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Another is Superman’s arch enemy, Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who is no longer the avuncular businessman played by Gene Hackman, but a long-haired, brattish hipster with disturbing hints of mental instability. One is a strong-willed senator (Holly Hunter) who insists that everything should be subject to the will of the people, up to and including omnipotent extra-terrestrials. Three people in particular are perturbed by the alien in their midst. Whether or not you take superheroes seriously, there is no doubt that the director does. Batman v Superman is too overblown and cacophonous for you to care too much about what happens, but it does make you admire Snyder’s feverish energy in taking the genre to bombastic, apocalyptic extremes.

Indeed, BvS feels like the grand culmination of everything he has tried in his previous films, from the stylised brutal violence of 300 to the fantastical dream sequences of Sucker Punch to the subversion of superhero tropes that was there in Watchmen (which, eagle-eyed nerds will note, is referenced in a scrawl of graffiti). But if you are willing to buy into a mean and moody examination of “meta-humans”, as the film calls them, then Snyder is undeniably the man for the job.

And there is a colour palette that ranges all the way from black to dingy grey.Ĭonsidering that super-powered crime fighters don’t exist, and that there’s no pressing need to fret about their effect on civilisation as we know it, it might be nice if someone would make a superhero film intended to thrill young viewers rather them give them nightmares. There is thunderously operatic music by Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL. There are discussions of philosophy and theology, or building legacies and losing parents. From their perspective, which deliberately evokes footage of the World Trade Center attacks, Superman doesn’t seem like the saviour of humanity, but a living weapon of mass destruction, hence the questions which run through the rest of the film.Ĭo-written by David S Goyer, who also wrote both Man of Steel and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Batman v Superman combines the fraught, multi-stranded plotting of the Batman films and the smoke-filled warzones favoured by Snyder. The twist is that the conflict is seen from street level, where the unfortunate citizens of Metropolis are forced to run and cower as shattered skyscrapers shower them with debris.

It couldn’t be more expansively grim if it was a four-part documentary on the bubonic plague.Ī sequel to Snyder’s Man of Steel, it starts by restaging that film’s climactic battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and his Kryptonian opponents. Superhero blockbusters are a lot more earnest than they used to be, and none more so than Zack Snyder’s two-and-a-half-hour epic. It sounds as if it should be a rollicking children’s cartoon, and it probably would have been, four or five decades ago. As the title suggests, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice hinges on a fight between a masked private detective who has machine guns mounted in his car and a flying alien who wears a red cape and shoots laser beams from his eyes.