Wonder Woman

Alternate Title:  About Goddamn Time

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  The daughter of the Queen of the Amazons enters the world of Men to stop a madman from using a horrific weapon to stop the end of World War One.


Things Havoc liked:   ... hi, everybody.

[chorus responds]: "Hi, General Havoc."

So er... before we get started today, I'd... like to take a little trip back through memory lane.

Below, we have an excerpt from my review of last year's 2nd worst movie, Batman v. Superman, Dawn of Justice:

"... in keeping with my stated policy of only going to see movies that I suspect have a chance to prove worthwhile, consider this my preemptive rejection of the entire DC cinematic universe. I do this project for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to let my readers know what films are worth seeing and what ones are not, but there is a limit to even my cinematic fortitude, and in consequence, I am afraid that if you wish to know how the future movies in this series will turn out, you shall all have to find out for yourselves."

Next, an excerpt from my review of last year's 1st worst movie, Suicide Squad:

"It should be no surprise that after watching Batman v Superman, swearing off DC forever, relenting, and being presented with this movie, that I intend to see the error of my ways and return to my policy of bothering only with superhero films attached to the MCU."

And now, a transcript from my end-of-the-year podcast, in which I discussed both of these films.

"... fuck the entire DC Universe that they're building. Fuck Wonder Woman. Fuck Justice League. Fuck the Flash. Fuck Aquaman. Fuck all of it. [....] I'm through with that whole series. I said I was done after Batman v Superman, and I relented, because Suicide Squad looked different."

Yeah... um... so... here we are.

Wonder Woman, needless to say, is a movie I did not intend to go see. It's a movie I did not want to go see, not because I hate women (sorry to disappoint you all, you valiant keyboard warriors), nor because of that stupid promotion Alamo theaters ran down in Austin, but because... well because look at the fucking track record for this series. LOOK AT IT! See the decrepitudes, the depths, the vile nilotic rites that this series of films has fallen to. Batman v. Superman was a fucking atrocity cast forth onto screen, so bad that when Suicide Squad came out and somehow contrived to be even worse, I had entirely run out of superlatives and hyperboles to throw at it. I don't know how many times I've had to repeat this old saw, but I do not go and see movies for the express purpose of entertaining you all with my pain. I go see them because I want to. And when a series has disappointed me, hell has pissed in my face as much as this one has, I stop fucking going!!! What other rational course of action is there to take, I ask you? I said those things above because I meant them, every word, with every fiber of my being. And yet...

I don't read reviews before going to see a movie. To do so would be to prejudice my opinion after all. But for some movies, the hype is unavoidable, as reviews bury the internet at large, and so it was for Wonder Woman. Even then, I would not have relented on this one, save that several friends of mine, foremost among them Captain Corvidae (yarrrrr) insisted that this one was worth going to. Corvidae has previously been subjected, on my account, to films such as High-Rise, Under the Skin, Leviathan, and Suicide Squad (please bear this in mind if I should ever turn up the victim of a gruesome wheat thresher accident), and so I felt that it was not a suggestion that I could refuse.

And so, having now wasted enough of everyone's time with preamble and explanations, I shall get to the question at hand. Having violated all semblance of consistency, to say nothing of common sense, and having gone to see the latest DC movie in direct defiance of all of the horrific acts of cinematic blight that preceded it, was it any good?

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...

... yeah. Yeah it was.

Wonder Woman is, against all odds, a good movie. Indeed, in some ways it is a very good one, but the mere fact that the word 'good' can be applied to it in any form is something of a miracle in and of itself. To say I expected little from this film is... well I mean scroll back up and read those quotes, for I meant every word at the time that I wrote or said them, but despite the cynicism that DC and Warner Brothers has spent the last year or so inspiring within me, this film actually managed to produce something, dare I say... fun. Something creative and enjoyable and interesting. Of course the mere fact that the movie posits a setting in which fun and adventure and interest is possible makes it a tremendous step up from its predecessors, but rather than recap how terrible those movies were, let us discuss what Wonder Woman, miraculously, does right. And for that, let us begin with a woman named Patty Jenkins.

Who is Patty Jenkins? Well I assume the majority of you know this already, but she is a film director, or at least was a film director way back in 2003, when she wrote and directed a Charlize Theron film called Monster, which Roger Ebert called the best film of that year, and which won Theron her only Oscar (to date). Monster was a legitimately great film, and so I can't quite figure out why, in its aftermath, Patty Jenkins vanished without a trace, save for a handful of television episodes of shows I didn't watch, and a 2011 Lifetime Original Movie about breast cancer (be still, my beating heart). Whatever the reason, she has returned from the negative zone (or wherever) to helm Wonder Woman, and thank God she did because without a strong director at the helm, this film risked becoming yet another stamp on DC's frequent shopper's card at the House of Shitty Fucking Movies (franchising opportunities coming soon). Though I promised myself that this review would not simply turn into another list of all the ways that Suicide Squad and Batman v. Superman sucked, this biggest differentiator between this film and those is simply the fundamental mechanics of how it is shot, with Wonder Woman taking place in a world with a vibrant color palate and artful, carefully-selected shots, designed to frame characters in the act of doing awesome things. The design, the cinematography, the sound design and score and all the other mechanistic elements of the film are all top notch, from the sun-dappled cliffs and beaches of the Amazonian island of Themiskyra, to the mud and trenches of the Western Front. There's no muddied darkness, no oversaturated color-leach, no desperate attempt to make the art design beat the audience over the head with how grim and gritty everything is. Instead, we get a movie that is actually... god forbid, fun and interesting to look at, a development so revolutionary, that I assume that the flywheels over at Warner Brothers will spend the next fifteen years trying to figure out how to prevent it from ever happening again. And yet this shying away from over-grim, over-gritty bro-douchery comes despite the fact that the movie is set in the middle of World War 1, a setting movies have traditionally avoided because of how unrelievedly grim everything is. As a result, Wonder Woman is one of the very small number of WWI films in existence that actually have something interesting to look at.

But what are we getting to look at, overall? Well among other things, action. Badass action, by any conceivable standard. One of the reasons I originally looked so favorably on Man of Steel was the tremendous scale of the thing, the Olympian action that covered for all of the misfiring story-beats and busted characters. While Wonder Woman (wisely) doesn't try to match the scale of that film, it does, within the bounds of its universe, manage to elicit the same feelings of awe and... well... wonder, that the aforementioned movie did. Unlike the choppy, badly-paced action of Batman v. Superman, Wonder Woman uses a much more traditional format, including two absolutely standout action sequences, one a pitched battle between Amazons and German soldiers on a sun-draped beach, the other a set-piece, operatic assault across the tangled ruin of No-Man's Land and the lethal maze of the trench lines, a sequence that includes Wonder Woman caving an armored car in with her fists and taking out a sniper by decapitating a belfry. The direction for these sequences is a little heavy on the slow-mo, but as with Snyder's own 300, all that is forgiven if the scenes being focused upon are sufficiently awesome. And they are.

And then there's the cast, and for once Warner Brothers and the rest have outdone themselves in getting the right people for the job. Casting has always been Marvel's strength and DC's bane, but this time we have Chris Pine, Captain Kirk himself, as Captain Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman's partner in war, her introduction to the wider world, and her... love interest? Maybe? Whatever definition we use, Pine is absolutely spot-perfect in this role, as he has the Robert Downey Jr. skill of being able to disarm a scene or line that might sound insufferably cheesy through a combination of roguish charm and utter sincerity. The dynamic between his character and Wonder Woman is deft and nuanced, with just enough tension, romantic and otherwise, to keep everything interesting, while imparting his character with motives, skills, and interest of his own enough to stand alongside the main event (something, I need not remind you all, which is fantastically rare for the usually-female characters that typically populate this archetype in these sorts of films).

