I'm gonna have to re-watch this movie.
Offical Batman v Superman: Movie Review and Discussion Thread
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I'm gonna have to re-watch this movie.
IMDB Reviews
The best superhero movie of all time (no spoilers)
Author: thegamerknightofficial from United States19 March 2016So, I saw BvS at an early screening, and it was easily the best superhero movie of all time, even better than "The Dark Knight." I went into the theater with already really high expectations, and the movie was even better than I expected. Yeah, the movie is pretty dark. It's darker than the Nolan trilogy, so that should give you a pretty good taste of what's to come. There are a few jokes here and there. Ben Affleck's performance as Batman was AMAZING. The best Batman yet. This one can actually fight, unlike Keaton's Batman who relied nearly solely on gadgets, and Bale's Batman whose fighting looked really dumb. For real, though, Affleck needs to win an Oscar for Best Actor. Eisenberg's performance as Lex Luthor was brilliant. Cavill's performance as Superman was pretty much the same as his performance in Man of Steel. His performance as Clark Kent was very accurate to the comics. Every other member of the cast did great, too, but those were the performances that stood out (Irons was great as Alfred, too).
The movie is ACTION PACKED. The fight between Batman and Superman was amazing. The way the fight was choreographed was beyond anything we've ever seen before. It's any fanboy's dream come true. As for the length of the fight: The true fight is longer than the Hulkbuster vs. Hulk battle in "Avengers: Age of Ultron." The reason I say TRUE fight is because there are technically two fights (sort of). One is a Batmobile chase (the end of it was the "Do You Bleed?" scene we saw featured in Conan), and the other one is the Dark Knight Returns-reminiscent fight (yeah, the one where Batman fights Superman in the armor). I'm not going to spoil who wins, but they both throw some pretty devastating punches at one another.
In the middle of writing this review, I forgot to mention Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman. I was a little worried about the accent, but she managed to hide it so that she gave us the Wonder Woman performance we've all been waiting for. She was pretty damn good (not as good as Eisenberg or Affleck, but good).
No crucial part of the film was revealed before the screenings or the movie's release. The visuals look amazing (except for one particular scene, where the CGI looked like trash). Overall, definitely a 10/10 film.
Although it's a great movie, don't go to the cinema with crazy expectations
A much greater improvement on MOS 5X better.
Author: corde1 from Washington State, USA
19 March 2016
I am drawn back to when this movie was first announced and how I despised the notion of a Batman V Superman film a la Freddy vs Jason, Alien vs Predator and so on. It all seemed like a huge gimmick to me and I expected the worst for this movie. Fast forward a couple years, I am sitting down at a private screening, the lights go down and the movies opens up. The opening sequence was not what I expected but shows Snyder's visual creativity in a similar manner as he did with the opening sequence of Watchmen.
We are hearkened to the Black Zero Event, only we see it from Bruce Wayne's perspective as shown in some of the trailers. I love that Snyder uses Bruce's as the eyes of the audience to get an outside perspective of the surrounding madness and destruction, and he does it very effectively. You are mad at these beings, you feel the terror, the confusion the anger for them bringing there war here, it plays out with spectacle and sadness.
I had reported a rumor about Scoot Macnairy's characters months back and was called out by Ocelot and others several times on things I reported, well turns out it was true. Something tragic happens at the hearing and it is our insight of how cunning and vicious this Lex Luthor is.
The overall story is well woven and much better than MOS, you can definitely breathe a sigh of relief in that Terrio does a great job of crafting this all together. The movie is a visual tour de force as we have come to expect with Snyder but let me just say that his directing has also improved. For those who moaned about the shaky cam and muted colors, they will be pleased. Performance wise. EVERYONE does an outstanding job, the standouts to me were Affleck, Eissenberg and Gadot. I was not on the Ben, Gal, Jesse hate wagon, though I found Eissenberg's casting questionable but I felt he had shown that he has some capable range of pulling it off. Affleck is Bruce Wayne, Affleck is Batman, talk about casting redemption. Similar to Reynolds, GL>Deadpool. Affleck should no longer be bogged with complaints about Daredevil.
For those that hated on Gadot, suck it, she owns the role in every way possible, she really has stepped up her acting game as well. The woman has presence as Diana, grace and beauty and as Wonder Woman, she is truly a Goddess. People were moaning about Gail's size, forget that nonsense, she proves she does not need bulking muscles to be a warrior and her fight scenes are exceptional, makes Faora look like she was waltzing. Eissenberg, well well well. Let me first say I thought the best versions of Luthor were from the Lois and Clark and Smalville TV shows but Jesse brings something totally new to the game.
Jesse plays his Luthor like a true devil. He is deceiving, manipulative, conniving, that line the Devil will do it, he is referring to himself to me. I could not help but see him like a Lucifer in his role and wondered if Jesse kind of based playing his character that way. Everyone else support wise was absolutely great. I do not want to write a long report of praises so let me see if I can cap off before getting on my flight. The fight set up was a little weak but boy the pay off was spectacular. Cavill I feel needs to step up a little more, granted he was wonderful but he was out shined. He needs to get beyond that distraught expression that he likes to use because he does it to death in this and I found that annoying.
The other member intro's were great and will have you all pumped for the JLA, the Knightmare scene was horrific and impactful and made me smile like a little geek. The final fight was amazing. Never in a CBM have we seen anything like it, yes I said it NEVER and lastly, I will say the movie does end on a heart wrenching note but a wink in the end. I loved it gave it a 9 and looking forward to seeing it again next week. If you guys have any questions ask I am going to be on a plane for the next 6-7 hours so will try to respond. I may have exaggerated about it being 10X better than MOS but I will say 5X better.
Why Superman Can Kill: In Defense Of 'Man Of Steel'
We are just one week away from the worldwide debut of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and online buzz has reached a fever pitch. As we wait to see how the new superhero battle royale plays out, there has been much discussion about the film’s predecessor, Man of Steel. DC fans can tell you the last few years have seen much debate over that film’s controversial ending. Fair warning: this article discusses spoilers about Superman’s 2013 reboot, including the ending, so if you haven’t seen Man of Steel then stop reading and go watch the film before you continue here. But come back, because I assure you, you won’t want to miss how I debunk one of the biggest complaints about the film!
When Superman snapped Zod’s neck in the climax of Man of Steel, a lot of people objected. “Superman doesn’t kill!” they shouted. What they should have shouted, however, is “Superman shouldn’t kill!” or “My preferred version of Superman doesn’t kill!” Because claiming Superman doesn’t kill is not true at all, and isn’t even up for debate. You may not like it, and he may avoid killing much more often than he kills, but the fact is Superman has repeatedly and consistently killed in the comics, from his very first stories right through most decades, and he’s still killing nowadays.
