Whoever Wins, We Lose: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

Having seen 2013’s Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot which was a serviceable origin story retelling until it exploded in monotonous tone-deaf city-smashing, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as punishing as its title is unwieldy. It’s another of Snyder’s dunderheaded epics of missing the point, a gleaming picture of dour comic book tableaus pre-digested with little regard for meaning, stripped of whatever power they once had, and weighed down by the burden of a visually overdetermined and thematically indigestible form. Overstuffed with empty calories, every so often the lumpy mass chokes up ideas so thoughtless and virulently stupid I couldn’t help but wonder if it was subliminally disgorged from the ugliest corners of our national id. After all, this is a movie about a noble extraterrestrial savior and a tortured crimefighter and the best it can think to do is contrive reasons for them to scowl as they go about representing the mindset of anyone whose first response to reasonable disagreement is to punch it in the face.

The story finds Superman (Henry Cavill) a divisive figure. He smashed up Metropolis pretty good in the last movie, ostensibly in the process of saving it, but with the unintended consequence of inflicting a 9/11-scale disaster on every other block. That understandably made a few people mad. Some, like a Senator (Holly Hunter, underutilized) whose logical concern is treated as mildly treacherous, want to constrain his power. Others, like Batman (Ben Affleck, growling with brooding trauma), whose alter-ego’s Wayne Enterprises had a skyscraper caught in the fracas, plot to bring him punishment for his otherworldly strength and its potential bad consequences. Still others, like villain Lex Luthor (played as a squirrely sociopathic tech bro by Jesse Eisenberg), want to contrive a reason to something something Kryptonite. It’s all of a piece with an intent to image a worst-case scenario superhero world, in which they’re lawless self-righteous power-mad vigilantes viewed with suspicion, fear, and worship, and who nonetheless must muster the energy to save the planet.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea. A real Superman would indeed be a scary thing, a man who could not be controlled by any earthly authority if he so chose. We’re lucky he mostly wants to do the right thing. But in Snyder’s vision, this becomes a troublingly muddled mess. It presents a Superman weirdly uncharacterized, and mostly motivated by his desire to save his mother, Ma Kent (Diane Lane), and his girlfriend, Lois Lane (Amy Adams). He’s not much of an altruist, aside from a few token saves, and certainly lives up to the suspicion he’s under. He acts with impunity, and on a whim. As for Batman, here he’s a violent bruiser, killing waves of faceless criminals by gun, by car, by plane, and by hand in bone-crunching rounds of savagery, then branding his logo onto the survivors. Ouch. This is bleak, grim nihilism, a film in which superpowers are real, but the idea of heroes is foreign. At one point Daily Planet editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) snaps: “The American conscience died...”

Snyder, with a script by Chris Terrio (Argo) and David S. Goyer (Blade Trinity), is channeling the trend begun in 80’s and 90’s comics that mistook a dim, darkly lit, and violent vision for an interesting, realistic, and meaningful one. Here’s a movie convinced its unremitting cruelty and cheap cynicism adds up to ideas of any import. It’s just deadening and uncomfortable, with pessimism and nastiness so garbled it comes out sounding downright fascist. It makes its heroes monsters to be feared, and then forces us to look up to them anyway. Its world is better off without them – every outlandish conflict is a direct result of their actions – but we’re to root for their demagogic unilateralism, to let them run rampant because only they have the super-strength to strong-arm their way to a victory. And if a certain number of mere mortals have to be obliterated in the name of their idea of justice, so be it.

The film traffics in images of terror. One scene finds a suicide bomber detonating in slow motion, the flames billowing out. The movie is bookended by buildings collapsing and filling the streets of a major east coast city with smoke and debris while citizens flee. An early inciting incident is a chaotic ambush in an African outpost used for political power plays in Congress. Snyder injects these unmistakable real-world associations into the film to goose its power, and to lend borrowed gravity to the story of two superheroes deciding to fight each other to prove…something. It’s borderline irresponsible, especially as he uses these spectacles of terror to excuse their actions, to argue for the justification of these men serving as their own judges, juries, and executioners. And every character who expresses reasonable objections is met with death, usually at the hands of this threat, as if to say they got what was coming to them for daring to want limits on these God-like super-people.

So it’s not much fun for most of the 151-minute runtime. It’s a slog, not just for its heavy (and heavy-handed) mood, but also for its straining and monotonous graveness. It grinds good performers under its demands, sapping Cavill and Affleck of charisma, turning Adams and Lane into damsels in distress, and leaving everyone else, including Jeremy Irons as faithful butler Alfred, trying to coax life into turgid exposition. When not going through its over-extended plodding plot, it’s mostly a cavalcade of seeds for future sequels and spin-offs, bringing in Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) for a mostly blank glorified cameo, the worst of which finds her in front of a computer essentially watching three teasers for upcoming projects. Or maybe it’s the upskirt flash that’s the nadir of the movie’s insistence on turning every woman into a pawn to be trapped – one maternal figure is gagged and bound in sadistic Polaroid’s – or, failing that, sexualized. It’s dismaying, just another reason I found the whole desensitized thing exhausting and tiresome, from its opening repeat of the Wayne deaths to an ersatz King Kong restaging followed by a hero getting nuked in the face.