The rest of the cast does not let the side down either, including as it does the incomparable David Thewlis as a member of Parliament who seeks to bypass the red tape of the war office by means of Wonder Woman, and a host of excellent character actors as Wonder Woman's squad, including French actor Saïd Taghmaoui (whom I first met in the staggeringly-good 1995 Mathieu Kassovitz film La Haine), playing a Moroccan con-artist and womanizer straight out of the Casablanca playbook (upon watching Wonder Woman throw a man through a wall, he comments that he is simultaneously terrified and aroused). Veteran Spanish actress Elena Anaya (you might remember her from Justin Timberlake's 'Sexyback' video) gets to ham things up as the frazzled, obsessive "Doctor Poison" (there's a Golden Age of comics name for you). The biggest surprise, though, is the Amazons themselves. Jenkins apparently lobbied to have their ranks filled, not by supermodels (as many films would have), but by towering Olympic athletes, all rippling muscle and... forgive me... Amazonian statures. These woman may or may not be great actors (my guess is not, given the limited lines they get), but they have the physicality of warrior-women down cold, and their stage presence and bearing is such that I was actually disappointed when the film left Themiscyra for a trip into the relatively sedate world of The Great War. Studded among the Amazons are real actors, including Gladiator's Connie Nielson as Queen Hippolyta, and none other than Robin Freaking Wright, Princess Buttercup herself (whom I hadn't seen in so long that I mistook her for Patricia Arquette), playing General Antiope, commander of the Amazon army. Robin Wright is a goddamn national treasure, and this, this role right here is why, as she takes her limited time on screen and turns it into rapturous badassery, culminating in the sorts of slow-mo action money shots usually reserved for scantily-dressed characters (male or female) in Zach Snyder films.

Things Havoc disliked: In case my above ravings was not clear enough, Wonder Woman is a good movie, and that alone is a hell of an achievement, given the pedigree from whence it was born. But is it a great movie, as some reviewers have been quick to pronounce? In a word... no. No, I'm afraid it's not.

Why not? Well, there's a couple of reasons, really, but the biggest one is front and center, and it's Wonder Woman herself, played in this case by Israeli actress Gal Gadot. I admit, I didn't expect much out of Gadot here, not after the dismal work she did in Batman v. Superman, and I admit as well that she easily outdoes that performance here, with one that has a number of things going for it. She has the look down pat, the presence, the physicality, everything but the acting itself which is... just not very good. It's not awful, mind you, but Gadot is just unrelievedly wooden throughout much of the film, only occasionally rising to the level of her co-stars. I appreciate that it's not easy acting in a language which isn't your native tongue (trust me, I know), but the end result is what it is, and it gives the movie's quieter scenes, the ones where the direction and action can't wallpaper over the movie's flaws, a decidedly B-grade feel to them.

There's also, of all things, the CGI, which, for some reason, is markedly sub-par, enough that it gets distracting more than once. How in the world this could happen on a $150,000,000 epic superhero film backed by several of the largest companies in Hollywood, I have no idea, but the CG work (as distinct from the practical effects) looks downright embarrassingly bad at points, with the digital stand-ins for Wonder Woman and her troops moving like marionettes from a mid-2000s throwaway film. Amber Hirsch, the film's VFX director, has a decent enough pedigree behind her (albeit mostly on shit movies), so I have no idea what the problem here was. But while Marvel's films have had their occasional slip-ups (one particular sequence involving Captain America in the climactic sequence of the Avengers comes to mind), this one looks so consistently awful that you can actually see the seam between the crappy CG effects and the decent practical ones. That's not something you ever want the audience to be able to pay attention to.

But overall, the problems with Wonder Woman aren't so much giant glaring things, it's small things, minor things, things that would normally, in the course of affairs not come up in a review like this, but which I must bring up here because there are so damn many of them. I'm talking about continuity mistakes, editing gaffes, minor (and less minor) errors in scripting, dialogue, and general research that point to a significant lack of attention to detail somewhere along the line during the production of this film. One of the aforementioned battle sequences, the brilliant one between the German soldiers and the Amazon warriors, involves a German warship joining the battle only to be mysteriously sunk, offscreen, by means we never get to see. The various trips that our heroes make to German bases and aerodromes involve innumerable errors of basic continuity and logic, with anachronistic weapons and equipment scattered about, or background material written in the wrong languages (duty rosters for German pilots written in French, for instance). And speaking of languages, one scene midway through the film has Wonder Woman identifying a captured German document as having been cyphered in a combination of "Sumerian and Ottoman", the writers being apparently completely unaware that Sumerian is a nigh-untranslatable language which has been dead for 5,000 years, one which the author of the document has no way of knowing, and 'Ottoman' doesn't exist, the language of the Ottoman Empire having been called 'Turkish' since its inception through to today. This isn't a pulp movie like Captain America or the Rocketeer, where such things could be hand-waved away as unimportant, the tone of Wonder Woman is reverent and earnest to a fault, attempting to use its WWI setting to tell a serious, mythic tale about the nature of war and the human urge to violence, and this many basic mistakes, ones that could have been corrected by a single line of dialogue or a simple editing alteration speaks to a general research failure on the part of the studio, the crew, or both. It's not that any one of these issues are major problems. It's that the sum total of them makes the film look sloppy, and when you consider the staggering lengths that epic film series like the MCU or the Lord of the Rings have gone to to produce a holistic, internally consistent universe, all this serves to show me is how far DC still has to go, even with a good movie under their belts at last.

Final thoughts:   And lest I render things murky with my criticism, that is exactly what Wonder Woman is, a Good film, a Very Good film at parts, one that clearly aspires to be a Great film but does not get there, held back by a limited leading actress, and generally sub-par crew and production work across the board. It is, at long last, a worthy inclusion in the ranks of Superhero staples from DC, a film on-par, qualitatively, with the second-tier offerings from Marvel such as Ant-Man or Thor 2. Like those movies before it, Wonder Woman, almost miraculously, has earned my seal of approval, and though it was not good enough to get me to re-think my policy on the DC-cinematic universe overall (the Justice League movie can go fuck itself, as far as I'm concerned), it has forced me to relent somewhat, in that I will see the inevitable Wonder Woman sequel, and will... consider the other standalone films that they have for me, though I still feel that the series has a long way to go before they can be spoken of alongside their august competition.

But... of course... there's another factor at work here, one that should in all fairness be addressed as well, which is that even with all of the positives and negatives I have summed up , the fact is that this is not just another Superhero movie, of the sort we have seen before, not simply another Ant-Man or Thor 2, but Wonder Woman, a movie that comic fans, particularly female ones, have been waiting to see realized for generations. It is a mainstream, A-list, multi-hundred-million-dollar superhero epic about a world-famous female superhero made by a female director for an audience that is expected to be in no small part female. And as such, while I stand by every line of my review above, and while I reject, in totality, all suggestions that I or other male critics have either no right or no capacity to review such a work, it is true that this is a movie made, in no small part, for another group of people entirely. It is a movie made for my sister, no stranger to movies like these, who saw the film and spent an hour on the phone with me describing nuances of shot selection and editorial decisions that stood out as obvious to her, but were entirely transparent to me. It is a movie made for Corvidae, whom all of you already know, who praised this movie in rapturous terms while I was out of the country, who loved it start to finish to the point where she volunteered to see it again alongside me, despite a schedule full of nightmares, and all of the awful, awful movies she has seen at my instigation.

It is a movie made for my mother. The original Wonder Woman. Who has no use for superhero movies in general, but who once spent every Halloween as Wonder Woman, and who went to see this movie for her own reasons, and loved it. When I asked her why, the main reason she gave me was not the action nor the fight sequences nor even the characters and story, but the fact that, for the first time in all her years of seeing movies like this, she could tell instantly that this one was directed by a woman, that it had a "woman's perspective", one I didn't even notice, but that she identified instantly. She loved this movie, because for the first time it was about a character she actually cared about, made by someone who wanted her, her specifically, to enjoy it.

I stand by everything that I have said about Wonder Woman, and about the wider DC universe. And I would be lying if I said I thought the fact that this movie is about a female superhero, about the female superhero, made these other opinions better than mine. But they are not worse than mine either, and the fact that this movie managed to cause people who hated the entire genre sing its praises, or become excited about future possibilities of future films from this source, all while still producing a film that I thought legitimately good, is something that deserves recognition. I did not regard Wonder Woman as a great film, but there are many, many others who did. And insofar as it's ever possible to be objective about film quality, maybe it is.