I’ve debated this issue many times, including most recently with The Amazing Spider-Man comic book writer Dan Slott (for the record, it’s one of my favorite Spider-Man runs of the last 30 years), who frequently brings up the issue on social media. He asserts nobody who understands Superman would write a story in which Superman kills, and any such story is an invalid interpretation of Superman. Slott and others insist Superman should never kill under any circumstances, and that despite some exceptions the overwhelming majority of Superman’s history proves he has a strict code against taking any life. It is further claimed there is never a no-win situation for Superman, and no story should be written putting him in a situation without an alternate to killing.
This absolutist position doesn’t just assert a preference for Superman refusing to kill, and doesn’t just argue it’s the best portrayal and the most consistent with the majority of stories — it insists stories violating this specific preference are invalid. That’s where I take exception, since it turns into nothing more than another fan preference stated as the only objectively right way to portray a character, imagining anyone disagreeing simply doesn’t properly understand the character.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhug...kill-in-defense-of-man-of-steel/#7d5c343c2613
The reactions of the premiere of Batman v Superman in Mexico are better than good
As many of you know, last night was the premiere of "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" in Mexico and the event was attended by director Zack Snyder and the three actors playing the Trinity of DC Comics, Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot. The first reactions were to pray and then we leave you with some of them, seeing that in general people have responded quite positively and even the actors were grateful that received by Mexican fans who attended the screening of the film .
If you seem insufficient we have gathered here since not that be dozens, you have more on Twitter, but must bear in mind that there have been some who have chosen to share big spoilers of the film , so if you do not want know much perhaps not the most advisable. We have here only because some of those that do not contain spoilers .
While the former are a pair of images released by Affleck to show that there were few attendees.
There are those who reiterate that if you liked "The Man of Steel" this will be the same. And if you did not like, it is possible that this either:
http://blogdesuperheroes.es/cine-las-reacciones-la-premiere-batman-v-superman-mexico-mejores-buenas
As many of you know, last night was the premiere of "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" in Mexico and the event was attended by director Zack Snyder and the three actors playing the Trinity of DC Comics, Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot. The first reactions were to pray and then we leave you with some of them, seeing that in general people have responded quite positively and even the actors were grateful that received by Mexican fans who attended the screening of the film .
If you seem insufficient we have gathered here since not that be dozens, you have more on Twitter, but must bear in mind that there have been some who have chosen to share big spoilers of the film , so if you do not want know much perhaps not the most advisable. We have here only because some of those that do not contain spoilers .
While the former are a pair of images released by Affleck to show that there were few attendees.
There are those who reiterate that if you liked "The Man of Steel" this will be the same. And if you did not like, it is possible that this either:
http://blogdesuperheroes.es/cine-las-reacciones-la-premiere-batman-v-superman-mexico-mejores-buenas
First reactions to Batman v Superman Are Very Positive
https://www.yahoo.com/movies/first-r...081640490.html
Here's some I was surprised to hear:
Batman v Superman was great. Jesse Eisenberg's performance in particular blew me away. #BatmanvSuperman
Carl Cunningham @carlcunningham
I love Keaton more than anyone, but this is the best live action Batman ever. And it's not even remotely close.
Carl Cunningham @carlcunningham
Also, naysayers... Zack Snyder + Chris Terrio = WIN. You want a race, well DC may have just caught up with one movie.#BatmanvSuperman
Ben Kahn @BenTheKahn
@AMSismyname But Eisenberg's Luthor and Affleck's Batman were clear highlights of the movie
https://www.yahoo.com/movies/first-r...081640490.html
Here's some I was surprised to hear:
Batman v Superman was great. Jesse Eisenberg's performance in particular blew me away. #BatmanvSuperman
Carl Cunningham @carlcunningham
I love Keaton more than anyone, but this is the best live action Batman ever. And it's not even remotely close.
Carl Cunningham @carlcunningham
Also, naysayers... Zack Snyder + Chris Terrio = WIN. You want a race, well DC may have just caught up with one movie.#BatmanvSuperman
Ben Kahn @BenTheKahn
@AMSismyname But Eisenberg's Luthor and Affleck's Batman were clear highlights of the movie
I had a feeling people would be praising Eisenbergs performance.
The dude lost me at Keaton...
I asked my friend one question from the movie she tells me the ending I was not pleased .
Stay away from the IPic theatre then my brotha cause me and my people's are gonna be absolutely needing out Friday...we done damn near bought out the theatre
Gotham
Legends of Tomorrow
Flash
Suicide Squad
Deadshot w/ Bruce & Clark lol
Maggie was there too
as was Lana(Archer)
and Negan
http://www.vulture.com/2016/03/batman-v-superman-c-v-r.html
What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman
Politics, mostly. And American empire.
e Batman and Superman allies or rivals, at their core? They’re definitely notenemies, and that’s only partly because they’re both superheroes. For long stretches, particularly when the characters were new, they had a deeply chummy relationship, with Batman like a non-superpowered Superman — a lesser, but cheerful, do-gooder who also fought for truth, justice, and the American way. (It was kind of adorable, with Batman almost acting like a kid who smilingly looked up on his star-athlete older brother.)
And yet, for the past 30 years, the relationship has been punctuated by a series of spectacular fights — a gruesome tussle over ideology in 1986’s graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a dramatic dust-up due to mind control in the 2003 comic-book story line “Hush,” and, of course, an upcoming gladiator match in this weekend’s big-screen tentpole Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. At this point, nobody really remembers that early, sunny friendship — when it comes to superheroes, pure friendship’s boring. Batman and Superman are both, of course, good guys, but what we so often want to see is them fighting.
But why? Why are fans so desperate to see superheroes in conflict that they urge superhero writers to employ absurd narrative contrivances like mind control or alternate universes to make happen what would otherwise be vanishingly unlikely fights (a tactic used well over a dozen times in the history of Batman-Superman tales)? One big answer is no answer at all — whowouldn’t want to see them fight? Every comics geek’s inner adolescent is perpetually asking, What’s the point of having two heroes if you aren’t also going to game out who’d win? As comics critic Chris Sims put it in a column on the topic, “When you have characters and all you see them doing is winning, it’s natural to wonder who would win harder if they ever had to compete. For that question, Superman and Batman make the perfect contenders.”
But we also want to see them fight because, to an unusual degree even for comic books, the fights mean something. That is, they are about something — or some things. Namely: how to make a better world, with Superman operating through hope and inspiration, and Batman through fear and intimidation. As the villain Lex Luthor puts it in the new movie, it’s “god versus man, day versus night.”
Let’s start with “god versus man.” Superman is an alien — which is to say, celestial — creature, born on another planet but here completely alone, completely singular in his powers, which have at times included feats like reversing the spin of the Earth to turn back time. Batman is not just a man but a broken one, who inhabits a broken universe, his parents killed by a petty criminal and raised in an era of rapid urban decay — “an old-money billionaire, a human, an orphan who has seen the worst of the world and let it all but turn him to stone,” in the words of critic Meg Downey. Superman, by contrast, “is a farm boy, an alien, raised with a stable adoptive family, who has seen the worst of the world and let it teach him a profound sense of empathy.”
