More Batman v Superman Reaction

Despite overwhelmingly negative reviews and mixed fan reaction, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice earned a massive $424 million dollars worldwide this weekend, with $170 million of that coming from North America. This total is somewhat influenced by the fact that BvS opened in more countries simultaneously than is typical of a big budget blockbuster movie, but there's no denying its massive success. It's fairly certain now that it will join the billion-dollar club, meeting WB's hopes and expectations for the lead-in to their other franchise movies.

Amidst all the hate the movie is receiving (of which I am a participant), it's easy to forget that many movies that get terrible reviews end up with massive box office totals. Many of us had become so accustomed to the overlap of quality and financial success in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that it was easy to forget that movies like Transformers and the Star Wars prequels earned huge box office returns. Mainstream moviegoers usually don't care what critics say, and are looking for a different kind of escapist entertainment for their dollar. These are the silent majority, who don't post online about their satisfaction with a movie, but show up based on trailers and their own visceral instinct of what they want to see.

There's no denying that BvS is full of pretty special effects to look at, though I wonder whether average audiences found themselves bored in the first hour of the film, which is almost entirely devoid of 'splosions. I also wonder, for those who don't actually analyze films or study the craft of moviemaking, if they found themselves not enjoying the movie as much as they hoped, even if they aren't able to articulate why. Or, on the other hand, do they just love it despite all its flaws because they're looking for nothing more than a passing adrenaline rush fueled by effects and violence?

It would be arrogant for me to suggest that positive reaction to a movie that's reviled by critics and hardcore fans is "wrong" or "idiotic." I do my best to avoid that inclination. My dissatisfaction with a movie shouldn't be the standard by which everyone else's tastes are measured. And while I find BvS to be a deeply flawed movie devoid of the spirit of the comic books and iconic characters from which it is sprung, I guess a lot of people don't see it that way.

Is there anything to like about Batman v Superman, besides Wonder Woman as I mentioned in my last post? I guess. I liked Jeremy Irons' Alfred just fine, even though I prefer Michael Caine. I liked some of the imagery associated with Bruce Wayne, such as the design of the Batcave and the burned-down Wayne Manor. The actual Batman v Superman fight was good-- Zack Snyder has no problem creating incredible imagery and action sequences-- despite being such a small part of a movie that's billed as being all about that rivalry. And I liked some of the soundtrack, Wonder Woman's theme in particular.

My biggest regret is that the huge amount of money that BvS is going to make will convince WB that they are on the right track-- that Zack Snyder is the right creative overseer of the DC Cinematic Universe, that the dark tone of these films is the way to go, and that stuffing these movies with light shows while story takes a back seat to action equals a successful franchise. I'm curious to see how much those elements bleed over into the films that are not directed by Snyder, such as Wonder Woman. In the Marvel movies, there is a balance between individual directorial control and a mandated adherence to the overall vision for the franchise, which has occasionally resulted in directors being ousted from the films.

Because I'm not a cynic at heart, I will continue to take each of these movies as their own entities and approach them with an open mind. It's safe to say my enthusiasm has been severely dampened, but I'm still hopeful about Wonder Woman in particular, and as a DC fan, I'll be there for Suicide Squad and the rest of them.

Ten Reasons to Hate Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

1. The whole damn thing is just too dark. Not a new complaint about the DC cinematic universe, to be sure, and I grant that it can't be an easy thing to balance the presence of Batman and Superman in the same universe. You don't want to change Bruce's personality or style, but as part of the Justice League, he has to interact with larger-than-life heroes on a grander scale than any of his escapades in Gotham City. The Superman of the comics has more sunshine and unfettered optimism in one pinky than Batman has in his entire Batcave. But since Batman has been the most successful DC character on film to date, board-room logic dictates that everything be dragged down to his level instead of vice versa. The end result is Superman gazing with disgust at the dreary world around him, looking more out of place than Eddie Valiant in Toontown and with far less hilarious results.

