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.

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.