Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice nonsense

God, the more I think about BvS's plot...

Like, if you look at it from a distance, it vaguely makes sense. I could write a summary of it.

But if you follow ANY character closely and ask yourself what their goals are and whether their actions are a reasonable way to accomplish them (or at least an understandable mistake), it completely breaks down. Not even talking about the world, just the characterisation. I'm playing scenes back to myself and in practically all of them, someone is doing something nonsensical.


Like, okay, take Lex Luthor. He wants to kill Superman, because Superman is scary powerful and answers to no-one. Okay, fair, The Metropolitan Man did that one too.

So what does he do in the pursuit of that goal?

First, he organises a smear job by hiring henchmen to kidnap Superman’s girlfriend in Africa, kill a bunch of people, and frame Superman when he comes to save her (because we all know Superman kills people with bullets). And he equips those henchmen with “experimental bullets” only his company makes, that work just like regular bullets. Because reasons. (This lets the screenwriter give Lois Lane screen time to follow that lead, even though her investigation ultimately serves no purpose whatsoever.)

After that, Lex is briefly reasonable. He uses the backlash to gain access to a chunk of kryptonite and to Zod's body and spacecraft, practically rubs his face all over the radioactive rock, and discovers that kryptonite may be the one thing that can hurt Superman. But then that particular chunk of kryptonite gets stolen by Batman, and Lex decides that CLEARLY the best thing he can do now is to engineer a Batman v Superman fight.

He gets Batman on track by, uh, pissing him off with anonymous letters? I think?

He gets Superman (the demigod with super-speed and super-senses) on track by kidnapping his girlfriend (AGAIN) and his mother, because that sure sounds like a foolproof plan. He then demands that Superman (the demigod with super-speed and super-senses and ethical injunctions) kill Batman in exchange for his mother's life, wow this plan is sounding better by the minute.

And he just kind of hopes that Batman can do the job, without any concertation between the two.

But wait, that's okay, he's got a backup plan! See, since he was bored after losing the kryptonite, he decided to go explore Zod's spacecraft. All alone. Wading through pools of mysterious fluids in his business suit. And he tells the ship's AI "pretty please use magic to turn Zod's corpse + my blood into a giant monster," and the AI is like "are you sure? y/n" and he's like "y" and the AI’s like "okay!"

So Lex has this giant monster that has all of Superman's powers but the mind of an enraged beast. That totally doesn't sound like what Lex was trying to protect the world from! Let it loose, boys! I'm not entirely sure what his plan was for after his monster's victory, but I hope it involved a lunar colony.

The good guys win. And Lex goes to prison. Which SOUNDS like the natural outcome of a botched murder, but actually it would've happened anyway, so he really should have prepared an escape plan.

Also, at some point along the way, Lex blows up the Congressional hearing where Superman was going to get chewed out. Because reasons. (Wikipedia implies it was to frame Superman, but it doesn’t exactly take a forensic genius to exonerate him, or to make Lex the prime suspect.)

Also also, in every scene he's in, Lex's primary goal seems to be to piss people off. Don't get me wrong, I personally LOVE the acting, but you can be a bubbly adorkable extrovert and NOT force-feed sweets to the senator who just did you a huge favour that is not yet set in writing.



Let’s jump to Batman, the angriest, broodiest character in a movie that’s like 98% angry brooding (Lex smiled once).

So Batman starts the movie pissed off about Superman because PLOT DEVICE er, I mean, because Superman blew up a Wayne Enterprises building in the process of SAVING THE WORLD. As you know, Batman never blows up other people’s buildings.

Also the anonymous letters play some sort of part. Anyway, hating Superman: that’s literally Batman’s only character trait the entire movie. The man of steel had more character depth, and that’s despite having only one facial expression. I guess that’s the price you pay for having to fit in three plots and five trailers.

So, uh… Okay, there was some kind of investigation about a Russian and a boat, but my memory’s gone a little fuzzy from boredom. I’m sure it made complete sense.

Cut to Batman in the harbour where the kryptonite is being unloaded into a truck. Batman’s devious plan is to attach a tracker to the truck, and then just bash straight into it with his bat-tank. I’m not sure what the tracker was for. Let’s be charitable and assume it was a backup in case the tank thing went wrong.