Which leads us to “day versus night.” Superman has faith that humanity will tend toward goodness if you give it trust and hope; Batman lacks that faith and believes the world only gets in line if you grab it by the throat and never let go. The former spends his contemplative moments hoping for the best; the latter spends those moments vigilantly preparing for the worst. But this contrast isn’t just characterological; it’s also historical. The icons were created almost simultaneously, but Superman is unmistakably a figure of his early years — the 1940s and 1950s, an era of buoyant, blinkered wartime and postwar consensus (at least as it might have been felt by most white, boyish comic-book readers), when it seemed appropriate to deploy a godlike do-gooder to do things like help cats out of trees or return purses to de-pursed Metropolis women. (One of his early nicknames was the Man of Tomorrow, after all.) Batman came of age later, beginning in the 1970s, the era of American malaise and urban decay, using cynicism as a weapon for good and training his sights on a Gotham City so broken it often looked like a war zone (often fighting super-criminals who hoped not just to plunder the city but overturn any lingering faith its denizens had in the virtue of compassion and social order). Which of these two worldviews provides the better way to live a good and productive life? You can do both, of course — just as you can love both characters and write them in such a way where they get along with one another. But readers don’t just want that — readers want to see the conflict.
And, in a real-world sense, most of them are on one side. Today, Batman is a far more popular character than Superman, and he typically wins whenever they go toe-to-toe in a story — which is, of course, ridiculous, considering he’s just an earthling, but that only makes it all the more remarkable as a reflection of reader preferences and prejudices. Outside of comics and movies, too, his worldview predominates, in the form of a perennially apocalyptic vision of the near future. In all ways, Batman is winning in the battle of Batman vs. Superman, which is especially strange given how little New York today, say, looks like the Gotham of The Dark Knight Returns. But we’ve been living so long in Batman’s universe that it can be hard to remember his worldview didn’t always have the upper hand.
Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, a “bully for peace.”
He was also an instant sensation. DC Comics knew it had a hit on its hands, but wanted a bigger one — which means they needed their star to be as family-friendly as possible. As comics historian Gerard Jones recounts in his chronicle of the era, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, DC exec Jack Liebowitz saw the nascent Man of Steel as “something that could be built and sustained here, a kind of entertainment that kids liked better than pulps and would continue to if given reason to keep coming back.” Accordingly, in 1940, he and editor Whitney Ellsworth drew up a pristine code of conduct for superheroes that, among other tenets, forbade DC heroes from knowingly killing. It was not unlike the onset of the Hays Code in Hollywood, and by the time U.S. soldiers were being sent off to war in 1942, Superman had become cheery, lovable, and status quo-respecting.
Those were not adjectives you could use to describe the initial depictions of Batman. He was first published in DC’s 1939 comic Detective Comics No. 27, the creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. At first, he was a “weird figure of the dark” and an “avenger of evil,” as one of the early stories put it. Unlike Superman, he had no special powers other than being exceedingly wealthy. He was more or less a rip-off of pulp hero The Shadow and spent his time in the darkness, attacking — and occasionally even murdering — evildoers. But, like Superman, he was also an instant smash — which meant the same image-buffering fate. In his new history of Batman, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, Weldon tells of newspaper editorials and church bulletins railing against dark, violent comic books.
As a result, the editorial leadership pushed Batman out of the shadows, making him brighter and poppier, and even turning the weird loner into a kind of doting father figure to a scrappy young ward named Robin (a relationship that could’ve really gotten dark and weird in different hands). “Adding Robin was no mere cosmetic tweak,” writes Weldon, “it was a fundamental and permanent change that placed Batman in a new role of protector and provider.” He stopped killing. He worked cheerfully with the Gotham police. He walked around in broad daylight. The Batman and Superman brands were more or less in sync.
Of course, Superman was a much more natural family-friendly sell than Batman, because comics writers couldn’t quite eliminate all of the darkness from the character of the Dark Knight, as later they’d have trouble trying to turn Superman into something approaching an antihero: One of these characters was a benevolently powerful space-god, the other a weirdo orphan wearing bat ears. This probably, at least in part, explains Superman’s bigger stature through the 1940s — his persona was a near-perfect vessel for imperious American confidence and social order. But Batman had his clean-cut pitch, too: He may not have had superpowers, but he was a kind of icon of self-improvement, since he had willed himself to reach the peak of human physical potential (well, willed and spent) and had fought a delightful gallery of enemies.
Oddly enough, it took DC a long time to figure out that these guys were two great tastes that could taste great together. Superman and Batman first appeared in an image together on the cover of a 1940 promotional tie-in comic for that year’s World’s Fair, but the interior pages showed no story where the two of them interacted. In 1941, there was a comic in which they stood side by side to help with a fund-raising drive for war orphans, but they had no dialogue with each other. That same year, they started appearing alongside one another on the covers of a new comics series calledWorld’s Finest, and on those covers, you saw them wordlessly playing baseball or going skiing — but once you opened the comic, you saw no stories where they actually hung out.
John Wayne and more like Dirty Harry.
Must There Be a Superman?” and saw the Man of Tomorrow realizing that he can’t fix structural problems like poverty and oppression. “You stand so proud,Superman,” read the opening narration, “in your strength and your power — with a pride that has found its way into the soul of every man who has stood above other men! But as with all men ofpower, you must eventually question yourself and your use of thatpower.” Wait, were we talking about Kal-El of Krypton, or the United States of America?
As Americans began to distrust power, so too did Batman begin to distrust Superman. They still fought side by side in the pages ofWorld’s Finest and on the roster of DC’s premier super-team, the Justice League, but there were cracks in the façade. In 1973’sWorld’s Finest No. 220, written by Bob Haney and drawn by Dick Dillin, the two are trying to crack a case, and the Kryptonian is turning up his nose at their villain’s quest for “illegal revenge.” “I can understand revenge,” Batman says with a condescending scowl. “I took it myself against Joe Chill, my parents’ killer! It’s a human emotion — revenge! Trouble with you, friend, is you’re not human!” The ticked-off Superman punches a tree and asks, “Who’s not human!?”
An ascendant Batman and Batman-ist worldview made concrete conflict almost inevitable, and matters came to a boiling point in 1983’s Batman and the Outsiders No. 1, written by Mike W. Barr and drawn by Jim Aparo. During a meeting of the Justice League, Batman declares that he’s had enough of the Superman-led squad’s law-abiding approach to saving the world. He says he’s going to break international regulations to rescue someone and when Superman tries to stop him, a furious Batman slaps his old friend’s hand away and says he’s resigning. Superman tries to appeal to the better angels of Batman’s nature: “We’ve always served as an example to the others —” But the Dark Knight cuts him off. “I never asked for that, Superman!” he barks. “I never wanted men toimitate me — only fear me!”
