This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
This Metropolis isn't big enough for the both of us.
Plot Overview
BvS opens with a flashback scene from Bruce Wayne's childhood, and the words, “There was a time above, a time before there were perfect things.” His mother and father are killed in a senseless mugging, and Bruce in his dream runs past a marquee displaying the movie title, “Excalibur”—establishing the year 1981 that will also appear on Martha Wayne's tombstone. Into Stuart's Wood he runs where he falls down a shaft full of bats and then rises with them (“In the dream they take me to the light, a beautiful light.”)
We move to Metropolis and pick up at the end of, “Man of Steel,” from the summer of 2013 where Superman defeats General Zod (Michael Shannon) causing collateral damage to the city and to Bruce Wayne's Enterprises, crippling Wayne's employee Wallace Keefe (Scoot McNairy.)
Next we're taken to the Indian Ocean 18 months later where some divers recover what looks like Kryptonite from a sunken ship. Then we go to Nairobi, Africa where The Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) scores an interview with a terrorist who doesn't realize what he's captured (“I'm not a woman. I'm a reporter”) until it's too late. It was a CIA sting (“They're tracking us”) with a super damsel rescue (“a noise like the sky cracked open”) and lots of collateral damage (“So many dead!”) in a typical operation of the type mentioned by author Michael Robotham: (44)
Luca spent
three months embedded with the Third Brigade, First Armoured Division,
and watched these “cordon and search” operations first
hand. He saw Iraqi men humiliated in front of their terrified families
and their homes trashed. He saw accidents because soldiers, wound
up with fear, were convinced that people inside these houses were
waiting to kill them. One wrong move, one mistaken gesture, and innocent
people died.
Unbeknownst to Superman (Henry Cavill) he was being set up. Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) convenes an inquiry regarding him (“He answers to no-one, not even, I think, to God.”)
There's a crime wave in Gotham City, human trafficking, but when the police arrive the captive women declaim about, “A devil. It saved us. … It's still there.” There's a Batman (Ben Affleck) hiding in the dark, spooking the cops (“Jesus Christ!”), and later marking the suspects (“He branded him”), a death sentence in a prison population. Batman, aka Bruce Wayne, confides in his handyman butler, “We're criminals, Alfred, we've always been criminals.”
Our two heroes are already looking askance at each other when mad scientist Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) deals with the CIA for the recovered Kryptonite to make with it a super weapon of assassination, with Senator Linch for a xeno-mineral import license, and with Wally to be a pawn in a scheme to pit Batman against Superman in “the greatest gladiator fight known to man” … that will degenerate into a scrum including a Doomsday monster and Wonder Woman as well.
Ideology
BvS rises above the puerile level of, “Who would win out of Batman and Spiderman? Important questions when you're four years old” (Robotham 136). It assumes familiarity with newspaper headlines ("Bat Brand of Justice"), literature (“Books are knowledge and knowledge is power”), vocabulary (“Philanthropist means lover of humanity”), and history (“The American conscience died with Abraham, Martin and John.”) It's a veritable maze in which one can easily lose the thread of the plot, but The Flash appears through a portal to tell Batman that Lois is the key. Okay.
Superman (aka Clark Kent) is fixing to give Lois Lane an engagement ring, but Lois thinks, “I don't know if it's possible for you to love me and be you.” That is so gay, he being from another world. A current usage of the word gay is explained by a writer-character in the 2014 movie, “Love is Strange.” It's used by the young in the expression, “That's so gay,” having nothing to do with sexual orientation, but meaning (broadly) “stupid.” Should they have a super wedding, the newspaper would trumpet their gay marriage meaning something different from what we're used to seeing in the press. We better check our dictionaries.
To abridge Webster: “gay adj 1 merry; 2 colorful; 3 licentious; 4 homosexual.” Korzybski suggests “index numbers to break up false identifications” (139). Clark Kent and Lois Lane engage in a (chaste) gay1 bathtub scene: a lot of splashing and laughing, that kind of gay. Wonder Woman wears a gay2 costume: blue, yellow and red. It's a kind of gay used by Robotham in a double entendre: “He's gayer than a handbag full of rainbows” (15). Lex Luthor's character is played as a Trojan that Webster defines as “a gay, irresponsible, or disreputable companion.” He is gay3, licentious. When Alfred wonders why rich playboy Bruce Wayne has yet to find himself a woman companion (but he still displays a deceased Robin's Boy Wonder costume who seems to have been dispatched by the Joker whom we saw in “The Dark Knight”), one may ask, Is Batman gay? Here is meant gay4, homosexual.