All I know, ultimately, is that Wonder Woman is a movie that has justified its existence. That is no small feat, when one regards all of its predecessors, both in and out of the official DC cinematic universe (consider Catwoman or Elektra), that did not. It is a film that I enjoyed watching, and that some people loved. Does this mean that the DC universe has finally found its footing and been placed on the right trajectory?  Maybe. But if it does not, then at least those who loved it will have one film they can treasure forever.

And if it does, then it would not be the first time in history that, when all hope was lost, Wonder Woman saved the world.

Final Score:  7/10

Next Time:  Three films you should see before Blockbuster season REALLY begins...

Suicide Squad

Alternate Title:  A Tale of Two Studios

One sentence synopsis:    An elite task force comprised of assorted supervillains is set loose to stop an ancient evil from destroying the world.


Things Havoc liked: ...

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Er... Things Havoc Liked?

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...so... let's talk about Batman v Superman for a moment.

Batman v. Superman sucked. There's really no other way to put it. It was a terrible goddamn film, a useless waste of two, hell three of DC's most important and popular superheros, a maudlin, ugly, disaster, which I hated with every fiber of my being. It had a stupid, needlessly-byzantine plot that made no sense once strung together and was cored around a jar of urine, a directing style that eschewed everything fun from the first movie in favor of a bitter polemical rant against anyone who enjoys superheroes, movies, or life, and a central premise which ultimately pitted a depressed headcase against a roid-raging dudebro for eight freaking minutes before resolving its primary conflict with one of the stupidest contrivances I have ever seen in all my years of moviegoing. I hated Batman v. Superman, and I vented my hate for it in these very pages, denouncing it with all of the biblical savagery that I could muster before announcing that I was rejecting the entire DC cinematic universe wholesale, and that whatever they wanted to do next, I would leave to others to see.

So, obviously, that didn't happen, because here we are. But the reason that didn't happen is more complex than my being a sucker for buzz or a slick trailer (though it definitely does involve those things). The reason that I, in defiance of my previous ban, went to see Suicide Squad, was because it looked... well different I suppose. The rumors that came out of its production that things were not working properly and that DC had decided to re-cut the film to be more like Deadpool were certainly concerning, but it's not like the notion that DC has been having problems making their movies work was a new one, and frankly, I liked Deadpool. With Batman v. Superman, DC's filmmaking seemed to have entered a tailspin, and perhaps ripping off the closest Marvel film in reach (even if it's not an MCU one) was not the worst way to try and pull out of it. Though haters and trolls may say otherwise, I am not against DC in their efforts to replicate Marvel's success. If I was, I would not have stuck with them after such disasters as Green Lantern or Batman v Superman. And so that, combined with the oddball nature of the trailers, the rumors of re-writes, the pedigree of the filmmakers involved, and the fact that several of my stalwart viewing companions expressed some interest in seeing this one, all combined to get me to reneg on the vow I had made not a couple of months before, and go see DC's attempt to get something right this time.

You learn things, seeing a movie a week. Things you might not otherwise have ever known. You learn which actors grate on you like nails on a chalkboard, and which ones are good enough that you'll go see anything if they're in it. You learn how to read between the lines of a teaser or a full length trailer to anticipate what movies have real potential and which ones are just the marketing department desperately trying to cover a flop. You learn that highly-praised indie movies can suck, and that the difference between a good, stupid brainless action movie and a bad one is that the good one isn't as stupid or as brainless as it initially appears to be. Lessons hard bought, the lot of them, some from the collective gestalt of a hundred movies seen, and some from a single moment's revelation after only one. But in all the years and all the reviews that I've done, one of the greatest surprises I've ever had came to me last Tuesday, as I watched this movie, and I learned that Batman v. Superman, a movie I hated with every fiber of my being and condemned in language appropriate for a war crime, was actually the best movie that DC would make in the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Sixteen.

Batman v. Superman was bad, believe me, you all heard me rant about its decrepitude and ugliness, but Suicide Squad is, contrary to all reason, logic, and the laws of physics, not only worse, but much worse a movie so bad as to defy description, one of the worst films that has ever been made by anyone for any purpose. Not only worse than its predecessor, but worse than every touchstone of failure that this genre has ever experienced, worse than Catwoman, worse than Barb Wire, worse than Electra and Amazing Spiderman, Batman & Robin and Superman IV, worse than every Fantastic Four movie ever made, the worst superhero film ever committed to celluloid or digital media, and quite possibly the worst movie I have ever seen as a part of this project. A bad movie may bore or annoy you, a terrible film may fill you with frothing rage, but Suicide Squad is so bad as to be numbing, a shell-shock-inducing calamity of a film that left me struggling to form complete sentences. Not bad like Green Lantern, not a sneering idiocy like Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad is a systematic, comprehensive failure of basic storytelling, film-making, and human endeavor from start to finish, a movie which, if the Gods are just, will live on in the annals of man as one of the handful of films synonymous with anti-quality, standing in company with giants like Battlefield Earth, Heaven's Gate, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. And yet to scream and rend garments over this eldritch cataclysm of a movie is not sufficient to come to grips with its decrepitude. Instead we must look at what happened and attempt, as might an arson investigator, to determine where it all went wrong.

Movies fail for many reasons, from bad direction to bad acting, but the one that seems to kill the majority of them, and the one that sits like a naked singularity at the heart of the issues afflicting Suicide Squad is the writing, writing so unremittingly ham-handed, so overwrought, so clunky and shapeless that no movie and no director could possibly survive its advent. Lines that could not ever have been a good idea, not even in the vacuum of a table-read, are littered throughout the film like land mines, waiting for a hapless actor to tread upon them. Moments where the cast is asked to exposit actions that the audience has just seen take place, or to tearfully recite some kind of supposedly heartwarming "bonding" dialogue, despite having no setup whatsoever for that statement, could not have been performed satisfactorily by anyone, let alone the flywheels that occupy the majority of this film. And yet to simply call this the result of a bad script or a hack writer is, once again, not sufficient, because this script was written by none-other than writer-director David Ayer, one of the very best filmmakers working, a man who also wrote and directed such films as Fury, Training Day, and End of Watch, a man who knows how to both create and realize not just good but excellent movies. So how could this script have gotten so far away from him as to produce something this bad?

Simple. Ayer wanted to make Suicide Squad. DC wanted to make Guardians of the Galaxy.

You see, for all the rumors about this film being re-cut to take advantage of Deadpool's success, the end result is about as far from Deadpool as it is from Citizen Kane, if only because it has no, and I repeat no humor in it, not even a semi-decent one-liner. What it does have is a desperate attempt to replicate Marvel's "bad people form a surrogate family" dynamic from Guardians of the Galaxy, an attempt so brazen that multiple characters describe the rest of their team as "family" despite having never once evidenced behavior that would support that. While I can understand DC trying to do something, anything to capture even a small piece of the magic Marvel has been using to craft their cinematic universe, the result is nothing but further evidence of just how difficult a line Marvel walked when it came to Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians had, among other things, a cast that was both razor-sharp and incredibly strongly defined, even with one member a mute (essentially), one a cartoon, and another purposely written around the fact that the actor playing him could not act. And yet even with those things, Guardians only managed to make their movie work by armoring it with a thick layer of snark and self-awareness, bending over backwards to gain the audience's permission to be cheesy and schmaltzy when it counted. Suicide Squad, like the DC universe it comes from, does none of those things, attempting to drop a "found family" dynamic directly on top of a collection of gaping-mouthed douche-hats without a single redeeming feature between them, all in the middle of a universe that has quite clearly evidenced its bilious contempt for such notions as human warmth or joy. To say that the result is a tonal clash is like saying that the Titanic was a boating accident.

The actors caught in this suck-vortex suffer different fates, mostly in line with their abilities. Better actors like Will Smith (playing team-lead Deadshot) or Viola Davis (playing arch-strategist Amanda Waller), manage to survive by more or less retreating into their established personas, strong enough in Smith's case that he can simply turn his role into "another Will Smith outing" and get away with it, while Davis switches her emotions off and forces her way through the material as though none of it matters to her in the slightest (this is the correct move, lest I sound critical). Basically everyone else goes down with the ship, either because they are bad actors, because they are stuck in a bad role, or both. Margot Robbie, trapped within the role of Harley Quinn, is one such tragic victim, as her character is simultaneously drill-bit-annoying and Westboro-Baptist-stupid, to the point where she sits and pouts over events that both she and everyone else within a million light years knows have not actually taken place. Joel Kinnaman and Jai Courtney, the Tweedle-Dipshit twins of bad action movies, have no chance at all, and consequently fail just as miserably as they always do, as does newcomer Karen Fukuhara, whom the filmmakers task with playing Katana without evidencing the common decency required to give her a character, a backstory, or even a viable reason to be present at all. The same is true of the other eighteen or so members of the Suicide Squad, each of whom get a generous nine seconds to establish themselves in, nicely conveying the fact that the movie has too many goddamn characters to try and pull off an ensemble piece, particularly since we have never seen any of these characters before now, and rapidly don't want to see them ever again.