Nowhere was their ideological conflict more pointed than in the most famous Batman story ever told, which is also the greatest Batman-Superman fight story ever told: writer/artist Frank Miller’s 1986 masterwork The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a dense tale set in a dystopian Gotham City tattooed with graffiti and beset by violent youths. Miller had been living in New York during its Koch-era nadir, getting mugged and seeing the tabloids scream about urban decay and the vigilantism of men like Bernhard Goetz. When Miller was commissioned to write a Batman tale, he decided to make Bruce Wayne what he called a “god of vengeance”— a pretty good description of Dirty Harry, actually, or other iconic antiheroes, like Travis Bickle and Rambo, who had already passed into American myth. “If he fights,” Miller wrote in his notes for Batman, “it’s in a way that leaves them too roughed up to talk.” His ideal Batman “plays more on guilt and PRIMAL fears.”
The result was, indeed, steeped in primal fear. In The Dark Knight Returns, an aging Bruce comes out of retirement and goes on a Death Wish-esque crusade to clean up the streets by any means necessary. He has also come to hate the sunshiny outlook of Superman, a figure who — in Miller’s depiction — has a naïve faith that it’s morning in America. Miller’s Superman has made a Faustian pact with the government, taking orders from President Reagan. (Well, he’s not technically called Reagan, but any reader will recognize the fictional commander-in-chief’s wrinkled smile and folksy chatter.) “I gave them my obedience,” Clark thinks to himself while destroying some Soviet weaponry. “No, I don’t like it. But I get to save lives — and the media stays quiet.” When Batman leads an army of vigilantes during a night of chaos in Gotham, Superman is ordered to take down his erstwhile ally.
In political terms, Superman would be a conservative and Batman would be a radical
The fight that followed was the most perversely inventive one in the canon. Superman arrives in Gotham and Batman completely beats the shit out of him. As it turns out, Superman may be strong, but Batman has two advantages: wealth and paranoia. His distrust of the Metropolis Marvel led him to come up with a cunning plan in preparation for the battle, and he can throw as many toys into it as he likes. He fires missiles at Superman; he wears a massive battle-suit that he plugs into the city’s electrical grid, then punches Supermanhard; he has a pal hit the Man of Steel with some synthetic Kryptonite (Superman’s historic weakness); and he ultimately wins, knocking Superman to a standstill. All the while, he takes pride in hurting Superman and meditates on their differing worldviews. “You sold us out, Clark,” he thinks to himself. “Just like your parents taught you to. My parents taught me a different lesson — lying on this street — shaking in deep shock — dying for no reason at all — they showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to.”
A similar exchange punctuates writer/artist John Byrne’s miniseries The Man of Steel, another influential recast of the Batman-Superman relationship, published the same year as The Dark Knight Returns (though less well-known). Issue No. 3 chronicled a wholly rebooted version of the heroes’ first meeting, devoid of the charming cruise-ship meet-up. Instead, the two of them, early in their careers, join together to catch a criminal — but they immediately question each other’s approach to the task. Batman beats up a lowlife thug in an alleyway for information; Superman finds Batman right afterward and calls him an “outlaw” and an “inhuman monster.” They decide to focus on taking down the villain, and, as they part ways, they reach a tense détente. “Well, I still won’t say I fully approve of your methods, Batman,” Superman says, flying away, “and I’m going to be keeping an eye on you, to make certain you don’t blow it for the rest of us … but good luck.”
But let’s get back to The Dark Knight Returns. “In political terms, Superman would be a conservative and Batman would be a radical,” Miller said when I interviewed him a few months ago. Miller himself identifies as a libertarian, so his protagonist’s distrust of power makes all the sense in the world. But the political question of the book is, in my view, only a symptom of a larger philosophical matter. This Batman is utterly without faith in anything beyond his immediate control. Sure, he can trust his butler, his sidekick, and his weaponry — but that’s about it. Everyone and everything else needs to be throttled and bent into shape, in order to wrestle with a world otherwise almost beyond repair. What’s more, Batman hates Superman because Superman does have faith: faith in the government, faith in Reaganite prosperity, faith that Batman might be able to see reason and give up. In Batman’s eyes, these are failings.
No one had ever before attempted to show these two being in such opposition, and so filled with bloodlust. But the crazy experiment was a massive success. For the first time, Batman comics started consistently outselling Superman ones, but the transformation went beyond mere sales. “It’s difficult to overstate the influenceThe Dark Knight Returns has had on comics and the culture that has risen around them,” Weldon writes. Thanks to Miller, the vision of Batman as a pitch-black bruiser and schemer was carved into the rock of superhero fandom. In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batmanhit theaters and, while it lacked the deep gothic mood of later screen hits like the influential Batman: The Animated Series and Christopher Nolan films that followed, it offered many of the dark, angry pleasures that Dark Knight Returns had surfaced — and it was a box-office smash unlike anything a DC character had ever seen.
Very few tales since then have dared to put the two heroes so viciously at odds as they were in Dark Knight, but every story of conflict since is shadowed by Miller’s and Byrne’s characterizations. In 1988’s Batman story line “A Death in the Family” — written by Jim Starlin and drawn by Jim Aparo — Robin is brutally murdered by the Joker and a complicated diplomatic situation makes any Bat-revenge legally tricky. Clark flies in to tell Bruce to stay in line: “There’s nothing you can do here,” he says. Bruce fires off a massive punch to Clark’s jaw, which of course doesn’t even bruise the Man of Steel. “Feel better now?” Superman asks, frowning.
Even when they got along, after Dark Knight, there was often a steely sense that thingscould go awry between them. A 1990 Batman-Superman crossover story called “Dark Knight Over Metropolis” dealt with the theft of a ring made out of Kryptonite, and at the end, Supes opts to give the ring to Batsy for safekeeping, just in case someone evil ever takes over Superman’s mind and he needs to be taken down. “I want the means to stop me,” Clark says, “to be in the hands of a man I can trust with my life.” It’s a sweet moment, but also a grim one. Indeed, for all the talk of trust, Superman was dourly preparing for the worst and acting out of fear. In other words, much as Batman had acted like Superman in the middle of the century, we had somehow entered a world where Superman was acting like Batman.
