Spoiler alert: if you do not want to know details skip to last paragraphs for rating and reasoning

I really wasn’t looking forward to Batman v Superman. I am not a fan of Zach Snyder’s film style and Man of Steel was pretty bad. I personally have never been a huge superman fan and have always loved batman.

This movie makes them both look like awful people/heros.

The movie sets up why Bruce Wayne hates superman via a flashback with Wayne however, this is effective in showing why Wayne has a reason to dislike superman.

How many times do we have to see the Waynes and uncle Ben get shot in super hero movies? We can skip the origin stories for characters like these we’ve seen them within the last 10-15 years.

Ben Affleck does a great job as Bruce Wayne and Batman. He is easily the best part of the movie. However Zack Snyder clearly doesn’t know much about Batman because this Batman uses guns, murders people and brands the ones he doesn’t kill. The movie tells us that those branded basically have a death sentence in prison.

That’s right batman murders people. The hero who has no super powers and is best known for his no kill rule has no regard for human life in this film whatsoever.

In one part he incapacitates a car, hooks it up to his bat mobile and swings it into another car, passengers still in both. And just in case you think that might be a one off thing he also blows a car up.

Batman also has some weird dream sequences in the film that honestly should have just been cut. The dreams seem to be prophetic in some way leading up to the justice league movie, so apparently batman is psychic too now.

The fight scene the movie is named after is extremely disappointing and short. The fight between batman and superman lasts a couple of minutes. It has some brutal moments and some moments that are downright unintentionally hilarious like batman smacking superman over the head with a bathroom sink.

So what ends this conflict you ask? Well right before batman is about to kill superman he learns their moms have the same name, from then on they’re friends. Yup batman stops trying to kill superman because of their mothers.

This movie has some of the most baffling edits I have seen in a mainstream film. The movie doesn’t have any focus and just jumps from character to character and seems to be missing an entire set up scenes for what those characters are doing.

The tone of the movie is boringly grimdark with not a hint of humor anywhere. This movie is super boring because it takes a “no fun allowed” stance on these character from comic books.

Superman is also ridiculous in this movie. At the end of Man of Steel he breaks down after being forced to kill Zod. In this movie superman doesn’t seem to even flinch at the idea of killing people. Whether it’s smashing a human through concrete walls or telling people they’re only alive through his mercy.

So Lex Luthor is the one who orchestrated the events leading to batman and superman fighting. Why does he want these two to fight? Who knows the movie doesn’t bother with telling us any of his motivation. He just makes them fight because that’s what the plot demands.

Wonder Woman was ok in this film. The earlier scenes of her outwitting Bruce Wayne were fun and her entering the fight at the end of the film was fine. The sad part is though they could have cut her character out of the film and it would have been the same.

Also all those other super heroes that the film has advertised? They’re just shown through video and have no impact on the plot at all. It’s like a mid-movie commercial for the justice league. This whole movie comes off as DC comics rushing to try to catch up with Marvel movies and it suffers greatly for it.

The final fight of the film is another giant waste of time with Doomsday being the villain for the last 20 minutes. Doomsday didn’t need to be in this movie and was pretty much wasted.

There’s not much positivity I can give this film. There was one cool batman fight, wonder woman was interesting and Ben Affleck was great. But the writing and editing in this film was pretty horrendous.

I personally would give this film a 3.5 out of 10. It’s pretty bad on every level. If you really want to see it I recommend a matinee showing or just renting it when it comes out on dvd or blu ray.

Mace Mackiewicz can be reached at 581-2812 or mmackiewicz@eiu.edu