A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Thursday, June 4, 2026

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Scoot McNairy, Callan Mulvey, Tao Okamoto. Screenplay: Chris Terrio, David S. Goyer. Cinematography: Larry Fong. Production design: Patrick Tatopoulos. Film editing: David Brenner. Music: Tom Holkenborg, Hans Zimmer. 

Dark, brutal, noisy, and glum, Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is unleavened by wit. The meeting of the self-made superhero and the benevolent alien was bound to happen eventually, but why did anyone have to take it so seriously? Why couldn't it have been fun, like an encounter of the campy Batman of the old TV series and the naïf Superman of James Gunn's 2025 reboot? Or if not that, at least not something so goddamn apocalyptic. You can see some of its actors, particularly Amy Adams and Holly Hunter, trying to rise above the chaos, but they keep getting sucked down into a plot that seems to go out of its way to make less sense than most comic book movies do. 

Posted by
Links: , , ,