Perhaps more important, the Batman mentality — paranoid, fatalistic, violent — was setting the pace for superhero fiction generally. Superman was killed by a rampaging monster in 1992. One year later, a brutal villain snapped Bruce Wayne’s spine, and a younger, more vicious successor took over the Bat-mantle. Superman came back from the dead and the original Batman took back the cape and cowl, but they still fought increasingly apocalyptic threats that required harsh pragmatism to beat. The best-selling comics across the industry in the early- to mid-’90s were violent and oozing with themes as dark as the colors. America wasn’t as decrepit and frightening as it had been in prior decades, especially in its cities, but in an age of increasing cynicism, Batman felt far moreau courant than the Metropolis Marvel. As a new century dawned, conflicts between the two became more frequent in comics and, in nearly every one, Batman kept winning.
There was 2000’s Justice League story line “Tower of Babel,” written by Mark Waid and drawn by Howard Porter, in which we learned that Batman had detailed and brilliant plans to take down every member of the League, just in case — including Superman. There was the 2003 alternate-history tale Superman: Red Son, written by Mark Millar and drawn by Dave Johnson and Kilian Plunkett, which imagined a world where Kal-El of Krypton landed in the Soviet Union and became a Stalinist dictator — only to be challenged by an anarchist Russian Batman who uses his superior wit to knock the snot out of Soviet Supes before killing himself with a suicide bomb. There was that same year’sBatman No. 612, written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Jim Lee, where Batman uses that old Kryptonite ring to knock a mind-controlled Superman onto his butt. There were 2014’s Batman Nos. 35 and 36, written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Greg Capullo, wherein Superman gets mind-controlled yet again and Batsy spits a tiny pellet of Kryptonite-like material into Supes’s eye to put him down. “Who wins in a fight?” Batman muses to himself in that last story. “The answer is always the same. Neither of us.”
It’s a nice rhetorical flourish, but in the real world, Batman iswinning. Not only do creators nowadays think stories work better when he comes out on top, but he also outsells Superman on the comics stands and — much more important — at the box office. Way back in the earliest days of big-budget superhero filmmaking, 1978’s Superman: The Movie was a sensation — but its sequels showed massively declining returns and that incarnation of the franchise was canned after 1987’s loathedSuperman IV: The Quest for Peace. Two years later, Batman struck big with the aforementioned Burton flick, which got two hit sequels: 1992’s Batman Returns and 1995’s Batman Forever. The failure of 1997’sBatman & Robin put DC Comics-based movies in the wilderness for a while, but it was Batman who led them back to the Promised Land. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Beginshit theaters in 2005 and was a surprise critical success, but the real action came with its two sequels. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises each made more than a billion dollars worldwide — numbers that were unthinkable for a superhero flick just a decade earlier. As many film critics noted, in the age of the War on Terror, this Batman seemed to be the hero we deserved.
Superman, on the other hand, couldn’t get airborne. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returnshit theaters in 2006 and it was as sunny, colorful, and hopeful as you’d want a Superman story to be. But Warner Bros. was disappointed in its performance and cancelled plans for a sequel. After years of failed proposals, a new Superman movie finally hit theaters in 2013: Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. It was a hit, raking in $668 million worldwide and giving Warner the confidence to use it as the starting point for its new DC Comics-based “shared universe” of interconnected films, the next of which is Batman v Superman. But at what price to his soul did Superman get this box-office victory? Man of Steel is a very dark movie. The visuals play out with gritty, color-drained filters. Superman spends much of the movie moping over a dead parent and wondering what the point of everything is. In the end, he has a horrifically violent battle with a fellow Kryptonian that levels Metropolis. He even grimly concludes that the only way to end that fight is to kill his rival (something the comics versions of Superman and Batman never do). The whole endeavor shows us a Superman who is brooding, angry, and pessimistic. In other words, it seems like the only way to do a successful Superman movie is to make it feel like a Batman movie. With Batman v Superman, they’ve just made another one.
The Batman perspective has some things going for it, of course: The world can indeed look pretty dark, as our collective anxieties and casually apocalyptic political mood testify daily. But it is also not the 1970s or ’80s anymore, and new threats like ISIS and climate change aside, the urban hellscapes which gave rise to the Dark Knight are distant memories at this point. Which does make you wonder: How much is the cynicism of Batman a logical response to a terrifying future, and how much a self-perpetuating worldview with a locomotive logic of its own? And then there’s the cost to comic-booknarrative: If Batman and Superman are going to keep fighting, could we maybe let the Man of Steel win? Because if the political worldview of superhero fiction is going to hang in the balance with each battle, the least we could ask for is a little genuine suspense about which one of the do-gooders is going to come out on top.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Batman and Superman
Politics, mostly. And American empire.
e Batman and Superman allies or rivals, at their core? They’re definitely notenemies, and that’s only partly because they’re both superheroes. For long stretches, particularly when the characters were new, they had a deeply chummy relationship, with Batman like a non-superpowered Superman — a lesser, but cheerful, do-gooder who also fought for truth, justice, and the American way. (It was kind of adorable, with Batman almost acting like a kid who smilingly looked up on his star-athlete older brother.)
And yet, for the past 30 years, the relationship has been punctuated by a series of spectacular fights — a gruesome tussle over ideology in 1986’s graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a dramatic dust-up due to mind control in the 2003 comic-book story line “Hush,” and, of course, an upcoming gladiator match in this weekend’s big-screen tentpole Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. At this point, nobody really remembers that early, sunny friendship — when it comes to superheroes, pure friendship’s boring. Batman and Superman are both, of course, good guys, but what we so often want to see is them fighting.
But why? Why are fans so desperate to see superheroes in conflict that they urge superhero writers to employ absurd narrative contrivances like mind control or alternate universes to make happen what would otherwise be vanishingly unlikely fights (a tactic used well over a dozen times in the history of Batman-Superman tales)? One big answer is no answer at all — whowouldn’t want to see them fight? Every comics geek’s inner adolescent is perpetually asking, What’s the point of having two heroes if you aren’t also going to game out who’d win? As comics critic Chris Sims put it in a column on the topic, “When you have characters and all you see them doing is winning, it’s natural to wonder who would win harder if they ever had to compete. For that question, Superman and Batman make the perfect contenders.”
But we also want to see them fight because, to an unusual degree even for comic books, the fights mean something. That is, they are about something — or some things. Namely: how to make a better world, with Superman operating through hope and inspiration, and Batman through fear and intimidation. As the villain Lex Luthor puts it in the new movie, it’s “god versus man, day versus night.”
Let’s start with “god versus man.” Superman is an alien — which is to say, celestial — creature, born on another planet but here completely alone, completely singular in his powers, which have at times included feats like reversing the spin of the Earth to turn back time. Batman is not just a man but a broken one, who inhabits a broken universe, his parents killed by a petty criminal and raised in an era of rapid urban decay — “an old-money billionaire, a human, an orphan who has seen the worst of the world and let it all but turn him to stone,” in the words of critic Meg Downey. Superman, by contrast, “is a farm boy, an alien, raised with a stable adoptive family, who has seen the worst of the world and let it teach him a profound sense of empathy.”