Now we have to look at another definition and a little bit of history. I'll quote Dr. Ide: “The Contemporary Christian standard was defined not by the bible but generated by Roman law as defined by the jurist Modestinus who argued that marriage was ‘consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani iuris communicatio: a life-long partnership, and a sharing of civil and religious rights’” (83–5). It's not just what the state, the civil authority decides, but religious authority has some play in the matter, too. In our “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” movie, a great deal is made of subjecting Superman to some kind of civil authority, but when things really get hairy, the divine is called on as well (“God have mercy on us all.”) According to cultural historian David Hackett Fischer, the Puritans had “a cultural idea of marriage that was unique to the Puritan colonies. … The Puritans of New England rejected all the Anglican ideas. They believed that marriage was not a religious but a civil contract” (77). In the New England states—& NY & DC—the civil contract was the whole kit and caboodle, so once laws against sodomy were removed it was a simple matter of equal rights to open (civil) marriage to homosexuals. The rest of the states did not abide such a redefinition, but the courts stepped in to force acceptance of same-sex marriage. But since gay can mean so many things it was not used in a legal definition calling for precision. Therefore the popular consensus voting to exclude homosexuals from marrying each other of the same sex would prevail in popular usage negating "gay marriage" when meaning homogamy. The newspapers get their grammar wrong in this regard, but they can safely use the dyad "gay marriage" should Lois and Clark wed.
In 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the states' bans against same-sex marriage was pseudo-unconstitutional—marriage isn't actually mentioned in the Constitution. Yet quoting from the “Catholic Sentinel”: (15)
The main opinion recognized in several places the role of religious beliefs in the questions surrounding same-sex marriage. Kennedy said toward the conclusion of his 28-page opinion that “it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned.”
The First Amendment ensures protection for religious organizations and individuals as they seek to teach the principles “that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths,” he continued, and to “their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons.”
Webster includes in his definition of “marriage: 3: an intimate or close union.” In BvS Luthor seeks to reanimate an “ancient Kryptonian deformity” by making a blood union with it. His unholy same-sex marriage with the monster produces an abomination, a word Justice Kennedy writing for the majority allows the religious to use when referring to same-sex marriages, per (Lev. 20:13) “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.”
Production Values
“” (2016) was directed by Zack Snyder. Its screenplay was written by Chris Terio & David S. Goyer based on previously generated characters. It stars Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot, Callan Mulvey, Tao Okamoto, and Jason Momoa. Ben Affleck did okay as a Bruce Wayne/Batman still dealing with childhood trauma. Gal Gadot did a good job playing a surprise Wonder Woman. Henry Cavill is splendid as Clark Kent/Superman. Jesse Eisenberg is outstanding as a creepy Lex Luthor. Kevin Costner is memorable as a briefly seen Pa Kent. Michael Shannon squeezed out a macabre take on General Zod's rotting corpse. The whole cast did rather well, many of them the same ones from the earlier “Man of Steel.”
MPAA rated it PG–13 for intense sequences of violence and action throughout, and some sensuality. Its runtime of 151 minutes still doesn't completely explain everything; it's a lot to take in. The CGI and visual effects are less than realistic. Hans Zimmer's score does it justice. The traditional gospel song “Amazing Grace” at the end breaks the dark mood. Don't blink at the last frame.
Review Conclusion w/ Christian Recommendation
I'm not that big a follower of DC Comics, so I didn't have much baggage to interfere with my enjoyment of this picture. It was only during the bass crescendo in the fighting scenes at the end that I donned my industrial grade hearing protection. The rest was tolerable. I'm easy to please, so I didn't have a problem with this film. There's so much in it that I'm sure not everyone will be equally pleased.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Edge of your seat action-packed. Suitability for Children: Suitable for children 13+ years. Special effects: So so special effects. Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall product rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
“Catholic Sentinel.” July 3, 2015. Print.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's
Seed: Four British Folkways in America.
New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print, WEB.
Ide, Arthur Frederick. Noah & the Ark: The Influence of
Sex, Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Flood Story and
its Writing.
Las Colinas: Monument Press, 1992. Print.
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Quoted in Stuart Chase, Power of Words. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1954. Print.
Robotham, Michael. The Wreckage. New York: Mulholland Books, 2011. Print.
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, Mass.: MERRIAM-WEBSTER. 1984. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org