2. Superman hates himself and so does the rest of the world. How dare you save countless innocent lives, Superman, how dare you! We must hold congressional hearings about your good deeds and spend upwards of 30 minutes of screen time pondering the contradiction of an all-powerful man living in a democratic society. We also invite you, Superman, to spend another 30 minutes doing the same, looking down and complaining to Lois or your mother about how doing the right thing is so hard. You must never smile during these proceedings. The good deeds you do must all be in slow-motion montages in which you look positively miserable as you look down from the sky at those who worship you, because Bryan Singer was being too subtle when he had you stabbed in the rib with Kryptonite.

3. Most of the movie feels like a trailer. I'm not just snidely referring to its Bay-esque editing and pacing. It plays largely like just a setup for Justice League and the rest of the upcoming DCCU. Wonder Woman, whose solo movie is next in the pipe after August's Suicide Squad, gets special attention, but even fellow Leaguers Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg get snippets long enough to qualify as film teasers. One of the most grating new phenomena in movies is that trailers have become events in themselves: there are now actually premiere dates of trailers, teasers for trailers, and commercials on YouTube before the commerc-- uh, trailer starts. Now, we have the first full-on movie-length trailer.

4. The first hour is almost intolerable. The movie is so overwrought that it has to spend a full hour, at least, before any action of significance takes place. The basic premise is simple-- Lex discovers Kryptonite, Batman wants to steal the Kryptonite in order to kill Superman. But they have to give the other characters something to do in the meantime, so Clark Kent investigates Batman while Lois Lane investigates Lex Luthor, Alfred investigates stuff for Bruce, Lex investigates Superman's ship and Zod's dead body, Wonder Woman investigates everybody, and Perry White resents all of this investigation (like ya do, as a news editor). There's a lot of file hacking and downloading, so much that one character literally falls asleep on screen while the downloading is taking place. This is what happens when a movie is simultaneously trying to apologize for its own prequel, set up an entire franchise of sequels, and be entertaining in its own right at the same time-- though, that last part comes across as an afterthought.

5. The dream sequences. Oh god, the dream sequences. It's hard to describe how bad these are. It's possible they're even worse than the dreary, self-important introspection that makes up the rest of the film's first-act quagmire. They serve absolutely no purpose other than to insert action sequences where the narrative structure wouldn't otherwise allow, and to once again foreshadow future movies. But the viewer doesn't care about the outcome of a fight that it knows isn't real. Once you get fooled by the first dream (a cheap jump scare that would be better suited to the Insidious franchise), you don't get fooled again. Of course, if I were really cynical, I could also say that the dreams existed so they could sell "Desert Batman" action figures. But I would never say that.

6. Lex Luthor has no motivation other than "I'm crazy and rich." Lex is a pliable villain. He started his career in comics as a mad scientist, then became a scheming CEO under Byrne's pen in the 1980s, and later morphed into a kinda-good-guy who was actually out to help humanity but just had a personal grudge against Superman. Jesse Eisenberg plays Luthor like a mentally unstable Mark Zuckerberg (go figure) whose favorite memory of college was that Philosophy Gen Ed he had to take. I don't understand his endgame in pitting Batman against Superman, or creating Doomsday. After all, if Doomsday survived the fight against Superman, where would that leave him? Lex isn't the Joker-- he never wanted chaos for chaos' sake-- but "crazy" is a nice, lazy way to motivate your villain, and that's the road taken here.

7. Batman straight-up murders people in this movie. Has he killed people before? Sure. It's a common criticism of Tim Burton's Batman movies. There's the famous "I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you" line from Batman Begins. And everyone knows he's made a handful of exceptions in comics over the years. But by and large, Batman doesn't kill. And he certainly doesn't smash villains' cars into one another as their mangled corpses flail about inside, throw their own grenades back at them or use Batmobile-mounted machine guns to turn entire structures into butter. BvS' Batman is basically the Punisher with a billion dollars. If that isn't distasteful enough for you, simply from a thematic perspective it robs him of any moral high ground he would like to stand on when comparing himself to the city-leveling Big Boy Scout.