And wrong it goes, because Superman is on the scene. (Why? No idea. I thought it was because Superman was looking for the kryptonite himself, but he leaves it there. So, just a crazy coincidence?) Supes stops Bats, because making loud noises past 11pm is against the law. But he lets him off with a warning. Bats cleverly replies “I’M GONNA FUCKING MURDER YOU TO DEATH, YOU FUCKING CUNT! TO DEEEEEATH!” (Possibly using different words; they DID aim for PG-13.) Superman just goes “okay whatever, I’m sure he didn’t mean it”.

So Batman steals the kryptonite again (off-screen, where Superman can’t see him). He uses that giant chunk to make, let’s see, three gas grenades and one spear-tip. Because the weapon you want to use against the man of steel is a spear. He also sets up a bunch of traps. But he leaves the kryptonite-tipped spear, his only real weapon, on the floor of some building nearby, I guess to give Superman a fighting chance? Then he attracts Superman’s attention by lighting up the bat-signal. (I don’t recall why this happens at the exact same time Lex’s plan takes off even though the two of them don’t coordinate.)

Lo, the fight you’ve all paid to see! It starts with Superman walking on a sonic land mine. This was actually clever of Batman, there WAS a chance that Superman would reveal a heretofore unknown weakness to sound waves, so point for that. But it did rely on Superman WALKING ON THINGS; point deduced.

Then Batman has gun turrets fire on Superman, who just stands there ignoring them because HE’S IMMUNE TO BULLETS as LITERALLY EVERYONE KNOWS. Minus one thousand points. You know what WOULD have worked though? One. Single. Kryptonite. Bullet. End of the movie right there.

Superman starts whaling on Batman, until the dark knight reveals his trump card: kryptonite gas grenades. Superman is instantly incapacitated. That sure sounds like the perfect time to finish him off with a kryptonite bullet, I mean spear! But dagnabit, Batman left his in the cloak room, so he has to resort to punching Superman in that general direction until the gas wears off.

Punch, punch, punch, gas, punch, punch, fast-forward to the spear. Batman is poised for the killing blow… Until Superman coughs out “we… must… save… Martha” (which happens to be both his and Superman’s mothers’ names). Batman responds by stabbing him to death.

No, wait, he responds by being all confused and asking for clarifications. Luckily, a wild Lois Lane appears and dispels the name confusion. Batman politely thanks her and stabs Superman to death.

No, wait, he asks for the full story, and learns of Lex’s devious plan that will probably result in other-Marta’s death. Batman processes this information, stabs Superman to death, rescues other-Martha, and goes looking for Lex to chew him out for not involving him in the plan from the start even though it all worked out in the end.

No, wait, he does all that except the stabbing part. Huh? Dude. Remember your skyscraper? Remember literally your only character trait?

Oh well. Martha rescued - because apparently the big bad Russian henchman with his own name (admittedly, “The Russian”) was trigger-shy, even with his base under attack and his timer at zero. But now there’s a giant monster on the loose! “If only I hadn’t left my bat-spear behind,” thinks Batman, “I’m sure that pointy rock would’ve worked on this unrelated monster. Oh, I know, I’ll” (go pick it up and come back?) “bait the monster to follow me back to the population-dense area where I left it.” This plan works better than you’d expect, in that Batman doesn’t die in seconds but instead just breaks his bat-plane, his bat-stride, and a few non-bat buildings (which is just a one-time thing and doesn’t impugn his virtue, completely unlike that rascal Superman).

Batman then proceeds to stand there doing nothing while Superman and Wonder Woman battle the monster. Spear, what spear? Oh, Lois Lane telepathically notified Batman that she would handle it, since she too divined that this monster is vulnerable to that pointy stick.

Blah blah gas grenade lasso spear stab heroes can credibly claim to have won the day together. Lex goes to prison, and Batman pays him a visit to pointedly NOT brand him with his bat-mark, because reasons. And he talks Wonder Woman into starting up the Justice League, which will be useful because “I just have a feeling” LOOK GUYS HE MADE A FUNNY - and not because, say, he’s now aware that the world is full of dangerous superhumans.