And then there's the Joker, oh god is there ever the Joker. Not that we get to see him a lot, for contrary to what the trailers told us, Jared Leto gets all of ten minutes of screentime, is not the main villain of the movie, and in fact, has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot, the actual villain, or any goddamn thing. And yet those ten minutes of facetime that Leto gets are more than enough to tell me everything I need to know about this new and updated version of the Joker, namely that he is catpiss-annoying on the level that Jessie Eisenberg's Urine-obsessed Lex Luthor was. The character looks and acts like what would happen if the entire marketing department at Hot Topic were fused together in a bizarre transporter accident, a disaffected hipster affecting pathologies because the alternative would be "conformist". I've long suspected that Jared Leto is an insufferable human being, but he plays this character like he's trying to confirm all of the worst rumors ever spread about him, and the camera lingers on his gold teeth and carefully-selected "gang" tattoos as though the cameraman was bribed by a cabal of his sworn enemies. Insofar as one should hate the villain of a movie (even though Joker is, I repeat, not the villain here), his character is something of a success. Insofar as one should also wish to continue watching the villain, much less so.

All of this seems to take place in a world devoid of anything but grunting shitheels packing heavy weapons and claiming membership in various elite military formations who would, in reality, piss themselves laughing at the prospect of inducting any one of them as a member before kicking their asses just for the fun of it. The film has the customary DC trait of causing major cities to be destroyed without consequence or even concern by the cast as a whole (I speak here of the US government, not the Suicide Squad), only this time, instead of making said destruction at least interesting to see, the movie is so uninterested in the prospect of showing us something interesting that it cuts away from it after a few desultory montage shots. The plot holes are many and cavernous, of course, including a main villain who can apparently defeat half the US army and shrug off direct hits from cruise missiles, but is taken out by a bomb so puny that people standing twenty feet away with no cover are not even knocked over. But the plot holes, as well as the knots that it ties itself into (to the point where I couldn't tell you what the actual plan was for using the Suicide Squad), seem less like carelessness or even stupidity this time than they do the result of complete indifference. The plot of Suicide Squad makes no sense because, on a fundamental level, nobody gave a shit about it, certainly nobody involved in its actual creation. Whether this was always the case, or whether it's simply a matter of the dramatic and brutal editing done to the film in desperation by a frightened studio, the result is a movie where characters find convenient binders labelled "Top Secret Information", whose contents they apparently absorb in fifteen seconds, all while major MacGuffins like a set of sub-dermal explosives injected into the Squad Members to keep them in line, cease to and resume working at what appears to be arbitrary moments, and characters that have been established as being immune to gunfire and rocket strikes not minutes before are suddenly felled by a baseball bat.

Final thoughts:   David Ayer, I wish to remind you all, is a man of talent. Zack Snyder, despite what many people believe, is a man of talent. A good many of the other people involved in this movie, from cinematographer Roman Vasyanov (End of Watch, Fury), to composer Steven Price (Gravity, Fury) are men of talent, as are members of the cast, both of this film and of its predecessor. And yet all that these men of talent managed to do in this case was to produce one of the most staggering misfires of modern times, a movie so bad that I struggle to find a single point to recommend it with. Had I not expended the bulk of my rage at DC with Batman v Superman, this review might have consisted of nothing but incoherent screaming, but as it stands, for all the efforts I've made to diagnose what happened here, I still feel rather like the explorer surveying the blasted ruins of a lost civilization and attempting to guess at what unfathomable catastrophe overtook it.

It should be no surprise that after watching Batman v Superman, swearing off DC forever, relenting, and being presented with this movie, that I intend to see the error of my ways and return to my policy of bothering only with superhero films attached to the MCU. But to write off Suicide Squad as nothing more than a bad entry in a series does not do justice to the transcendent majesty of its failing. This is a film that, by sheer awfulness of writing and acting and plotting, manages to be physically uncomfortable to watch, not because its subject matter is objectionable nor because its cinematography is frenetic, but because one is embarrassed to be watching tripe of this grade, both for yourself and for those forced to participate in it. This is a film destined to be remembered, by me at least, and likely by everyone else forced to see it, a film that will be recalled in hushed whispers around quiet corners of bars, as men grasp glasses of stiff whisky with white knuckles and speak tremblingly of a film they once saw whose gaping void of quality could extinguish the very stars.

 

Final Score:  1/10

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Alternate Title:  You Either Die a Hero...

One sentence synopsis:    Manipulated by the evil Lex Luthor, Batman and Superman clash over contrasting ideologies to crime fighting.


Things Havoc liked: In a world filled with internet outrage culture, and the raging anger of fanboys galore, 2013's Man of Steel was one of the most contentious movies I have ever seen cross the cinema. I have had multiple violent arguments over the qualities of that film, watched grown men devolve into fistfights over the question of whether it was a faithful adaptation of Superman, or a disgusting betrayal of all that is right and good in the world. As those who remember my review can attest to, I liked the film, for its visual splendor, for its iconography, for the titanomachy-grade action that was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I liked it despite many glaring flaws as to tone and characterization and unfulfilled promises from the best trailer I have ever seen, but I liked it nonetheless. And yet in retrospect, the vitriol directed at Man of Steel by the many, many individuals who did not like it, not one little bit, served to taint the entire enterprise in my mind looking back. Perhaps my opinions are more malleable than they should be, or perhaps I was wrong initially and came slowly to see the light, but while I never came to hate Man of Steel, its star has definitely dimmed in the years that have passed from that moment to this one. With the raging hatred of those who abominated the first movie undimmed, and indeed increased, as we closed on the release date of its sequel, I decided to make a concerted effort to be objective with this one, above and beyond my customary disposal of preconceptions. Come Hell or High Water, there was a large segment of the internet that was going to hate this movie, and I refused to let that color my impression of Warner Brothers' go-for-broke attempt to have The Avengers' lunch.

Things Havoc disliked: All in vain...

If I have skipped over the "things I liked" section, understand that it is not because there was nothing in this movie that I liked. There was. I liked Jeremy Irons' turn as Alfred Pennyworth, a performance that is less rooted in Michael Caine and more in Michael Gough. I liked small touches that the movie introduces almost as throwaways, such as the fact that Batman, in this movie, eschews Christian-Bale-voice in favor of an actual vocoder. I liked Holly Hunter's turn as a wisecracking senator from Kentucky who chairs a senate committee charged with clarifying Superman's legal status. I even liked the effrontery with which Zack Snyder chose to hypothesize, rather than tone down, the christological parallels that the movie is riven with when it comes to Superman, explicitly including sequences where worshipful throngs of people kneel before his advent as though he were the second coming, while desperate encyclicals from the Vatican and other religious leaders declare that Superman is not actually Jesus Christ incarnated. The Christ parallels with Superman are inevitable, and were enormously thick in Man of Steel, but by calling them out explicitly, Snyder turns the subject around into a discussion of how people might actually react if an invulnerable alien god representing good and righteousness were to descend upon the planet. I liked this and all the other things I have cited, and yet I did not lump them all together within the "Things Havoc Liked" section, as is my usual wont. And I did not do that, because they are all ultimately irrelevant next to a single, impenetrable fact.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, is a piece of shit.