Which leads us to “day versus night.” Superman has faith that humanity will tend toward goodness if you give it trust and hope; Batman lacks that faith and believes the world only gets in line if you grab it by the throat and never let go. The former spends his contemplative moments hoping for the best; the latter spends those moments vigilantly preparing for the worst. But this contrast isn’t just characterological; it’s also historical. The icons were created almost simultaneously, but Superman is unmistakably a figure of his early years — the 1940s and 1950s, an era of buoyant, blinkered wartime and postwar consensus (at least as it might have been felt by most white, boyish comic-book readers), when it seemed appropriate to deploy a godlike do-gooder to do things like help cats out of trees or return purses to de-pursed Metropolis women. (One of his early nicknames was the Man of Tomorrow, after all.) Batman came of age later, beginning in the 1970s, the era of American malaise and urban decay, using cynicism as a weapon for good and training his sights on a Gotham City so broken it often looked like a war zone (often fighting super-criminals who hoped not just to plunder the city but overturn any lingering faith its denizens had in the virtue of compassion and social order). Which of these two worldviews provides the better way to live a good and productive life? You can do both, of course — just as you can love both characters and write them in such a way where they get along with one another. But readers don’t just want that — readers want to see the conflict.
And, in a real-world sense, most of them are on one side. Today, Batman is a far more popular character than Superman, and he typically wins whenever they go toe-to-toe in a story — which is, of course, ridiculous, considering he’s just an earthling, but that only makes it all the more remarkable as a reflection of reader preferences and prejudices. Outside of comics and movies, too, his worldview predominates, in the form of a perennially apocalyptic vision of the near future. In all ways, Batman is winning in the battle of Batman vs. Superman, which is especially strange given how little New York today, say, looks like the Gotham of The Dark Knight Returns. But we’ve been living so long in Batman’s universe that it can be hard to remember his worldview didn’t always have the upper hand.
Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, a “bully for peace.”
He was also an instant sensation. DC Comics knew it had a hit on its hands, but wanted a bigger one — which means they needed their star to be as family-friendly as possible. As comics historian Gerard Jones recounts in his chronicle of the era, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, DC exec Jack Liebowitz saw the nascent Man of Steel as “something that could be built and sustained here, a kind of entertainment that kids liked better than pulps and would continue to if given reason to keep coming back.” Accordingly, in 1940, he and editor Whitney Ellsworth drew up a pristine code of conduct for superheroes that, among other tenets, forbade DC heroes from knowingly killing. It was not unlike the onset of the Hays Code in Hollywood, and by the time U.S. soldiers were being sent off to war in 1942, Superman had become cheery, lovable, and status quo-respecting.
Those were not adjectives you could use to describe the initial depictions of Batman. He was first published in DC’s 1939 comic Detective Comics No. 27, the creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. At first, he was a “weird figure of the dark” and an “avenger of evil,” as one of the early stories put it. Unlike Superman, he had no special powers other than being exceedingly wealthy. He was more or less a rip-off of pulp hero The Shadow and spent his time in the darkness, attacking — and occasionally even murdering — evildoers. But, like Superman, he was also an instant smash — which meant the same image-buffering fate. In his new history of Batman, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, Weldon tells of newspaper editorials and church bulletins railing against dark, violent comic books.
As a result, the editorial leadership pushed Batman out of the shadows, making him brighter and poppier, and even turning the weird loner into a kind of doting father figure to a scrappy young ward named Robin (a relationship that could’ve really gotten dark and weird in different hands). “Adding Robin was no mere cosmetic tweak,” writes Weldon, “it was a fundamental and permanent change that placed Batman in a new role of protector and provider.” He stopped killing. He worked cheerfully with the Gotham police. He walked around in broad daylight. The Batman and Superman brands were more or less in sync.
Of course, Superman was a much more natural family-friendly sell than Batman, because comics writers couldn’t quite eliminate all of the darkness from the character of the Dark Knight, as later they’d have trouble trying to turn Superman into something approaching an antihero: One of these characters was a benevolently powerful space-god, the other a weirdo orphan wearing bat ears. This probably, at least in part, explains Superman’s bigger stature through the 1940s — his persona was a near-perfect vessel for imperious American confidence and social order. But Batman had his clean-cut pitch, too: He may not have had superpowers, but he was a kind of icon of self-improvement, since he had willed himself to reach the peak of human physical potential (well, willed and spent) and had fought a delightful gallery of enemies.
Oddly enough, it took DC a long time to figure out that these guys were two great tastes that could taste great together. Superman and Batman first appeared in an image together on the cover of a 1940 promotional tie-in comic for that year’s World’s Fair, but the interior pages showed no story where the two of them interacted. In 1941, there was a comic in which they stood side by side to help with a fund-raising drive for war orphans, but they had no dialogue with each other. That same year, they started appearing alongside one another on the covers of a new comics series calledWorld’s Finest, and on those covers, you saw them wordlessly playing baseball or going skiing — but once you opened the comic, you saw no stories where they actually hung out.
John Wayne and more like Dirty Harry.
Must There Be a Superman?” and saw the Man of Tomorrow realizing that he can’t fix structural problems like poverty and oppression. “You stand so proud,Superman,” read the opening narration, “in your strength and your power — with a pride that has found its way into the soul of every man who has stood above other men! But as with all men ofpower, you must eventually question yourself and your use of thatpower.” Wait, were we talking about Kal-El of Krypton, or the United States of America?
As Americans began to distrust power, so too did Batman begin to distrust Superman. They still fought side by side in the pages ofWorld’s Finest and on the roster of DC’s premier super-team, the Justice League, but there were cracks in the façade. In 1973’sWorld’s Finest No. 220, written by Bob Haney and drawn by Dick Dillin, the two are trying to crack a case, and the Kryptonian is turning up his nose at their villain’s quest for “illegal revenge.” “I can understand revenge,” Batman says with a condescending scowl. “I took it myself against Joe Chill, my parents’ killer! It’s a human emotion — revenge! Trouble with you, friend, is you’re not human!” The ticked-off Superman punches a tree and asks, “Who’s not human!?”
An ascendant Batman and Batman-ist worldview made concrete conflict almost inevitable, and matters came to a boiling point in 1983’s Batman and the Outsiders No. 1, written by Mike W. Barr and drawn by Jim Aparo. During a meeting of the Justice League, Batman declares that he’s had enough of the Superman-led squad’s law-abiding approach to saving the world. He says he’s going to break international regulations to rescue someone and when Superman tries to stop him, a furious Batman slaps his old friend’s hand away and says he’s resigning. Superman tries to appeal to the better angels of Batman’s nature: “We’ve always served as an example to the others —” But the Dark Knight cuts him off. “I never asked for that, Superman!” he barks. “I never wanted men toimitate me — only fear me!”
