumstances and motivations for their emotionally charged brawl in Civil War. It’s conflicting to watch Cap and Iron Man beat the shit out of one another, even if you side with either one of them! They’re friends—we’ve watched them hang out! They’re also bonafide superheroes—we’ve seen them save the world over and over again! And they’re happy to do it…they’re compelled, in fact!
And that’s one of the things that’s so infuriating about Zack Snyder’s Joss Whedon’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League (ZSJWZSJL). The entire enterprise is an exercise in cinematic gaslighting. The movie is constantly telling us that Superman was a great hero who can be trusted to protect planet Earth and its inhabitants. Bruce Wayne, who might as well be Superman’s publicist in this movie, is the one usually doing all the telling. But why should we believe Bruce? Why should we trust him? When have we ever seen either of these men act in a heroic fashion at all?
Never. It never happened.
There are people on Twitter on Letterboxd who have done, in one form of the other, the whole “well, you may not like him, but at least he has a vision, not like those Marvel movies,” and look, I don’t get this whole DC vs Marvel thing. I grew up with and love both, but truth be told, I skew a tiny more DC. So I’m willing to extend any movie with Superman and Batman in it a little extra sliver of that sweet, sweet benefit of the doubt. But honestly, what the fuck are these people talking about? What is Snyder’s grand vision? The movie ends the exact same way as 90% of the Marvel films—there’s just some big clusterfuck CGI battle that looks like shit, with the members of the Justice League trying to fight video game character models to stop a McGuffin from doing who knows what! It’s basically the same plot as Infinity War for fuck’s sake!
Don’t give me Zack Snyder’s piss and tell me it’s Granny’s Peach Tea. Don’t try to sell me on this grand vision bullshit when absolutely none of these movies connect thematically or narratively. Was it always Snyder’s vision to follow up Man of Steel with BVS? No fucking way, man. This motherfucker could not please the majority of his BUILT-IN audience with one of the most beloved children’s characters in the world! Man of Steel underperformed! They threw Batman in it because he brings in money. And don’t tell me Snyder’s grand vision was to make the Snyder Cut when it’s filled with recycled photography, garbage effects, slapdash table setting bullshit, and last minute creative decisions! He said it was TV, then he said it was black and white, then he cropped it for IMAX screens. That doesn’t sound like a man with a plan!
You people have been telling me for years—YEARS!—that the Snyder Cut existed. It was just sitting there, waiting for a little post-production, and bingo bango bongo, it’s ready to roll. How can you possibly stand by this having now seen the sorry state of this thing? There’s recycled footage from Man of Steel in here! The flashback to the war with Darkseid was basically the same sequence in Whedon’s movie, only they swapped out Whedon’s Steppenwolf with Snyder’s Darkseid in Snyder’s version! They did a CHARACTER MODEL SWAP, you fucking lunatics! And that Knightmare “flash forward” thing? What the hell was that? It was pure nonsense and it looked godawful!
(Can I just digress for a moment to talk about this flashforward thing? ZSJL has flashforwards, flashbacks, and a character named the Flash.)
At this point you might be asking yourself two things: Did Jake hate this movie? And is he intimating that he prefers the vile, disgusting, cutthroat Joss Whedon version?
The answer to the first question may surprise you. The answer to the second may infuriate you.
No, I did not hate this movie. As to whether I prefer the theatrical cut…well, it’s complicated, so I’ll say yes and no.
The Snyder Cut is at its best when it is focusing on the three best characters in the movie: Cyborg, the Flash, and Aquaman. Snyder actually has takes on these dudes and the takes are good. Ezra Miller is ob-fucking-noxious, but so is the Flash. It totally works. Aquaman is just Jason Momoa, who is sort of the platonic ideal of a stock, male, Snyder character in real life. So that works too. Cyborg is, above all else, a legitimately likable character with a proper heroic arc and backstory.
One of the most bugfuck insane things about the Snyder Cut is how goddamn heroic and good Cyborg’s story is. This is the kind of story Zack Snyder simply cannot imagine when it comes to characters like Superman and Batman. The sequence in which Cyborg listens to his father’s audio message in the digiverse is Grade-A Superhero Jet Fuel and it is legitimately the only time Snyder has been able to pull off, from a thematic perspective, the arc of a real hero. Whereas Superman’s two dads gave him the advice that turned him into a legitimate psychopath, Cyborg’s dad more or less tells him “with great power comes great responsibility.” And yeah, sorry, but that’s it, man. That’s the fucking tweet.
We also see Cyborg, you know, helping people. In one of the very few coherently staged, legitimately intriguing sequences in the movie we see Cyborg divert money (which he, in his Cybogian form, now understands is nothing more than a digital abstraction) into an impoverished, single mother’s bank account. Jesus Christ, after watching Superman not be able to pull his head out of ass for two movies, this is so goddamn refreshing. It’s exciting to watch heroes save the day by punching people real hard, but by god, it is sometimes so much better to see them save the day with their brains and their hearts.
If you ask me what these absolute fucking numbskulls at WB should be doing next, the answer is to make a cool Cyborg movie. But of course, actor Ray Fisher has essentially been cancelled for daring to be a black man with a legitimate grievance against a fucking slime ball, so this is likely to never happen.
Now that I’ve called Whedon a slime ball let me just elucidate on an area of this whole sordid tale where, I’m sorry to say, Whedon takes the cake. When his Superman shows up at the end of the theatrical cut, we get to see an authentic depiction of that character. The Man of Tomorrow. The Last Son of Krypton. The Man of Steel. The Blue Bomber. Supes. Whatever you want to call him, that’s him. He spouts a few corny but earnest one-liners, saves the day in spectacular fashion, and then races the Flash at the end of the movie. That’s Superman. Not a “take” on, not a “version” of. No. Just Superman, red, yellow, and blue!
So where am I at the end of all this? What am I to make of my almost decade of suffering under Snyder’s boot heel of “auteurism?” Well, I’m in anguish. There is no catharsis, no release, no nothing. The Snyder Cut looks like pure shit. Both cuts do. So I don’t know what sort of settings Snyder cultists have on their TVs but there’s just no winner here. It all looks terrible. The effects, the palette, the compositions, everything. Both movies are bursting at the seams with CGI sets and last minute fixes and uninteresting designs and embarrassing jargon-filled exposition dump truck bullshit. Like what you like, but, again, don’t try to tell me this is elevated superhero cinema or whatever nonsense you’ve been pushing in your Qanon chat room for the last three years.