8. When it finally goes down, the big fight is anticlimactic. In a movie called Batman v Superman, the "v" part only amounts to about 15 minutes. Now, I'm not one of the fanboys who's been salivating over the prospect of a titanic clash between these two characters. Personally, I like my heroes to be on the same side, which is why I don't much care for the premise of Captain America: Civil War either (although I know how that one turns out too, and I'm sure it will run circles around this disaster). We all know these things end up with the disparate heroes coming together in common purpose, but it's clear from speaking to many fans that the Batman/Superman matchup was their primary source of anticipation. Sadly, the inevitable clash is predictable in both setup and execution, no doubt leaving many bloodthirsty viewers feeling like they just watched two hours of pre-fight for 30-second match.

9. If you saw the second trailer, you've basically seen the movie. No, really. When the second trailer hit, there was an outcry that it gave away too much, and the WB spin team quickly disavowed that notion. Turns out, the assessment was pretty dead-on. If you felt like you could safely piece together all three acts of this movie from two minutes of footage, that's because you probably did. Heroes brood and pontificate. Heroes fight each other. Heroes stop fighting each other and fight big ugly monster instead. The End. Between the trailers and the news about the Aquaman, Flash and Cyborg cameos, there's not a single surprise left in the movie, not a single story beat that a ten-year-old couldn't see coming a mile away.

10. The best thing in the movie gets maybe 20 minutes of screen time. You probably know who I'm talking about, because critics and audiences alike are hailing Wonder Woman as the sole highlight of this mess. She got the only eruption of cheers and applause in the entire screening I attended, warming the heart of this cranky feminist who resents that it will be almost 20 years since the dawn of the modern superhero film before the most iconic female comic character in history gets her own movie. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise that the script doesn't allow Zack Snyder and David S. Goyer more time to potentially ruin Diana. When she takes center stage in 2017, she'll be in the hands of another director with hopefully better prospects.

Seriously, Wonder Woman's entrance was a crowd-pleasing moment that almost redeemed my evening. Almost.

The Saga of Animal Man

This review will contain MILD spoilers for Animal Man, but nothing major.

I had the first two collected volumes of Animal Man-- the late 80s, early 90s Vertigo series-- sitting in my "unread" longbox for about three years. At that time, I had read a few things about the series-- that it was a groundbreaking epic by the legendary Grant Morrison, and that it famously broke the fourth wall by making its titular hero aware that he was a comic book character. I had seen the famous panel wherein the Animal Man, AKA Buddy Baker, makes this discovery (Google "animal man I can see you") and you won't have any trouble finding it).

I don't consider this a major spoiler because the series is notorious for that revelation. It turns out that it takes quite a while to build to it, but I was hooked early on, and when I finally completed the two volumes gathering dust in that longbox, I was compelled to seek out the remaining five chronicles of Animal Man to see where the story went. It was a wild ride, with lots of highs and lows. Animal Man is a remarkable series-- a touch uneven, given the variation in writing and drawing talent-- but filled with thought-provoking and engaging stories.

The seven collected volumes can be divided into three major parts, defined by the contributions of Animal Man's three primary writers. Grant Morrison penned the first 26 issues (volumes 1 - 3), followed by a brief arc by Peter Milligan before Tom Veitch took over for 18 issues (volumes 4 and 5), and Jamie Delano then made Animal Man his own for 29 issues (the massive volumes 6 and 7). These three periods represent sharply contrasting tones, themes and narrative directions for the series.

Grant Morrison's Animal Man is every bit the magnum opus it's touted to be. DC's concept of an Animal Man revival was to take an obscure 1960s C-Lister, who had barely been in a dozen comics, and redefine him for the rebooted, post-Crisis-on-Infinite-Earths universe. They also wanted to give him a dark edge-- though the Vertigo imprint didn't technically exist yet, Animal Man fit right into that wheelhouse-- and make him topical and relevant. Morrison succeeds in all of these goals, probably beyond anything that was conceived when the project first got underway.