Nowhere was their ideological conflict more pointed than in the most famous Batman story ever told, which is also the greatest Batman-Superman fight story ever told: writer/artist Frank Miller’s 1986 masterwork The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a dense tale set in a dystopian Gotham City tattooed with graffiti and beset by violent youths. Miller had been living in New York during its Koch-era nadir, getting mugged and seeing the tabloids scream about urban decay and the vigilantism of men like Bernhard Goetz. When Miller was commissioned to write a Batman tale, he decided to make Bruce Wayne what he called a “god of vengeance”— a pretty good description of Dirty Harry, actually, or other iconic antiheroes, like Travis Bickle and Rambo, who had already passed into American myth. “If he fights,” Miller wrote in his notes for Batman, “it’s in a way that leaves them too roughed up to talk.” His ideal Batman “plays more on guilt and PRIMAL fears.”
The result was, indeed, steeped in primal fear. In The Dark Knight Returns, an aging Bruce comes out of retirement and goes on a Death Wish-esque crusade to clean up the streets by any means necessary. He has also come to hate the sunshiny outlook of Superman, a figure who — in Miller’s depiction — has a naïve faith that it’s morning in America. Miller’s Superman has made a Faustian pact with the government, taking orders from President Reagan. (Well, he’s not technically called Reagan, but any reader will recognize the fictional commander-in-chief’s wrinkled smile and folksy chatter.) “I gave them my obedience,” Clark thinks to himself while destroying some Soviet weaponry. “No, I don’t like it. But I get to save lives — and the media stays quiet.” When Batman leads an army of vigilantes during a night of chaos in Gotham, Superman is ordered to take down his erstwhile ally.
In political terms, Superman would be a conservative and Batman would be a radical
The fight that followed was the most perversely inventive one in the canon. Superman arrives in Gotham and Batman completely beats the shit out of him. As it turns out, Superman may be strong, but Batman has two advantages: wealth and paranoia. His distrust of the Metropolis Marvel led him to come up with a cunning plan in preparation for the battle, and he can throw as many toys into it as he likes. He fires missiles at Superman; he wears a massive battle-suit that he plugs into the city’s electrical grid, then punches Supermanhard; he has a pal hit the Man of Steel with some synthetic Kryptonite (Superman’s historic weakness); and he ultimately wins, knocking Superman to a standstill. All the while, he takes pride in hurting Superman and meditates on their differing worldviews. “You sold us out, Clark,” he thinks to himself. “Just like your parents taught you to. My parents taught me a different lesson — lying on this street — shaking in deep shock — dying for no reason at all — they showed me that the world only makes sense when you force it to.”
A similar exchange punctuates writer/artist John Byrne’s miniseries The Man of Steel, another influential recast of the Batman-Superman relationship, published the same year as The Dark Knight Returns (though less well-known). Issue No. 3 chronicled a wholly rebooted version of the heroes’ first meeting, devoid of the charming cruise-ship meet-up. Instead, the two of them, early in their careers, join together to catch a criminal — but they immediately question each other’s approach to the task. Batman beats up a lowlife thug in an alleyway for information; Superman finds Batman right afterward and calls him an “outlaw” and an “inhuman monster.” They decide to focus on taking down the villain, and, as they part ways, they reach a tense détente. “Well, I still won’t say I fully approve of your methods, Batman,” Superman says, flying away, “and I’m going to be keeping an eye on you, to make certain you don’t blow it for the rest of us … but good luck.”
But let’s get back to The Dark Knight Returns. “In political terms, Superman would be a conservative and Batman would be a radical,” Miller said when I interviewed him a few months ago. Miller himself identifies as a libertarian, so his protagonist’s distrust of power makes all the sense in the world. But the political question of the book is, in my view, only a symptom of a larger philosophical matter. This Batman is utterly without faith in anything beyond his immediate control. Sure, he can trust his butler, his sidekick, and his weaponry — but that’s about it. Everyone and everything else needs to be throttled and bent into shape, in order to wrestle with a world otherwise almost beyond repair. What’s more, Batman hates Superman because Superman does have faith: faith in the government, faith in Reaganite prosperity, faith that Batman might be able to see reason and give up. In Batman’s eyes, these are failings.
No one had ever before attempted to show these two being in such opposition, and so filled with bloodlust. But the crazy experiment was a massive success. For the first time, Batman comics started consistently outselling Superman ones, but the transformation went beyond mere sales. “It’s difficult to overstate the influenceThe Dark Knight Returns has had on comics and the culture that has risen around them,” Weldon writes. Thanks to Miller, the vision of Batman as a pitch-black bruiser and schemer was carved into the rock of superhero fandom. In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batmanhit theaters and, while it lacked the deep gothic mood of later screen hits like the influential Batman: The Animated Series and Christopher Nolan films that followed, it offered many of the dark, angry pleasures that Dark Knight Returns had surfaced — and it was a box-office smash unlike anything a DC character had ever seen.
Very few tales since then have dared to put the two heroes so viciously at odds as they were in Dark Knight, but every story of conflict since is shadowed by Miller’s and Byrne’s characterizations. In 1988’s Batman story line “A Death in the Family” — written by Jim Starlin and drawn by Jim Aparo — Robin is brutally murdered by the Joker and a complicated diplomatic situation makes any Bat-revenge legally tricky. Clark flies in to tell Bruce to stay in line: “There’s nothing you can do here,” he says. Bruce fires off a massive punch to Clark’s jaw, which of course doesn’t even bruise the Man of Steel. “Feel better now?” Superman asks, frowning.
Even when they got along, after Dark Knight, there was often a steely sense that thingscould go awry between them. A 1990 Batman-Superman crossover story called “Dark Knight Over Metropolis” dealt with the theft of a ring made out of Kryptonite, and at the end, Supes opts to give the ring to Batsy for safekeeping, just in case someone evil ever takes over Superman’s mind and he needs to be taken down. “I want the means to stop me,” Clark says, “to be in the hands of a man I can trust with my life.” It’s a sweet moment, but also a grim one. Indeed, for all the talk of trust, Superman was dourly preparing for the worst and acting out of fear. In other words, much as Batman had acted like Superman in the middle of the century, we had somehow entered a world where Superman was acting like Batman.
Perhaps more important, the Batman mentality — paranoid, fatalistic, violent — was setting the pace for superhero fiction generally. Superman was killed by a rampaging monster in 1992. One year later, a brutal villain snapped Bruce Wayne’s spine, and a younger, more vicious successor took over the Bat-mantle. Superman came back from the dead and the original Batman took back the cape and cowl, but they still fought increasingly apocalyptic threats that required harsh pragmatism to beat. The best-selling comics across the industry in the early- to mid-’90s were violent and oozing with themes as dark as the colors. America wasn’t as decrepit and frightening as it had been in prior decades, especially in its cities, but in an age of increasing cynicism, Batman felt far moreau courant than the Metropolis Marvel. As a new century dawned, conflicts between the two became more frequent in comics and, in nearly every one, Batman kept winning.
