Cruel and Unusual

SPOILERS

Rarely has a film production company been named more appropriately...

As I have mentioned before, here and on my Materioptikon blog, DC's 80 page giants of the Sixties loom large in my earliest childhood memories of comics.

For the first twenty or so years of my life, the Caped Crusader and the Metropolis Marvel were buddies: taking vacations together in the bottle city of Kandor. Since COIE, Miller's Dark Knight and Byrne's Man of Steel, 30-odd years ago, however, they've been antagonists as often as allies. That's the mission statement of the record-smashing blockbuster I saw yesterday on Easter Sunday.

Negative reviews hung over the film on social media like a squally shower on a sunny day. I had disliked virtually everything about 2013's turgid and joyless Man of Steel and contemplated waiting for the dvd ( rumoured to be even longer than the current release...) However, I spent the holiday afternoon in Elgin's 3/4 empty main cinema. And I grew fractious and impatient for it to end.

While posing as a political thriller, this film sacrifices story and character to re-enact, rather farcically, a Frank Miller fight scene. There were a few saving graces: Jeremy Irons' Alfred is the most proactive character in the film. Affleck's Bruce Wayne has some gravitas and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, while too "Xena" for my tastes, steals the show when she finally appears, But so much else is irredeemably wrong. The murder of Jimmy Olsen;the lunacy of Lex Luthor; the suicide bomber;the Parademon/Darkseid premonition and Doomsday: DC's ghastly Hulk stripped of pathos.

The film also offers presumably fan-pleasing glimpses of the Justice League to be. I found the "Conan-isation" of Aquaman unappealing. Meanwhile, Cyborg, the ghetto Ben Grimm created by the leadfooted Marv Wolfman is thrust down our throats yet again as the only black hero DC has to offer. Cavill's steroidal SuperBro remains free of any charisma or emotional involvement,

Superman is a screwball comedy- an office romance between the Country Mouse strongman and the wisecracking Gal Friday. Think of all those winks to the audience. Batman and Robin masquerade as rich idlers who catch gimmicky crooks for dopey cops and Wonder Woman is a wide-eyed princess thwarting Nazis and man-haters in The Big One. These 20th century ideations define the characters.


But Zuckerberg and 9/11 haunt BVS and, while it succeeds in making these icons from the 30s and 40s dazzling and contemporary, it does so in the vein of Dan DiDio's DC comics: a dark, paranoid and brutalised world.  The result is a dour, humourless film; fun-free and with nothing in it for kids- unless you think Batman saying "shit" is hilarious. Holy Bat-profanity,

In the mid-80s, DC comics, the progenitor but then the bridesmaid to the underdog medium of the 20th century, boasted proudly and with some reason: "Comics aren't for kids anymore".  Sadly, Didio's tenure can only proclaim comics aren't for kids at all. And this mind-numbing superhero movie has nothing to say.

Blogger Rip Jagger has a very different take on the film here; virtually the reverse of mine:
http://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/dawn-of-justice-dojo-review.html
Frankly, I found Marvel's charming and funny Groot paperback a much more rewarding experience.

Still to come: Big Finish's Prisoner; Spider-Gwen, Batgirl and Gotham Academy; Groot!
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