Well, here’s the Batman vs. Superman blog post that you’ve all been waiting for.
So, a bit of background on how I saw this movie. Me and my college buddies are wonderfully close; I’ve only been out of the Boston area for a few months, and I already miss them all terribly. Right before we all went our separate ways1, we did what any self-respecting almost-adults would do with our last bit of time in the same place: popped out to the Cape for a weekend of debauchery. Whereby ‘debauchery’, I mean, we got drunk, played League, brainstormed creative writing ideas, and watched a bunch of dumb shit.—
Which, of course, brings me to Batman vs. Superman.
Now, we all knew that the movie was terrible, going in. But even so, my god, was I surprised by just how bad it actually was. I mean… There were no words. I ran out of words somewhere midway through the first dream sequence, where Batman apparently gained powers by being bitten by a radioactive bat.
Now hang on, I hear you say. It was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.
No, Batman vs. Superman was actually that bad. And it was that bad for exactly the reason that has lead some people, ironically enough, to defend it.
Batman vs. Superman has such incredible, tantalizing glimpses of what it could be, everywhere through it. It builds you up, and then it lets you down all the harder. You can’t dismiss it as a ‘so bad, it’s good’ film; there’s too much good in it for that. But you can’t take it seriously either: every awesome fight scene is ruined by absurd dialogue; every piece of good dialogue is trapped in a convoluted plot. It is a horrible, ridiculous, and almost irredeemable mess. But, it is the most salvageable horrible, ridiculous, and almost irredeemable mess that I have ever seen.
So what went wrong?
Honestly, where do I even start? The DC Extended Universe, rather than learning from Marvel’s example, decided it wanted to put out Justice League yesterday, and that leg-work was skippable. Fans are still entirely too hung-up about The Dark Knight for studio execs to want to make anything else. Man of Steel left us a Superman with too much un-Superman-like baggage to ever be compelling in the role.
These are all difficult problems with no easy solutions.
But there’s one problem that stands out apart from all that, and that’s that the movie was just desperately in need of a competent screenwriter and director.
Harsh? Yes. True? Also, very much, yes.
Now, I’m not going to speak to Snyder’s other films.3 Every writer has the chance to grow and develop their skills with time, and I’m not about to completely write off a screenwriter or a director for their first ever film, or even their fifth ever film. Man of Steel was a poor Superman film, but Batman vs. Superman did not need to be as bad as it was merely because it was building off of Man of Steel. In a similar vein, Argo was a fairly well-written script, which Chris Terrio certainly deserves credit for, and that’s true regardless of how much of a train-wreck Batman vs. Superman was.
And of course, I understand that Snyder was under a lot of pressure from the his higher ups. When you have Ezra Miller for a cameo, you don’t get to say no to putting him in, no matter how stupid that cameo is. When you only have one movie to establish all of your Justice League tie-ins, you don’t get to cut those tie-ins, even for the sake of the story. You can’t change Superman’s characterization too much, or he no longer fits with Man of Steel. I get that, I really do.
But even given those limitations, Batman vs. Superman was a terrible script. Snyder could have done better. Terrio could have done better. Hell, even I could have done better.
Could I really have, though, I hear you ask?
Yes. Yes I could. And I did.
Ladies and gentlemen and others, may I present Batman vs. Superman: Reimagined.
I stuck to all of the constraints that the writers realistically had. I kept huge swathes of dialogue intact, and retained the overall plot. And yet, I somehow managed to add in a ton of Wonder Woman, give Lex Luthor a motivation, make an actual conflict between Batman and Superman, and cut an estimated 27 minutes off of the film’s runtime4. And I wrote it in slightly less that two months. While I was in law school.
Are there issues with my script? Tons! The movie’s still over-bloated with character introductions and shoe-horned plot points. It’s still too early in the DCEU for Superman to die. The Justice League tie-ins still seem tacked on, and the Ezra Miller cameo is still an embarrassingly stilted and ridiculous attempt at foreshadowing. But my point isn’t that Batman vs. Superman could be perfect; my point is that it didn’t need to be terrible. I am not an actual screenwriter. I have never even taken a screenwriting class5, and I have definitely never sold a script, to anyone. And even I could do better than the Batman vs. Superman we got.
Next blog post, I’m going to do a detailed analysis of why I made the choices that I did, and get in the weeds of why I think that Batman vs. Superman failed as a movie. But for now, I just want to leave you with this: Batman vs. Superman had enough good in it that even someone like me could pull it out. And that is exactly why all the bad in it is so impossible to ignore.
1. Well, strictly speaking it was after we had all begun to go our separate ways: one of my friends was headed to Harvard divinity school and needed to sort out housing, and another was too busy getting married. But they were there in spirit.
2. We also trolled the hell out of a couple annoying bigots, watched anime, and came up up with superhero costumes. Did I mention my friends are awesome?
3. Although, for the record, I have yet to see a single one I thought was written well enough to sell the script.
4. That’s just a rough estimate, since I don’t have a professional script reader, but it shouldn’t be too far off.
5. Heck, I’ve never taken any sort of creative writing class. Literally not one.