There was 2000’s Justice League story line “Tower of Babel,” written by Mark Waid and drawn by Howard Porter, in which we learned that Batman had detailed and brilliant plans to take down every member of the League, just in case — including Superman. There was the 2003 alternate-history tale Superman: Red Son, written by Mark Millar and drawn by Dave Johnson and Kilian Plunkett, which imagined a world where Kal-El of Krypton landed in the Soviet Union and became a Stalinist dictator — only to be challenged by an anarchist Russian Batman who uses his superior wit to knock the snot out of Soviet Supes before killing himself with a suicide bomb. There was that same year’sBatman No. 612, written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Jim Lee, where Batman uses that old Kryptonite ring to knock a mind-controlled Superman onto his butt. There were 2014’s Batman Nos. 35 and 36, written by Scott Snyder and drawn by Greg Capullo, wherein Superman gets mind-controlled yet again and Batsy spits a tiny pellet of Kryptonite-like material into Supes’s eye to put him down. “Who wins in a fight?” Batman muses to himself in that last story. “The answer is always the same. Neither of us.”
It’s a nice rhetorical flourish, but in the real world, Batman iswinning. Not only do creators nowadays think stories work better when he comes out on top, but he also outsells Superman on the comics stands and — much more important — at the box office. Way back in the earliest days of big-budget superhero filmmaking, 1978’s Superman: The Movie was a sensation — but its sequels showed massively declining returns and that incarnation of the franchise was canned after 1987’s loathedSuperman IV: The Quest for Peace. Two years later, Batman struck big with the aforementioned Burton flick, which got two hit sequels: 1992’s Batman Returns and 1995’s Batman Forever. The failure of 1997’sBatman & Robin put DC Comics-based movies in the wilderness for a while, but it was Batman who led them back to the Promised Land. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Beginshit theaters in 2005 and was a surprise critical success, but the real action came with its two sequels. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises each made more than a billion dollars worldwide — numbers that were unthinkable for a superhero flick just a decade earlier. As many film critics noted, in the age of the War on Terror, this Batman seemed to be the hero we deserved.
Superman, on the other hand, couldn’t get airborne. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returnshit theaters in 2006 and it was as sunny, colorful, and hopeful as you’d want a Superman story to be. But Warner Bros. was disappointed in its performance and cancelled plans for a sequel. After years of failed proposals, a new Superman movie finally hit theaters in 2013: Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. It was a hit, raking in $668 million worldwide and giving Warner the confidence to use it as the starting point for its new DC Comics-based “shared universe” of interconnected films, the next of which is Batman v Superman. But at what price to his soul did Superman get this box-office victory? Man of Steel is a very dark movie. The visuals play out with gritty, color-drained filters. Superman spends much of the movie moping over a dead parent and wondering what the point of everything is. In the end, he has a horrifically violent battle with a fellow Kryptonian that levels Metropolis. He even grimly concludes that the only way to end that fight is to kill his rival (something the comics versions of Superman and Batman never do). The whole endeavor shows us a Superman who is brooding, angry, and pessimistic. In other words, it seems like the only way to do a successful Superman movie is to make it feel like a Batman movie. With Batman v Superman, they’ve just made another one.
The Batman perspective has some things going for it, of course: The world can indeed look pretty dark, as our collective anxieties and casually apocalyptic political mood testify daily. But it is also not the 1970s or ’80s anymore, and new threats like ISIS and climate change aside, the urban hellscapes which gave rise to the Dark Knight are distant memories at this point. Which does make you wonder: How much is the cynicism of Batman a logical response to a terrifying future, and how much a self-perpetuating worldview with a locomotive logic of its own? And then there’s the cost to comic-booknarrative: If Batman and Superman are going to keep fighting, could we maybe let the Man of Steel win? Because if the political worldview of superhero fiction is going to hang in the balance with each battle, the least we could ask for is a little genuine suspense about which one of the do-gooders is going to come out on top.
Cool and to be fair because i know that's the intent of this post! Let's try and post an article on why Ironman and Captain America and the rest of the bunch need to fight each other for research purposes. Furthermore, In good taste, let's post it in one of the Marvel threads. BTW, Seems like a lot of folks are interested in the premise of this article and movie that you and others have labelled as being "quite" with "very little buzz." For the record, Starwars hit 70%. I not even going to waste my time and post the google search trend for the past 3 years on this "quite" with "very little buzz movie." It's one thing to not really like DC or their "trend" in movies etc. But to see folks give 1-star(aka Roadrage) just for the hell of it. Post every single negative article they can find etc is just plain ol sad.
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RoadRage gave this thread one star
Like I said really sad man. Especially coming from a member who's admitted he doesn't really know the genre that well. But is willing to go out of his way to give a thread a 1-star just because of what exactly?
See this is what i like to see and hear. You've been on record as not really like MoS all that much for certain reasons. Yet, you're open and willing because your a comic book fan, first and foremost, to say hey i've hear good things and I'm going to check it out! Personally, I hope you like! There are a few people that said they didn't like MoS but they really liked this one.
Curious to get your thoughts when you do!
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I'm looking forward to seeing it, doubt I'll pay for it though. Might get a free ticket or stream it. Lolz, ain't getting my money!
I hope, however you see it, translates the cinematography! Which i hear is exceptional and one of the best looking movies to date.
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I might just go to the theaters because I won't be able to log in online without dodging spoilers
i have my doubts about the hype.
but what i have read is that if you like man of steel you will like this.
i liked man of steel. i think it is the most realistic depiction of what would happen if a 'superman' came to planet earth.
i have purposely not watched any trailers (except for the initial teaser a couple of years ago) so i am going in blind. i actually prefer to watch trailers after the movie now because too often trailers spoil the movies lately.
so i will do my best to keep my expectations low. when star wars came out with all of they hype i was expecting something that i did not receive. so imma go in skeptical this time.
but what i have read is that if you like man of steel you will like this.
i liked man of steel. i think it is the most realistic depiction of what would happen if a 'superman' came to planet earth.
i have purposely not watched any trailers (except for the initial teaser a couple of years ago) so i am going in blind. i actually prefer to watch trailers after the movie now because too often trailers spoil the movies lately.
so i will do my best to keep my expectations low. when star wars came out with all of they hype i was expecting something that i did not receive. so imma go in skeptical this time.
this is primarily the reason i watch shows and movies as soon as possible nowadays. too many idiots get their rocks off by spoiling shit. even the headlines on news sites do that dumb shit. it pisses me off.
Amen to the bolded part. A lot of people weren't happy with the massive amount of destruction in MOS, but really, what would you expect when two superpowered aliens are doing battle in the middle of a huge city, especially one who gives no fucks about human life whatsoever.
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