Marion G. Harmon, A Writer in Vegas.

Superhero epic as war movie.

A few of my readers have expressed enthusiasm over hearing my thoughts on Batman vs. Superman. I suppose they think that, being a successful writer of superhero fiction myself, I am uniquely qualified to pass judgement on the movie. So here goes.

But first, go see it.

You think I’m joking? Nope. It’s worth the ticket price, whatever you think afterward. And since my expressing my opinion involves all sorts of spoilery stuff, you should see it first so you can give me your opinion.

So go see it. Come back. I’ll wait.

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Back now? Okay then. First, and to leave no doubt, I liked it. A lot. I’ve read reviewers who dismissed it as tendentious moralizing buried under hours of CGI fighting, so I went to see BvS prepared to be disappointed. I will grant that, if you didn’t like 2013’s Man of Steel, then you won’t like Superman v Batman. After all, it’s the next stone in the new movie-mythology being made here.

The movie wasn’t perfect. I thought that director Zack Snyder overdid the religious iconography just a bit (movie watchers are pretty smart, Zack–one or two theologically resonant images is good, a bucket of over-the-top imagery is gratuitous). I wasn’t fond of the shaky-cam work. But I’m going to write about what I liked.

Titans at war. That was the impression I came away with. The battle scenes (just calling them fight-scenes is selling them short), were pushed with driving orchestration that brutalized your ears as much as the scale of force hit your eyes. The message in the images and sound was that this was a battlefield no mortal could survive upon; Batman survived first because Superman wasn’t trying to kill him, and later because he could react faster than Doomsday—like a fly ducking the flyswatter. Just watching it leaves you disoriented and a bit shell-shocked.

This is the power of Superman taken to its “real-world” conclusion. Just as the battle with the Kryptonians in Man of Steel laid waste to the center of Metropolis (which, a year and a half later, is marked by a huge open Ground Zero and the contained Kryptonian wreck), the last battle in BvS lays waste to Gotham Harbor.

And BvS drives home a theme begun in Man of Steel: we would not trust gods among us. There are several characters representing this distrust, including a senator, who is principled, and Lex Luthor, who is not. The senator is motivated by the very real concern that if Superman is not held accountable then he will abuse the privilege. Luthor, on the other hand, see’s Superman through his own eyes. Of course he doesn’t consciously think of it this way, but, as a corrupt man seeking power, he cannot believe that power does not always corrupt.

Luthor knows what he would be if he had the power of Superman; a false but nonetheless unopposable  god-king. He would rule, he thinks that sooner or later Superman would do the same, and the thought of Superman ruling him, corrupt or not, is intolerable. The extent of his pathology is evident in the fact that he created Doomsday as a last resort should Batman fail; the world could burn—he could die—but so long as Superman fell he simply didn’t care.

Personally, I found Luthor’s nihilist stance a little underdeveloped. “If God is all powerful, he cannot be all good. If God is all good, he cannot be all powerful.” This is a criticism of divinity reasoned through and dismissed in the first few lectures of any serious theology course; while it sounds profound and even unanswerable, it is only unanswerable for those who have no interest in answering it. Luthor dismisses God, and Truth and Goodness, because recognizing anything higher than himself is impossible. He’s forced to recognize Superman, whom he tries to pull down as his nemesis because he cannot tolerate that. It makes a decent motivation, because while it’s a flawed one it is a very human one.

Batman, like Luthor, does not trust Superman although for different reasons. In Batman’s case, he has stared into the abyss too long (twenty years wearing the cape to clean up Gotham). “How many people stay good?” Unlike Luthor, his motivation for fighting Superman is mostly altruistic; he wants to save humanity, not himself. It’s also personal for Bruce, in that as an observer on Ground Zero for the Battle of Metropolis, where he lost dozens of friends and members of his “corporate” family, he has internalized the event with his own parent’s deaths. There’s a lot of anger there, and it pushes his whole story.

A last note on Bruce Wayne/Batman. In the end, what stops him from killing Superman is an interesting fact that I’d never thought about; his slain mother, and Clark’s living one, are both named Martha.

I mentioned religious imagery, and  Luthor’s almost existential rebellion against the mere fact of Superman. Yes, Superman is a Christ-figure. Some might find this objectionable. I don’t; divine or not, real or not, Christ is a type. There have been many Christ-figures in history, men and women willing to use their lives and even lay them down in the service of others. With great power comes great opportunity for service. In BvS, Clark’s existential crisis comes because while he wants to serve, the reaction of a significant portion of the public to his service is…mixed.

Of course Luthor is manipulating events, but the underlying distrust had to be there to begin with.

Interestingly, one thing that BvS seems to conclude is that, as idealistic as Clark is, Louis is both more of a realist and at the same time more committed. She is certain where he is not. She is his heart, the one who makes him finally and unreservedly claim Earth as his home.

Which brings us to the end of the movie, and Doomsday.

You see this coming, at least if you are reasonably steeped in Superman lore. I thought it was done superbly, tied in seamlessly to the elements from The Dark Knight Returns. And really, it had to be something like this. After all, you need a threat to match the heroes; that’s one problem with superheroes as strong as Superman (and one reason why I made even A Class Atlas-Types in the Post-Event World much less powerful). And Superman’s self-sacrificing death certainly buried the anti-Superman movement—as well as launching the assembling of the metahumans who will now form the Justice League.

I look forward to it, the next step being next year’s Wonder Woman.