Not merely a piece of shit, but a huge, steaming, foul-odored piece of intestinal filth, enormous in scope and terrifying in impact. We live in an age of cinematic superheroes, not merely the shining lights of the MCU, but also the other great movies that have traveled in its wake, the Deadpools and X-men and all of the rest. And yet, confronted with the ranks of angels that have graced our screens for a decade and more, what has DC, Warner Brothers, and Zack Snyder, the man I have defended for years and years, done? They have produced the cinematic equivalent of a war crime, a movie that is and was and will remain one of the most cataclysmic misfires in modern history. For all the patience I have laid upon this collection of would-be dignitaries, forgiving Green Lantern, forgetting Catwoman, defending Man of Steel in the face of withering criticism, this is how I am repaid? This putrid abomination of a comic book film? This wholesale, willful negation of not just superheros but film as a medium and narrative as a concept? This is what they presented to me, in the expectation that I would lay praise at their feet and number them among my sainted elect? This was truly the best they could do?

Well they have sown the air, dear readers. Let them reap the whirlwind.

Batman v Superman is a disaster on every level of filmmaking I can cite and several others still waiting to be invented, a calamity that recalls parallels to the Hindenburg disaster, before which a critic and cinephile such as myself can do nothing but weep and lament the humanity that was lost in devising and producing it. It is a sour, bitter thing, a vindication to all of those who insisted to me that I was wrong to defend Watchmen, wrong to defend 300, wrong to defend Man of Steel, because they all led straight to this twisted, broken failure of imagination, creativity, and thought. No one, no one touched by this enterprise escapes it unscathed, certainly not Henry Cavill, whom I appreciated in the last movie for his earnestness and physicality, but who here has become a mopey, depressed un-character, shunting about almost robotically from scene to scene, as if he has read the script of the film and knows that nothing awaits him here but bitterness and ash. Superman is a character designed to embody our best natures, optimism, strength, courage and justice, and if Zack Snyder sought to do nothing more than piss on all four concepts through this portrayal, he succeeded. Ben Affleck meanwhile, who is an Oscar-winning director in his own right of great skill and talent, plays Batman like a man under the influence of several particularly dangerous steroid-PCP cocktails, a grunting, sweating dude-bro whose plotline through the movie is possibly the single stupidest plotline I've ever seen for a major superhero, and I remember both Spiderman 3 and Superman 4. In grotesque violation of the core tenets of the character, Snyder turns a hero famous for his legendarily inflexible prohibition against killing, into a cowled version of the Punisher, who slaughters his enemies with machine guns while obsessing over the possibilities of murdering Superman for no reason at all. I remember reading Frank Miller's All-Star Batman & Robin, a comic in which Batman referred to himself as "The Goddamn Batman", gloried over breaking his enemies' spines, and forced a small child to scavenge sewer rats for food, and this movie is still the worst version of Batman I have ever seen realized in any form, a character assassination so complete that no actor, be he Affleck, Keeton, or Lawrence freaking Olivier, could possibly have salvaged it.

And yet even with all of this, Affleck and Cavill are probably the best parts of the movie, for the true depths of awfulness on display here belong not to them but to Jesse Eisenberg, who is so staggeringly miscast as Lex Luthor that I considered seriously the possibility that the entire movie was arranged by a conspiracy of his sworn enemies. There have been many versions of Luther over the years, from Kevin Spacey and Gene Hackman's goofy versions to the more serious take Clancy Brown put on the character in the Justice League animated series. But Eisenberg, presented with infinite possibilities, is absolutely unable to make his mind up, switching motivations at least a dozen times throughout the movie, in some cases in mid-scene, from an arrogant tech-god in the (inevitable) Steve Jobs style, to an abused child lashing out at his dead father, to an atheistic terrorist desirous of literally killing God, to a mad scientist seeking the coolest toys, to a twisted harbinger of some terrible threat yet to come, to another thing and another and another. Eisenberg has no character except annoyance, no standard traits except stupidity, and his "evil plan" is not only one of the stupidest I have ever seen committed to film (a key element of his plans involves a jar of his own piss), but is additionally layered with redundancies, elementary mistakes, continuity-shattering plot holes, and utterly baffling decisions not just from him but from everyone he interacts with for any length of time, be they hero or not. But for all of his many, many flaws, Eisenberg's Luthor is at least occasionally entertaining to look at, if only from the sense that baffling stupidity may arise at any time while he is on the screen. The same cannot be said of Gal Gadot, an unknown Israeli actress and model who is called upon to finally, after infinite screaming by comic fans, to portray the most famous super-heroine in comics, Wonder Woman. She sucks. Gadot cannot act to save her life, not that the screenplay does her favors in this regard, relegating her to a handful of cameo appearances so nebulous that I seriously mistook her for a different comic character altogether. Shoehorned into the movie for no reason other than franchise maintenance, she has nothing to do with anything, and the tiny collection of scenes she appears in, either as Diana Prince or as Wonder Woman herself are nothing more than cheap fan-service, hoping to keep people hanging on until next year, when DC finally intends to release the Wonder Woman movie they proclaimed to be impossible so many times.

And yet, to simply call this or that actor's performance bad or even terrible does not even come close to the baffling anti-thought that permeates this movie like a miasma, afflicting everything from the derivative, over-bombastic Hans Zimmer score to the godawful cinematography and world design, to the plot and effects, which are so lackluster that they would not have appeared out of place in a mid-00s X-men spinoff. One of the few undeniable high-points of Man of Steel was the thunderous scale of the thing, a movie in which Olympian gods vented destruction and wrath upon their enemies in staggering, awe-inspiring spectacle. And yet of all the things from the original film to discard, the filmmakers chose not the fractured storytelling, not the stupefying plot contrivances, not the mutilation of beloved, century-old characters, but the sense of wonder that they had managed, against all odds, to produce. The action in Batman v Superman is almost uniformly some of the most boring action I have seen from a superhero film, a factor not helped by the "big bad" that our heroes must punch repeatedly being the laziest rendition of seminal Superman villain Doomsday that I've ever seen. The movie's version looks like someone crossed a troll from Lord of the Rings with The Scorpion King, and has CGI that would have been laughed off the set of Catwoman. There is no sense of scale, not to the final fight nor to the movie as a whole, as most of the titular Batman v Superman fighting takes place in an environment of Kryptonite gas, turning the entire thing into a battle between a meatheaded, drunken bully, and a depressive head-case who just wants the entire thing to stop. Not one fight has a sense of interest, of stakes, of personal agenda or emotion or even wow factor, but then neither do any of the dialogue or exposition scenes either, so why should I be surprised. This includes an extended sequence in the middle of the film where Wonder Woman is given a thumb drive containing top secret information from Luther's corporation, which turns out to be a series of trailers for future DC continuity movies. Which she watches. For five minutes. Yes, that means the movie stops dead in its tracks for five whole minutes so that it can advertise other movies to you that have not yet come out. I know some people think Marvel congratulates itself too much, but at least they usually save their ads for the next movie until after you have finished watching the current one!

But all of this, all of this, I might have forgiven (might), if it weren't for the final, damning element of this colossal misfire, the fact that the movie is so goddamn ugly. I don't mean ugly in the visual sense, although it absolutely is that, with a visual style that washes out the primary colors these characters are so well known-for into a dour, faded mockery of themselves, shot primarily in what appears to be a Detroit junkyard at night. No, I mean the ugliness of the sensibility that would lead to someone making a movie like this, a movie where Batman is a grotesque caricature of the sort Frank-Miller used in his more militant, crap works such as Holy Terror, a grunting parody of a "real man" who spends his time crossfit training before running out to murder people for no reason other than his own ego. I mean the ugliness required to produce a movie in which Superman, a character so defined by his moral sense that many people consider him boring and arrogant, undergoes an existentialist crisis before picking up the idiot ball and refusing to put it back down. I mean the ugliness and cynicism required to produce a movie ostensibly starring Wonder Woman after literal decades of denying women a place at the table, and then effectively whisking her off-screen like Charlie Brown's football and demanding that we go see another movie next year if we actually want to see her. I am talking here about a movie that reduces Lois Lane to a complete idiot with nothing better to do than find her way into death traps, that turns Lex Luthor into a simpering asshat whining about how unfair it is that people like superheroes, that turns the very notion of catharsis into a cruel joke, and then has the gall to turn around and mock Marvel's films for being too "unrealistic". I am talking about a movie that is ugly, nihilistic, and cruel, not merely in its worldview but in its active actions towards fan-base and casual film-goer alike. I am talking about a movie so irredeemably awful that I, comic book fan that I am, instantly wrote off every other movie in the DC canon from here on out, including this year's Suicide Squad. Because if this is the sort of product that the flywheels at DC and Warner Brothers believe is worthy of me and mine, then I suggest that they take a good solid look in the mirror, and then proceed to literally fuck themselves to death.

