Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition

As I’m slowly working through these DC movies, I was struck by a decision – do I watch the 2 and a half hour Batman v Superman or the 3 hour one that has slightly better reviews? I’ve never seen either before, because they had bad reviews and looked stupid. I did some digging, and the reviews say that this “Ultimate” version has more character development and explains the plot better, so I felt like it was worth the time. 3 hour Superman movie, here we go.

The first hour of this movie was surprisingly strong. I was invested in a lot of the ways the plot started to develop, and some of the ways that Man of Steel carried over to the beginning. This sort of continues – I was not bored through most of the movie. Like a lot of superhero flicks, the final action scene has a lot more CGI laser shows than I care for, but although I dragged my viewing out over the last week I did not feel bored the way I did with a lot of other DC films, including Man of Steel. This is a surprise, because when I think about the actual pieces of this movie, they are mostly in the bad-to-terrible range.

Starting with the acting and characters – Jesse Eisenberg is far and away the worst Lex Luthor we’ve seen. To be fair, Hackman and Spacey set the bar high, particularly given the writing Hackman was working with. Also to be fair, Eisenberg is flat out terrible in this role. The Lex Luthor scenes are the worst in this movie, and they have some stiff competition. Moving on, Laurence Fishburne is an excellent actor. This movie has no idea what to do with him. He’s fine, but all of his scenes could be cut. Snyder was just excited to snag Fishburne, but this is the second movie in a row where there is almost no reason to involve the Daily Planet. I’ll give it to Cavill – this is the best Superman character I’ve seen yet. His relationships with Amy Adams and Diane Lane are a strong point in the film. Ben Affleck does a fine job playing a Batman that is written terribly. This is the worst Batman of all the Batmans, but that’s on the writing. An entire movie of Batman set to angsty (murdery?) teenager. I really think this could have been much worse with a different actor, but the ceiling was so low. Then, there’s Gal Gadot who just exists to set up the next two movies that involve her. She doesn’t ruin anything, but doesn’t add anything other than extra run time.

Next, the plot. I’ll cover it more in the spoilers section, but the short version is that it makes no sense. The conflict between Batman and Superman is dumb, and this movie might as well just have been called “The Justice League Prequel”. Why does Lex Luthor do the evil things that he does? Nobody knows!

So, the story sucks, the characters are mostly mediocre, the acting is fine, the movie is super long. My brain wants to declare this movie at best bad, but I didn’t hate it. So, I’m settling on calling it a fine movie even though it feels gross doing it, and giving it a 5. Not good, but not boring. If I had to guess, if I ever watch this film again my rating will drop as I know that none of the interesting stuff truly pans out.