BvS Dawn of Justice review

Understand this.

   I was Batman fan, then a DC fan, now I am an advocate of COMICS.

   I grew up when "grim n gritty" re-imaginings were a thing, Superman remained noble in death and there was a whole experiment to see how readers reacted to a Batman that killed. They didn't like it. I understand the core and history of these characters.

   Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice is better than Man of Steel.

   Mainly because it didn't piss me off as much. It's pompous, boring as fuck and virtually monotone. There's about five minutes more action than the trailers, it takes waaay to long to do anything interesting and the actors look trapped by their contracts.

   Cavil is just as earnest and dull as he was in MoS, Afleck isn't bad but only by virtue that all he has to do is wander about with a distant look on his face, Gal Gadot is quite good, but you've seen most of her screen time in the trailers, Eisenberg is fucking horrible and never stops trying to be the Joker, the rest are pretty good, especially Laurence Fishbourne as Perry White. Jeremy Irons is a delight as Alfred, but so under used it's tragic.

One facial expression to rule them all.

   The plot is over complicated and full of redundancies, for example the desert scene near the beginning, don't need it. The scene would have been fine if Superman had been even remotely heroic in the previous movie, thus justifying trying to discredit him. The destruction of Metropolis should be enough to make the world wonder about an unaccountable god. The story does make a sort of sense but it's too aware of its own enormity and moves at a glacial pace.

you have two choices, it's raining...

   The action is SO dull. There's glimpses of cool, the gas wearing off, the heat vision, the Batman warehouse scene that mostly appeared in a TV spot. The problems come from the quick editing and constant shot changes and everything takes place at night with cyan or sepia highlights, it's like a Victorian rave filmed by an epileptic.

or on fire.

    The biggest problem though is that what it lifts from the comic it clearly doesn't understand. Snyder is just a visual director and Goyer needs a much stronger director/producer to rain in his utter bullshit writing.It's a twelve year old's take on Batman, and that's going to lead into part two of this review.

  There's also the set up for the Justice League. The four other league members are ticked off a checklist and inorganically shoe horned in. The "dream sequence" is a bit cool though but, dammit, that's not the right actor.

   The worst part is this should have been a momentous, celebration of a long standing comic tradition; superheroes meet, fight, make up, defeat the bad guy but it labors every beat like it's a rowing drum on a slave boat instead of pounding out the baseline in the greatest nightclub ever.

   It's overlong, over stuffed and boring but it does at the very least build on Man of Steel and have a few moments of genuine heart. Moments, in a two hour fifteen minute slog through a miserable colour pallet. Give it another few movies and WB might get it right soon.

   The music cues are fucking weird to.

Taking it up the R's

Well this is the inaugural blog to Four Colour Celluloid and I'd like to launch it off the back of the most recent squirting from Fox, Deadpool.

Is it good? Yes, there, review over. Will it effect the output of Fox and other movie studios determined to push their comic properties into three dimensions? It already has with WB threatening us with an R rated Bluray edition of Batfleck v Space Jesus: Dawn of Franchise, then there's Wolverine 3 and X-Force receiving R rated treatment for the big screen. Those latter two actually lend themselves to the mature content crowd, but bvsdoj just doesn't, even on Bluray. It's Batman and Superman for fucks sake, yes there have been mature comic stories told using these characters, but they've been few and far between and rarely approach the level of violence and horror on display in films like Deadpool. 

   James Gunn put the dangers of R rated success far better than I can, that with inappropriate use it could potentially kill a film but for me the fact that WB and Fox are so intent on pleasing an existing audience, who will see their films regardless, they are ignoring the next generation of geeks that will help maintain their studios in the future. Man of Steel was two "fucks" and a stab wound away from an R rating and that was thematically awful, pushing it further presents a very big problem; kids will completely lose out on the two biggest superheroes in history.

   Batman and Superman are at their core, power fantasies for young folk, yes they can both be stretched around many frameworks to produce interesting stories for all ages but making a cape from a towel and pretending to fly was a highlight of my childhood and while today's kids will do the same thing on a game console they will be less inclined to buy a game based on a film they can't see, same with the toys. I doubt parents will be inclined to buy the toys for them either.

    Not that the merchandising is the soul goal of the game but in a child's eyes it's all a part of the fun we adults have long forgotten and contributes to the momentum needed to get a new generation of readers into comics. WB seem to look on past successes, which are all the "grim n' gritty" bat flicks and think that's all there is to it. Man of Steel doesn't tickle the right balls and divides audiences so WB panic and rather than fix the mistakes made in a sequel, stick Batman in it, and Wonder Woman and EVERYONE and make an uber dark, violent, grim and...probably un-watchable piece of drek, I dread finding out.

   Yes, before the whining starts I am fully aware that not every superhero is a PG-13, Blade, The Crow, Kick-Ass...Kick-Ass 2 and probably so on have all been successes, but their source material is appropriate to an eighteen rating, Superman and Batman should be accessible to everyone, not just the numpties who think swearing and punching justifies their continued enjoyment of their adolescent heroes.

   So now movie studios...well WB will look at Batman's positive responses from the test screening of bvsdoj and the success of Deadpool, add two and two and come up with fifteen, completely missing the point that the films are an entry level into the wider world of geekery, and merchandise and moola of course, but more importantly giving children the idea that a man can fly. 

   The bigger irony being the 14 year olds who enjoy spoiling shit for people on facebook won't actually be able to get to see the films they wish were R rated.