Final thoughts:     One of the great mysteries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beyond the fact that it exists at all, is the consistent level of quality that it has maintained, such that weaker movies like Iron Man 2/3 or The Hulk still maintain a sense that serious people tried to make a good movie through the best methods they knew. The results are not always excellent (though the majority definitely are), but they are never the sorts of gross insults that a truly awful movie can feel like. But while I generally resist the temptation to describe bad or even terrible movies in such hyperbolic terms as "slaps in the face", Batman v Superman leaves me with little choice, made as it seemingly is by people grasping and jealous of the MCU's success, who could not stop themselves from voiding contempt for all those who supported Marvel in their endeavors instead of indulging in the "grim and gritty realism" that they offer up like offal disguised as ambrosia. As such, what is staggering about this film is not that it is bad, for a whole slew of DC-comics-related failures have adequately prepared me for that possibility, but that its badness comes in forms so ugly and hateful to myself and others, particularly given the fact that I was never a great fan of DC's characters in their comic form, and consequently have no fond childhood memories for them to stomp upon. Consider my rage then a cathartic thing, channeled on behalf of others, whose childhoods were spent between the pages of a Batman or Superman comic, and who have come to see their heroes realized on screen only to be confronted with one of the worst superhero films I have ever seen.

Where this series, for it is explicitly intended as one, goes from here, I cannot say. At time of writing, Batman v Superman did indeed make the hundreds of millions of dollars that superhero movies are wont to, and yet a steep and pronounced drop-off in second-day and second-week receipts point to something more than a handful of highbrow critics raging that their theaters have again been taken over by "teenager" fare. The deep apathy with which this movie was received by a public which may have bad taste but resents being spat upon does not speak well for the cornucopia of DC-comics movies that Warner Brothers has planned for the immediate future. I do not know if the lessons of Batman v Superman can be metabolized by a production unit so debased as to loose it upon us in the first place, and if I'm being entirely honest, I could not care less whether they can or not. Batman v Superman stands as a repudiation of the very reasons why I began this project, a cynical, slimy exercise in contemptible arrogance and shocking stupidity, a movie that hates you for liking superheroes, and hates itself for containing them. A studio capable of producing such a thing is one that I have no intention of supporting further by any means, and thus, in keeping with my stated policy of only going to see movies that I suspect have a chance to prove worthwhile, consider this my preemptive rejection of the entire DC cinematic universe. I do this project for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to let my readers know what films are worth seeing and what ones are not, but there is a limit to even my cinematic fortitude, and in consequence, I am afraid that if you wish to know how the future movies in this series will turn out, you shall all have to find out for yourselves.

And if, in doing so, you discover that the followup movies are nothing but cynical exercises in nihilistic defecation, thinly excused by wild gesticulations towards terms like "gritty realism" and "hardcore", then, in one way at least, I will be able to say that Batman v Superman told me the truth.

 

Final Score:  2.5/10

Next Time:  This film was DC's last hope.  But there is another...

Man of Steel

Alternate Title:  Clash of the Titans

One sentence synopsis:   Superman fights the forces of the genocidal kryptonian, General Zod, who has arrived to wipe out humanity and restore Krypton.

Things Havoc liked:  2006's Superman Returns was a tremendously disappointing film for a large number of reasons, but one scene in particular from it remains etched in my mind. Early on in the film, as Superman flies about the Earth, righting wrongs and saving lives, he encounters a maniac who has bolted a minigun to the roof of a building, and is raining fire down on helpless police below. As Superman lands to confront him, the enraged madman turns the minigun on Superman, firing thousands of rounds into him uselessly, moments before dismounting the gun and firing a pistol at point blank range into Superman's face. We are then treated to a slow motion shot of the handgun bullet bouncing off of Superman's eye. A stupid, throwaway moment of no further consequence? Yes. But it was also a moment (the only moment in that wretched film) wherein I got the sense of grandiose wonder that should come from the titanic, unbridled, raw power of Superman.

So now I'd like you all to imagine a movie comprised entirely of this.

Man of Steel, Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan's take on the flagship character of DC comics, is a thunderous film, in the literal sense. I thought myself no longer capable of being enthralled by pure action any more, not with the man-weeks worth of fights I have seen on the screen, but I was simply wrong, for I have never seen something quite like this movie's unrelenting pace of violence and punishment. The action in this movie, and there is so much of it, is precisely what I think most people missed from Brian Singer's failed version of Superman, action which defines Superman as something utterly alien to this Earth, irreducibly above men, and with villains to match. Every scene, every combination, every single blow of the dozen-odd combats that fill this film is filmed and delivered with such raw force as to jackhammer into the viewer a sense of scale I've rarely if ever encountered in an action movie. Cities burn in this film. They are crushed beneath the forces of the universe itself, as Olympian Gods stride across the world bringing death and ruination to their enemies. A sequence midway through the film where Superman and another Kryptonian engage in a crust-shattering fistfight while under the active fire of tank-killing attack aircraft, or one later where they do not even bother to bat the flying cars raining down on their shoulders out of the air, in favor of bringing skyscrapers down onto one another, are truly like nothing I've ever seen before. There are many films who seek to have an epic feel for their action, generally by self-awarely highlighting one "signature" moment for the audience. No such thing here. The film rains titanic, mythological-scale action down upon the audience in a relentless torrent, drenching us in its sense of scale, and leaving us (or me at least), half-stunned at the revelation, always buried in the back of my mind, of just what this version of Superman is.

And who this new Superman? Why he's Henry Cavill, of 'the Tudors', 'Stardust', and the surprisingly underrated 'Immortals'. Unlike Christopher Reeve, Cavill does not portray two different characters in Clark Kent and Superman, as Superman does not exist when the movie begins, and Clark Kent, like many young men, doesn't even know who he is yet. He certainly looks the part, and if the movie surrounds him with better actors given weightier material, then it is only in keeping with the traditions of the franchise. One better actor is Russell Crowe, playing Jor-El, whose role (for obvious reasons) wanes as the film progresses, but who receives much more material than I expected, including a backstory that ties fairly convincingly in to our villain (more on him later). Another (astonishingly enough) is Kevin Costner, who still doesn't know quite how to deliver a line naturally, but manages to sell himself as Johnathan Kent quite satisfactorily by simply playing an older version of his stock Field-of-Dreams characters from long ago. As this is roughly how Pa Kent is supposed to sound, I'm quite all right with it, and his (surprisingly limited) scenes with the younger Clark actually manage to be downright moving. Diane Lane, as Martha Kent, hits just the right note, as someone long-since used to the odd nature of her son, having made the adjustments necessary to keep going. Standouts among the rest of the cast include Christopher Meloni (the third consecutive movie in which he has strongly impressed me) as a military officer trying desperately to contain the damage the invading Kryptonians are causing, and Lawrence Fishburne in a completely pointless, but still effective role as Perry White.

But the meat of a superhero film is often its villain, in this case General Zod, played by Michael Shannon (of Mud and Boardwalk Empire). I admit, I wasn't fond of his take on Zod at first, not because he failed to live up to Terence Stamp (whom I adore, but was admittedly camping the hell out of the role), but more because he seemed too wooden, his acting style too shallow for the role. But as the film progressed, I must admit, he grew on me, especially as his later appearances (as an older, wearier Zod) took on more of a patina, as it were. The film does give Zod some legitimate background, mad though it might be, and Shannon's screams of Dune-style vengeance notwithstanding, the character is actually fairly restrained, at least most of the time.

