Deconstructions Are Not Characters and Grim is Not Realistic: The Self-Hating Fanboyism of Zack Snyder’s Batman V. Superman

Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice is a horrible, cynical, didactic, hateful, disconnected, and grandiose mess, a glorified high school philosophy paper that deconstructs its titular heroes with heavy finger-wagging.  It reduces the dark knight and the man of steel to grumbling simplistic caricatures, shamelessly apes frames from classic graphic novels, blatantly shuns connective tissue between scenes, and laughs at the idea of coherent character motivation. It’s a lecture vomited in the ugliest colors that not only misunderstands what makes these characters so iconic, but more importantly, what makes them characters.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: faithfulness to the source material. This movie draws much of inspiration from one of the most seminal graphic novels of all time: The Dark Knight Returns. We could get into an endless debate about how much the movie honors this masterwork by talking about scene framing, character deconstruction, and questions of morality, but I submit to you that none of this matters.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (9/10)

In a fastidiously chaotic movie, one of four new characters mutters, as if to himself, “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites.” This question of order vs. chaos, war vs. peace, good vs. evil, is standard comic book fare, but what makes Age of Ultron so deft and satisfying is the way it ties up all sorts of threads from previous movies to create a nearly seamless whole – chaos and order, personified in one movie.

Days of Future Past is Relevant, Savvy, Gutsy, Ridiculous, and Superb

It’s a great time to be a nerd, but we all remember X-Men: Origins: Wolverine: The Movie With Too Many Colons, the competent but unforgivably dull Superman Returns, the beginning of the slow death knell for the DC movie-verse, Green Lantern….heck even The Dark Knight Rises disappointed some hardcore fans. Then you’ve got Sony and their blatantly business-centric decision to reboot Spider-Man, just so they could keep the movie rights, which wouldn’t be so bad if the movie weren’t a desperate franchise-starting cash grab with poorly developed characters and redundant action scenes. With so much greed prevalent in the studios, it would seem pointless to hope that some quality, old-fashioned movie fun could be expected, but movies like The Avengers, and now X-Men: Days of Future Past, prove it is not.

The Marvel Movie Character Rights
That link succinctly summarizes the post-millenial movies which feature Marvel characters, and which studios own which ones. Here’s a breakdown: Sony owns Spider-Man and Ghost Rider, 20^th Century Fox owns X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Marvels owns Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, and many more besides, and it all started in 2002 when Spider-Man ignited a whole new era of superhero flicks and studios taking their moneymaking potential seriously. Directors who had never been given access to big budgets, like Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, and Ang Lee were given free reign of the comic book movie world. Raimi breathed new life into Spider-Man, Singer knocked X-Men out of the park, and Lee…well he managed to resurrect and kill the Hulk’s film potential in one go. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Why The Lego Movie is an Important Film

While I’m going to do my best to paint a complete picture of both the meaning the creators of The Lego Movie intended and its overall importance to the cultural film canon, fact is I could be wrong about all this, but film analysis is still a fun exercise worth pursuing, and in the case of this film it’s important also because many of the themes beneath the surface are liable to be absorbed by the sponge-like brains of young viewers, shaping the moviegoers of tomorrow. It’s remarkable what people can absorb without being conscious of having done so.

*SPOILER ALERT*
The Lego Movie (TLM) crash-lands with impossible-to-ignorance immediacy into this crucial phase of movie culture: the unoriginal re-release of every potentially profitable franchise, from comics to board games. Some may view TLM as the death-knell for all that is original in Hollywood, some may view it as just another harmless kid’s movie, but let’s try to prove these people wrong, and then some. This movie has a dizzying amount of layers to it, but the one I’m going to explore is primarily our relationship to entertainment culture, and how TLM presents it in a textured, clever, hilarious, unique, and creative way.

The Desolation of Smaug: Mediocrity and Grandiosity

Pictured: Peter Jackson after the trilogy is over.

Henceforth on this blog, my reviews will be less traditional and more analytical, so let’s get straight to it, and break down the reasons I both loved and was bothered by The Desolation of Smaug (henceforth referred to as DOS). My first concern to address is whether or not this trilogy deserves the $3 billion haul it is going to make, and the answer is a resounding no.

Listen, I’m a nerd. I love richly detailed fantastical worlds, I love seeing my favorite characters come to life on the big screen, all that good stuff. What I don’t like seeing is a relatively lean adventure bloated. The studio’s tale goes that as they were making the movie, they fell in love with JRR Tolkien’s extra-curricular materials fleshing out the canon of Middle Earth. So they kept on stuffing more and more and eventually decided, “Oh well, let’s make another movie!” Then a month or two went by and they announced, “Oh also, by the way, there’s a third movie!”

Ender’s Game (6/10)

“The book is always better” is a phrase you will never hear me use, because this is a silly comparison. Books and television both tell stories, yes, but in wildly different ways, so what is expected of a book should never be expected of a movie. It would be like me blaming an apple for not tasting like an orange. The main thing I always insist on with book-to-movie adaptations is that they keep the spirit of the book, because why even bother if you’re going to butcher the heart of the original? It would be like if someone took “Goodnight Moon” and turned it into a movie that was pro-pantheism. Read this post of mine for a more elaborate breakdown of this philosophy. So does Ender’s Game pass this test of mine? Yes and no. It’s a wildly inventive movie visually speaking, but in bringing everything about the beautifully constructed technical world of Orson Scott Card’s novel to such specific and vibrant light, some of the earthiness and humanity of the book is lost.

Red Pill Popper

“Why oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”
-M.P.

If you do not know where this quote comes from, go find somebody to give you a nice hard slap. The Matrix was a seminal late 90’s action blockbuster that changed the very nature of the action hero and, for better or for worse, permanently altered the moviegoing landscape. What sticks it securely in the national consciousness is not just the kick-ass special effects and action, but the underlying theme of questioning reality as we know it. The above line was spoken to me by a pastor friend of mine as his going away quote. In the movie, it’s delivered by a crew member of the Nebuchadnezzar, Cipher, to Trinity. He bemoans having accepted the red pill and been awoken to the horror of reality and the burden it placed upon his shoulders – he can never go back to the relatively blissful ignorance of life inside the Matrix.

Dream Worlds

“You musn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
-P.F.

I love movies, and down the line I plan to indulge this blog in the occasional movie review, so let’s sorta kinda begin here with a quote from one of the mind-bendiest film trips in recent years: Christopher Nolan’s Inception. The scene in question involves two characters, Arthur and Eames, huddled with their team in an abandoned warehouse, protecting the perimeter from encroaching bad guys. Arthur is using a semi-automatic rifle, and then Eames steps out from behind him with the above saying, speaking it quite pithily before he yanks a grenade launcher out of nowhere and uses it to blow a particular bad guy into smithereens.