Let's get the basics out of the way first. Buddy Baker is Animal Man, a superhero with the power to reach out to nearby animals through something called the morphogenetic field (later referred to as the Life Web, and later still, The Red) and adopt their abilities. For example, he can adopt the speed of a cheetah, an eagle's ability to fly, or an ant's ability to lift 50 times its own weight. In typical 1960s fashion, he got these powers through radiation, in his case from a downed alien spaceship. In the present, he works as a movie stuntman while raising two children, Cliff and Maxine, with his wife Ellen.

Now, that status quo only lasts for about a dozen issues or so, since Animal Man's plot moves in wild and unpredictable directions almost from the get-go. Most critics agree that the series' first watershed moment comes with issue five, titled "The Coyote Gospel." The disturbing and bizarre tale of a Wile E. Coyote knockoff posits the basic question of what it would be like to be an animal that experiences all of the unending cruelty of the physical gags of Looney Tune cartoons, only in the real world. It hits the reader like a brick wall and foreshadows many of the themes Morrison would explore in the following issues, particularly about the relationship between creators, artists and characters.

From there, Morrison provides some short story arcs with an emphasis on animal rights topics, all the while weaving an undercurrent of mysteries that build gradually over the next 20 or so issues before culminating in some of the most satisfying "a-ha" or "payoff" moments I've ever read in a comic. The climactic final issues of Morrison's run make volume 3 easily the strongest of Animal Man's collected works. The metafictional nature of the conclusion is somehow apt, despite being somewhat detached from the storylines that built to it. If you need a hint of where the story goes, you need only look at the title of volume 3-- "Deus Ex Machina."

I should say a word about the art during Morrison's run before moving on. It could best be described as-- serviceable. Chas Troug's pencils tell the story, and are perfectly pleasant to look at-- especially considering some of the low-lows of volume 5-- but are not especially memorable. The writing is the star, and not until Jamie Delano took over as scribe would Animal Man's art would parallel the story in terms of quality.

Determining how to follow Grant Morrison's epic run must have been a challenge for DC editorial. The relatively short Peter Milligan run was a misstep. It attempted to retain the weirdness of Morrison without the metafiction, resulting in a bizarre tale about alternate realities and Schrodinger's Cat. When Tom Veitch takes over, the narrative takes another left turn. His tactic was to retcon Animal Man's 1960s origin substantially, and bring Native American mythology into the mix.

While some parts of that arc are successful, it takes way to long to get there, and the story diverts into much less interesting arcs on the way, such as Animal Man working for the government to protect the President from a trio of bratty psychic children. Veitch also gives Buddy an annoying hippie sidekick named Travis, who grates on the nerves just about every time he's on panel. While regular artist Steve Dillon provided "just-okay" art, there were a few fill-in artists in volume five that were beyond terrible-- one so bad that he actually traced a drawing of Buddy's daughter from a previous issue. It's almost amazing to see that art so bad made it into a mainstream comic.

After the entertaining but underwhelming Veitch issues, Animal Man returns to true glory in volumes 6 and 7, when Jamie Delano takes over writing duties and Steve Pugh handles most of the art. Pugh's art is atmospheric and dark, perfect for the new direction that Delano takes Animal Man in these two volumes. His characters are distinctive and facial expressions are vivid. Pugh is also adept at drawing the wide variety of animals that are, of course, essential to a story about a hero named Animal Man.

It is in these volumes that Animal Man once again makes a radical departure from anything that could remotely be considered a superhero story. It's hard to describe where the story goes without giving spoilers, but it's miles from where you could possibly imagine. One early story involves Buddy rescuing his son from a murderous psychopath. Focus shifts to Ellen for a while as she gets involved with some militant feminists. The final arc, which comprises the enitre 465-page volume 7, involves religion, revolution, life, death, and radical transformations that send the life of Buddy Baker spiraling into chaos.

I've never felt so compelled to devour the entire run of a comic series in trade form as I have with Animal Man. I think a large part of that is due to Grant Morrison's three-volume epic; after that, I was attached enough to the character of Buddy Baker to wade through some of the weaker issues to get to Animal Man's climactic conclusion. I think it's a worthwhile series for anyone interested in a dark series with unique storytelling.