I mentioned the action before, buttressed as it is by effects, both visual and audio. The visual effects are seamless, of course, but the design is something to be seen. Kryptonian ships and technology are distinctive and very alien, employing strange, three-dimensional pinforms in place of screens or projectors, and presenting a strong sense of cohesiveness for a world we barely get to see. As to cinematography, Zach Snyder (oddly enough) chose this movie to put down the slow-motion controls, and pick up instead the Firefly-style tracking shots and foreground-background focus switches for his effects shots, a decision I don't pretend to understand, but can't deny the effectiveness of. But of all the various crew elements, it's the music, composed of course by Chrostopher Nolan's pet composer Hans Zimmer, which really drives this film. The soundtrack, particularly the main theme of the piece, is, if anything, even more evocative than John Williams' famous Superman march from thirty+ years ago (yeah, I said it!), and perfectly captures the tone and feel of the film as presented. Indeed, this film might well be Zimmer's strongest work, and given that Zimmer scored (among other things) Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the freaking Lion King, that is not a statement I make lightly.

Things Havoc disliked:  I've always held that it's fair game to criticize a film for being bad, but not for being something other than the perfect film you had in your mind. Movies exist on their own, and it is not reasonable to object because they are not some other, different movie, which may or may not exist. For this reason, I have long rejected criticisms of Superman movies in particular based on nitpicks of setting or plot ("everyone would recognize Clark Kent despite the glasses!") as having missed the point. The premise of a Superman film must be accepted in order to appreciate the film at all, and to do otherwise is the same as objecting to a performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony because it did not have pretty graphics.

But... all that said... this was not the movie I wanted.

I know, I know, I'm a huge hypocrite. Bear with me. This movie had, when the marketing campaigns began, the single most effective movie trailer I can remember seeing, one that instantaneously put this film on my radar as one to not miss. It wisely took several of the strongest elements of the film (Zimmer's score, Crowe, Costner, the pre-Superman life of Clark Kent), and brought them front and center, resulting in a film I could barely wait to see. This is a terrible mindset to walk into a film with, as the movie in your head is almost always (Avengers is one of the only exceptions) going to far exceed the one on the screen. I recognize this, and yet at the same time I can't overlook the major flaws that stood out as I was watching the film. Not details of costuming or physics, for such things are irrelevant, ultimately, but the simple nature of what this film was and what it was not.

Despite the trailers, this movie spends nearly no time at all on characterization, and that, ultimately, is the decision I cannot understand. Batman Begins and the Dark Knight (to cite only Nolan's films) knew that superheros are interesting only insofar as they can be characterized properly, and that action, no matter how tremendous, does not sell a film. Nolan and Snyder here not only seem to disagree with that analysis, but actively sought to disprove it, by providing mountains of the finest action I've seen in a decade or more. And yet the shortchanged characterization, mostly told in flashback, makes the film seem highly unbalanced. We gloss over Clark's search for his origins, in favor of plunging directly into the conflict with Zod, pausing only periodically to show us retrospective scenes of Clark and his parents dealing with the inevitable problems that a Kryptonian child would have on Earth. None of these scenes are badly done (an early one showing a young Clark's inability to handle the sensory overload of his own Kryptonian body was particularly creative), but they are not the central focus of the film, and given that all of the great comic book films of the last seven years or so (Iron Man, Avengers, Thor, Batman) understood the need to make such things the central focus of their respective films, I'm baffled as to what these great filmmakers could possibly have been thinking.

Yes there are other issues I could point to. Amy Adams is simply not up to the task of replacing Margot Kidder from the original Superman films, although she wasn't as bad as Kate Bosworth. Several lines, particularly early on, do not land softly, and fall into the category of "obvious expositionary scenes". The Jesus-metaphors for Superman (always an element in his mythology) are a little thick here as well, from details like his age to shot construction at various points. But honestly, none of that matters to me as much as the missed opportunity to give Superman the character weight that many comic readers erroneously assume he is not capable of bearing, the sort of weight the trailers for the movie appeared to promise, and that never was forthcoming.

Final thoughts:    What do you do with a movie like this? A movie made with such consummate skill and sure-handed direction, that you cannot help but stand in awe of the production, whose flaws, major though they may appear to you, are less mistakes, and more active decisions on the part of the filmmakers to focus on this thing and not that one? What is fair here? To condemn the film for not being some other, wholly chimerical movie, that you imagined it might be? Or to forgive the film its flaws despite the fact that there were large sections of it that had you shaking your head and even cringing? How do you represent being simultaneously disappointed and awestruck by a movie? I don't know the answer. I've gone back and forth on this film since the moment I walked out of it, willing at times to give it a five and council against getting one's hopes up, willing at other times to give it an eight and praise it as an superbly-executed film which does precisely what it sets out to do. These are my reviews, yes, that represent my opinion, and yet I've always sought to separate out my own biases from the actual qualities on-offer. Maybe that's impossible here. Maybe it was always impossible.

Ultimately though, I suspect that most people's reactions to Man of Steel will be as intensely personal as mine was. I've spoken to many so far who watched the film, none of whom pointed to the same things as either flaws or moments of genius as anyone else. Things I glossed over as unimportant stood as towering bastions of rage-inducing tyranny to others, while matters I considered vital to the understanding of the film's qualities were utterly irrelevant to others. I strongly feel that most of those who have raged against this movie because of some flaw in logic or physics have missed the point entirely, and are engaged in nitpicking, but I accept that those people probably think the same of my analysis, and with good reason. As such, I'm left after all the song and dance with my original reaction to the film. Almost every aspect of the characterization the film did try worked flawlessly. I simply felt there wasn't enough.

And in the end, you can complain about any number of things in a movie, but if a film leaves you wishing there had been more of it, then honestly, how bad could it really have been?

Final Score:  7/10

The Dark Knight Rises

Alternate Title:  The Batman Movie we Deserve


One sentence synopsis:    Bruce Wayne must confront his own demons and a pack of revolutionary terrorists led by Bane.

Things Havoc liked:  Every generation gets the Batman it's looking for. In the 60s we got a cheesy goofball foiling the ludicrous deeds of plastic villains. In the 80s it was the Dark Knight, watching over a corrupt city nearly as mad as he was while battling anything and everything in his path. In the 90s, we got a stylized Batman of haunting, neo-gothic surreality, one which ultimately collapsed under its own weight of artifice. Today we live in a world of international terrorism, violent civil upheaval, economic uncertainty, and all-pervasive fear of the future. And here is the Batman movie we have been seeking.

What use, in a film like this, to recite names of actors and characters and say what everyone has already said? This is Bale's third turn as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and he has finally grown into the role in a way I did not think he ever would, diving down into the nadir of his own soul and clawing his way back out through methods even Batman films did not prepare me for. The cost of becoming Batman has been a constant theme within these movies, but never has it been more severe than now, to the point that neither his body nor his mind nor even Alfred's eternal vigilance for Bruce Wayne's soul can stand them any longer. And yet reality is still present, waiting to be dealt with in the form of another one of Batman's never-ending rogues' gallery.

Bane is played by Tom Hardy, a choice I could not understand when first I heard it, bulked up like a side of frozen beef and wearing a Hannibal Lechter mask that turns his voice into a strange, synthesized British drone that reminded me of Deckard Cane more than anything else. Yet if Heath Ledger's Joker was a primal spirit of Chaos, Bane seems to be that of Death-the-Leveler, incarnated from a 15th-century cult text and set forth on Gotham not merely to kill, but to flatten society from the top down before he does so. He never raises his voice, never bows to an agenda beyond nihilism and the revelation of all earthly concerns as vanity and hypocrisy. His plan is buttressed by a horde of fanatical suicide-killers, loyal only to the notion of the fire that he will start, and the upheaval that will follow in his wake. He does not scream and he does not deceive, save in that he consciously permits the belief in hope before stamping it out as a tool of policy. Hardy's performance is hidden behind the embodiment of such a character (we cannot see his face, and his voice might as well be computer generated), but he sells the role perfectly, and I could not, by the end of it, picture another in his place.