This is a technically proficient blockbuster insisting on loudly thundering down the wrong road at every turn, ponderously bringing flights of fancy to overblown heights and down to reductive muck. With the whole history of these iconic larger-than-life characters to play with, there’s nothing more imaginative here than having one of them trying to hit the other over the head with, say, a porcelain sink. Still, it’s best when mind-numbing, in long sequences of concussive fantasy fight night or bonkers nightmare sequences, for at least that’s a break from its maddening point of view. Built from mythic and resonant components made curdled and rotten, its characters are meant to save us, but are indifferent to the suffering in their wake. Neither red-blooded adventure nor sharp auto-critique, it’s content to be ugly and cacophonous, the sights and sounds of this approach to the genre wrung-out and dying before our eyes.

Geopolitical Showbiz: ARGO

In early 1980, an unknown producer quietly, but with a modicum of industry press attention, put a next-to-no-budget science fiction movie named Argo into production. This movie was not destined to be a hit. It wasn’t even to be made at all, cancelled before it even got off the ground. It was, however, a movie of some small historical importance. Argo was a C.I.A. cover story for an attempted extraction of six Americans trapped in Tehran during the Iran Hostage Crisis. This unlikely true story is now a movie named Argo, so the whole thing comes full circle. Now a movie about itself, to a certain extent, its new iteration, directed by star Ben Affleck, is a nicely paced period piece thriller.

Though smartly scripted and narrowly focused by Chris Terrio, this film starts messily, with a flurry of heavy-handed exposition and clumsily staged scene setting. Laying out a Cliffs Notes background of 20th century Iranian history right off the bat led me to believe that the film would be far more interested in providing and exploring the political context rather than leaving the setting and situation as mere set-dressing and plot motivators for its primary concerns. Those concerns are nothing more than crisply presented scenes of period detail and men in suits urgently taking care of business, a terrific collection of character actors doing what they do best: lending weight and likability to small, but impactful roles.

In the film’s opening moments, the American embassy in Iran is taken over and six of its employees (Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall, and others) manage to flee, taken in by the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). They can’t stay there for long. Soon someone will grow suspicious. The embassy hostage-takers will realize they don’t have all the Americans in their possession. Domestic pressure is mounting as well. The days go by with little news, good or bad, and the populace grows weary and restless. Affleck fills the opening of the film with copious cutaways to news footage both mock and real, filling in information of the political malaise of the times with overeager intrusiveness. Still, the point gets across. What will become of this dangerous situation? The U.S. government needs a plan.

That’s where the fake movie comes in. It’s, in the words of the C.I.A. operative played by Bryan Cranston, “the best bad idea we’ve got.” The agent played by Ben Affleck will fly into Tehran posing as a producer of a Canadian science fiction film, meet up with these hiding Americans and fly away claiming them as Canadians in his film crew. To do so, the movie needs be adequately believable, which is where two Hollywood veterans – a special effects expert (John Goodman) and a weary producer (Alan Arkin) – come in. They’re there to make the whole thing look legitimate. The Hollywood sequences in the film are dryly funny in the tension between the literal life-and-death stakes of the agents’ plans and the been-there-done-that attitudes of the showbiz types.

Focusing on the process of this unlikely, stranger-than-fiction rescue attempt, Argo mixes scenes of tense walks down hallways, conversations around rotary phones and passing manila folders between men in sharp suits and shaggy facial hair. (This is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its period costuming, a sort of spy game Mad Men in that way.) In sequences set in America, great that-guy actors like Chris Messina, Kyle Chandler, Zeljko Ivanek, and Titus Welliver fill in quickly sketched government roles, spouting jargon, delivering terse one-liners, and getting the plot moving. In Iran-set sequences, threats are presented as vague foreign rage that rumbles outside the home in which the six Americans are nervously hiding, unable to even look out a window for fear of capture and execution. As the hidden Americans’ and their hopeful rescuers’ plotlines slowly merge, the film builds to an extended period of undeniably effective suspense, skillfully made.

Affleck has proven himself a relatively unshowy auteur, creating functional pieces of serious-minded mid-budget genre filmmaking – thrillers of one sort or another, all – without generating much in the way of distinctive filmmaking. In Gone Baby Gone and The Town, as in Argo, he gets good actors solid material and stays out of the way, doing only what’s necessary to get the story on the screen. That’s not an altogether unworthy approach. Even if here it leads to some visual uncertainty – he’ll go for three shots when one would do – he knows when to capture strong popcorn energy and how to build tension out of nervous editing and tense parallelism. The final stretch of Argo is a nearly white-knuckle tightening of dramatic tension that unfolds so crisply and intensely that I could feel the collective exhale in the theater when the pressure eventually released. This is strong work.