By now you’re probably sick of reviewing the film from multiple perspective. It’s not my fault if every character is its own brand of fucked up! I’ve already done a lot of Superman’s fucked-up-ness above, but let’s quickly go over the remainder.

Like Batman, Superman starts the movie itching for a fight because PLOT DEVI- because Batman dresses all in black and sometimes hurts people. Unlike Batman, Superman is a demigod, who could start then end that fight in about three nanoseconds. But then we’d have to spend the remaining two hours and thirty minutes watching Superman make blank faces at people, and no-one wants that. So, inaction.

Blah blah kryptonite blah explosion blah Lex Luthor kidnaps Superman’s beloved and tries to manipulate him into fighting Batman. Using his super-speed, Superman doesn’t kill, incapacitate, search, interrogate or capture Lex. He has a much better idea: he’s going to go do exactly what Lex wants.

Now, Wikipedia says that Superman tries to reason with Batman instead of murdering him. This wasn’t my reading of the scene, but I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, what with Batman not instantly turning into a fine red mist and all. It’s much less clear why Superman would bother with Batman at all, when he could go straight to Martha - saving approximately all the minutes of his clock, allowing him to reach Lex long before the monster is done breeding. I guess he really wanted a dude with a pointy stick to watch his back.

It’s even less clear why his strategy, upon discovering that Batman is too angry to talk, is to bash Batman’s squishy human body through five walls instead of - say - flying out of reach and conducting negotiations through a megaphone. (Or he could just leave and go save Martha.) Luckily for him, comic book humans are invincible.

Blah blah monster blah blah spear. The spear that is Superman’s only known weakness. The spear that makes him weak and fragile just by being nearby. That is the spear Superman is going to grab by the handle, not even in the bottom-most grip, to go stab the monster. If only there was some other superhuman nearby. One who had proven capable of chopping off the monster’s limbs with just a sword. He, or she, could’ve inflicted the killing blow at only a fraction of the risk. Ah, cruel fate.


Speaking of awkward segues, let’s finish with Wonder Woman, a character as tightly welded to the movie’s plot as a neutrino. What does SHE want? Er. Well. Uh. Let’s go over what she does, and I’ll get back to you.

She (as Diana) is coincidentally at Lex’s party the night Batman (as Bruce) decides to sneak into the (unguarded, unlocked) LexCorp server room. Bruce copies Lex’s data, and Diana steals his usb stick. I’m not quite sure what she was planning to do if he hadn’t shown up.

Bruce later tracks her down (how?) to a museum, where she says she wanted a picture on the stick but couldn’t decrypt it. She says she only wanted to borrow the stick, and has put it back in Bruce’s car (WHEN? HOW? WHY NOT JUST HAND IT TO HIM?).

Bruce decrypts the files, because “military encryption” is code for “None Shall Pass Save He Whom The Plot Hath Chosen”, and finds the photo and other evidence, proving Diana to be some kind of long-lived superhuman. Not sure why this data is on LexCorp’s server but does not feature anywhere in Lex’s plans; maybe he never bothered to open the folder labelled “JLA promo material”. So Bruce mails Diana the picture, and that somehow makes them best friends forever and they go and kill the monster together. (“I thought she was with you,” BLATANTLY LIES Batman to make a funny for the trailer).

So, what DID she want? Well, as she told Bruce at the end of the movie, she wanted to stay in hiding. The way to do that is to blow up LexCorp’s servers, as well as any usb copy some random corporate spy tried to make. Did she not understand the concept of digital files, and thought that if Bruce emailed her the picture it must not exist anywhere else any more? Or did she want that picture more than anything, for sentimental reasons? Or is she just a living, breathing, incoherent plot device? Yes.


The minor characters too seem to delight in shooting themselves in the foot in the one or two scenes they’re in, but I’m going to stop here because this is long enough as it is. And I haven’t even touched the editing! The nightmares! The ponderous visual metaphors! The goddamn time travel!

God this movie is so fun to hate.