Nor is he the only one I was dubious about who redeemed himself. Anne Hathaway, who while pretty, has previously starred in romantic comedy and princess fantasy films that I abhor, turns in here the best Catwoman performance I've ever seen, and I remember Michelle Pfeiffer perfectly well, thank you. In keeping with the tone of the film, Catwoman here is a cat burglar, athletic and supremely skilled, but no more, and we meet her when she is already at the peak of her prowess, effortlessly robbing Bruce Wayne himself at the very beginning of the film, and thereafter taking perfectly serviceable care of both herself and others on into the film. Her character teases any knowing audience with hints from the comics, but never veers into caricature, perfectly embodying everything Catwoman should be in a Batman film. On the other side we have Joseph Gordon-Levitt as John Blake, a young Gotham cop who deduces Batman's identity quite early on and finds himself thrust into an increasingly major role in opposing the madness of Bane. Levitt, despite his good turn in Inception, has always annoyed the hell out of me, mostly because he has a bad habit of picking shit movies to appear in. After this performance, I have to admit, I'm beginning to see why he's become so popular. Blake dodges every rookie cop stereotype I can think of and several others that I just invented, on-route to giving us a dedicated, driven cop who wants to do right by his city and his badge, all without overacting or histrionics. When he is forced to shoot two assailants in a construction yard, he visibly upset at what he's just done , and when his former idol is revealed to be flawed, he explains why he is disappointed, but in both cases, returns thereafter to his job, if only because the stakes are too high for anything else. I promised I wouldn't turn this review into my usual "list of actors I liked", so I'll just sum up by saying that Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine are all as awesome in this movie as they were (with Cotillard's obvious exception) in the last one, and every one of them brings precisely the right notes to their performance.

Nolan's Batman films have always been masterpieces of style and tone, and this film is no exception. Everything that previously was here has returned, and been dialed up to reflect the even greater stakes of this film. Hans Zimmer's score, already a brooding orchestral masterpiece has been ratcheted up into a full blown, almost Wagnerian overture to the epic themes being displayed here. The city of Gotham, which seemed a post-industrial wasteland in the first film, and a glass-and-steel arena for the Joker and Batman to do battle in the second, is now a crumbling Detroit-like city on the brink of Armageddon, all mystique stripped away in favor of atavistic gutpunches. The cinematography is expert as always, symbolizing and framing Batman's fall and desperate strides towards redemption without ever becoming overbearing. When at length the movie shows us Batman standing before his foe, in broad daylight, on marble steps, we know exactly what is being told to us and why, and yet it never feels pushed into our face.

And what a journey this film is. Among comic book characters, Batman has always had a reputation for darkness, and Nolan has clearly done his homework in that regard. The entire second half of the film (spoiler alert) is an extended foray into urban hell, as Bane's conquest (yes, conquest) of Gotham city enables him to spin fortune's wheel at will and turn the low against the high (and anyone else he wishes to exterminate). We see wealthy parts of the city being looted and burnt, families dragged from their homes and shot by enraged have-nots, or the violent thugs that Bane recruits from prisons. Cops are hunted through the streets, their bodies hung from the suspension cables of bridges, and show trials presided over by madmen sentence the previously-powerful to be hurled into frozen rivers to drown. As a vision of the most apocalyptic fantasies of urban upheaval, this movie will do quite nicely, and while I'm not one of those lunatics who thinks Nolan is trying to impugn the Occupy Wall Street movement (or the Arab Spring), he unhesitatingly borrows much of their imagery to give these scenes a greater impact on the audience. The sheer audacity of the bleakness in this film, where Batman is broken and cast down, and his city, blanketed in snow, is given over to the rule of psychopathic suicide-terrorists for months on end, is almost stunning. There are many reasons to hate this film, but lack of daring is not among them. Like it or not, Nolan sought to present, in this movie, something that nobody would ever forget. I certainly won't.


Things Havoc disliked:   I confess, I did not even think it was possible for a movie to simultaneously be too long and rushed.

165 minutes this movie runs, and I'll be damned if it doesn't feel it. No good movie is too long of course, but while I wasn't exactly bored at this one, I could feel the weight of time as I sat through it and realized that no, the movie still wasn't approaching something resembling an ending. What's strange is that despite the immense runtime, this movie feels like a rush job, as every one of the (at a guess) six-or-so main characters, half of them new to this film alone, must be given ample time to establish their characters and go on the journey prepared for them. The result, predictably, is that certain inconvenient things like "facts" get papered over. Despite a promising start in which Bruce Wayne is forced to acknowledge the raw physical damage that a decade spent as Batman does to a person's body, the movie quickly loses all sense of what human beings are and are not capable of. Back surgery is performed by means of punches, and the power of will to overcome mere physical limitations is touted to a point where even a Batman movie cannot sustain it. Furthermore, I know this is a Batman movie, and that the previous films involved such concepts as weaponized fear gas, microwave bombs, sub-dermal high explosive, and personal-scale radar that can track an entire building, but this film's supertech just runs off the rails. We are treated to levitating armored gunships, fusion reactors-turned-thermonuclear weapons, entire fleets of batmobiles equipped with electromagnetic cannon and Gatling guns. It gets to the point where not only are we being asked to swallow an awful lot of future-tech shenanigans, but it begins to take the focus off of the characters themselves, leaving their actual confrontations somewhat overshadowed by the clash of robots and hardware.

There are also some significant structural problems with this film. The principle of the inescapable pit-prison is cool and all, but poses some unfortunate logistical and physical issues that I had a hard time getting around (someone I was with asked if they had electricity or not). Left unexplained is how many characters seem to get from point A to points B, C, D, or E, a matter of some interest when the points are on separate continents and the characters in question are crippled, hunted, and broke. Nobody explains how a quarantine tight enough to seal thousands of police underground and prevent a single escape from a megalopolis in five months can be evaded when it becomes necessary for someone to break into the city, nor how the army of trained killers failed to notice a fully functional gunship poised on the roof of a building during those aforementioned five months. The logistics of supplying a city of twelve million severed from all contact with the world save for relief trucks is perhaps best not thought about. There are also many scenes wherein literal armies of heavily-armed men discharge machine guns at one another without effect, often eschewing their guns altogether in favor of fisticuffs and melee combat. These sorts of scenes always stick out to me if only because of how ubiquitous they are in lesser action films, and to see them in this one is disappointing, even if they're obviously done for effect.


Final thoughts:  I'm torn on this movie.

Writing this review, I found myself able to recount good and bad points, but not to sum up, as I discovered that I could make a case for giving this film a 9, and also a case for giving it a 4. Both cases could be defended. And yet to split the difference and give it a 6-7 could not. In an age when most movies play it safe in every respect, one can object to Christopher Nolan's final entry in the Batman trilogy, but one cannot accuse it of being safe. Indeed it's one of the most audacious movies I've ever seen, dispensing with the dreaded "third-act collapse" so common to movie trilogies (X-men, Spiderman, Godfather, Matrix) by virtue of turning the intensity dial up to 11, then ripping the dial off and punting it into the river. Nolan here seems to have made a conscious choice that, whatever he did, he would not make a soft landing for his trilogy, and that if the expectations on this film were so impossibly high that they could never be met, there was nothing to be lost from attempting to shoot the moon. So ultimately, I have to look at the film in all its glory and excess, all its grit and pain, all its triumph and flawed stupidity, and ask myself, simply, did it work?

And you know what? Yeah. It did.

It may not appeal to everyone. I can list, by name, at least a dozen people I know who will hate it. But the sheer scale of this film, the triumphant highs and the (far more numerous) cavernous lows to which our heroes are plunged, all of that coupled with a stylistic design that emphasized the epic, almost operatic sweep of what was being shown to us, succeeded ultimately in burying all of the flaws and issues that one might have brought up. And a film that does that much whichalso contains superb performances and very good (if occasionally too-spot-on) writing that this one did, I really can't complain. I would rather see a film that showed me something spectacular (in the literal sense of the word) with flaws than a film that showed me the same damn thing I've seen a thousand times before. And while this movie had flaws, some of them quite serious, the three-hour epic tale of the fall and redemption of Bruce Wayne was a grand enough setting to overcome those flaws. I did not leave this film in a fit of fanboyistic glee, as I did for The Avengers, but rather in stunned silence, my mind struggling to grapple with everything I had just been shown. As the weight and complexity of it all has percolated within me, I am left with the strong sense that what I saw was a movie of weight and yes, even gravitas, scarcely to be equaled in this age of Battleship and Bay-formers. A movie this bold could only be a catastrophe on the level of Heaven's Gate, or a masterpiece of the level of Lawrence of Arabia. With very few reservations, I choose to call it the latter.

This is not the Batman movie I expected. It may not even be the Batman movie I wanted. But it is the Batman movie we all deserved.

And sometimes that's the best thing of all.

Final Score:  8.5/10