Who killed the world? BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

Let's just get this out of the way up front: I don't hate Zack Snyder's movies. 300 is deeply flawed, Orientalist, ableist, and many other -ists, but I also find it compellingly watchable. Snyder has a lovingly homoerotic eye for beautiful male bodies, for one thing (a trait remaining strong in BvS), and can frame a beautiful picture for another. Watchmen was about as good an adaptation of that lumbering behemoth as I think comic fans could expect. And I actually really enjoyed about 60% of Man of Steel, the first of half of which played more like a contemplative Terrence Malick film than a smash-'em-up superhero flick.

So I was enthusiastic, but a bit concerned, going into Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. For one thing, that's a stupidly long title, and the "v" in place of "vs." suggests all the action and excitement of a Supreme Court decision. For another, it seemed to signal that this movie would be even more overstuffed than the last, as it attempted to introduce the future Justice League while also being a Batman movie and possibly a Superman movie, although the order of the guys in the title is a little confusing. But hey, it promised me Jason Momoa, so I was willing to give it a shot.

All visual entertainment should contain Jason Momoa. It is known.

Spoiler alert: Jason Momoa is in this movie for about 8 seconds, and that is nowhere near enough Jason Momoa. Henry Cavill is only shirtless in one -- ONE -- scene in this movie. Ben Affleck is...kind of hot? I'm all confused and rather angry. Thanks, Zack. 

But back to the movie itself. BvS is a terrible Superman movie, mostly because everyone seems so intent on telling Clark that he should just say "fuck it all" and not be Superman, even when the world is in imminent and immense danger. It also spends essentially zero time on the Lois and Clark relationship, although it does find time for another romantic mini-moment at the scene of a citywide disaster, so I guess there's a point for continuity. On the other hand, it's a fairly decent Batman movie. I'd put it on par with The Dark Knight Rises, but on second thought that's kind of a backhanded compliment. I was often befuddled and occasionally actively angry watching that movie, and that's kind of how I felt here too.

The logic in this movie is at the level of buying a gyro at Arby's: not only is it unholy and terrible, it's not something that would even occur to the average humanoid.

These gyros aren't food. They're from Arby's.

Characters in this movie know things they really couldn't possibly know. They act in ways that living people with brains and motives would not act. I mean, two people forge an unlikely and immediate alliance based on the fact that they literally have mothers with the same name. (Spoiler: it's Bruce and Clark. You, dear reader, knew that, because you are an intelligent person who makes logical connections between concepts, unlike basically every character in this movie.) Lex Luthor appears to be a wealthy hipster on a meth bender. I think Bruce Wayne may also be on the meth or something, because he keeps having...nightmares? hallucinations? DARK KNIGHTMARES. There we go. They do not make sense, but it's okay, because nothing else really does either. There is no sense. There is only smash.

All this isn't to say there aren't bright spots in the movie, because there are. Not literally, of course. This movie is visually very dark, as in "difficult to see things because all the fights happen at night."

You basically need Knight-vision goggles to watch this movie, is what I'm saying.

But Snyder has an eye for impressive, overwhelming visuals, and I suspect if you watched this movie with the sound off, you would probably enjoy it a lot. Things go boom and smash very well here. Visually, at least, the titular "gladiator match" between Batman and Superman looks cool, even if the motivations behind it make no sense. As I mentioned earlier, Snyder also has a loving eye for the muscular male body that I'm totally down with, and he provides a Batman training montage that gives a more visceral sense of the physical effort it takes to stay Batman than anything since Nolan's Batman Begins. (In this particular respect, BvS surpasses DKR, as there is no magic knee-brace silliness here.)

This looks hard. #that'swhatshesaid

The scene revisiting the climactic battle scene from Man of Steel from the ground works very well in establishing the sense of terror that the average resident of a comic book metropolis like, uh, Metropolis would likely feel when buildings are being smashed to pieces by flying aliens. It also gives Bruce Wayne what would be a decent motivation for taking down Superman -- Supes cannot be trusted with such immense power, and he's hell on real estate values -- if it were not for the fact that the Dark Knight also smashes through buildings with abandon, just at night instead of during the workday. I guess citywide destruction doesn't matter if it's cocktail hour. But because Jeremy Irons explains Batman's motivations, I buy it, because he is gruff and authoritative and British.

The other element that works well is Diana Prince, who is called "Miss Prince" exactly once in the movie and "Diana" or "Wonder Woman" exactly zero times, but we all know who she is. Wonder Woman occupies the best four minutes of Batman v Superman. This is largely because she is neither Batman nor Superman. For one thing, she smiles, which is not an expression either of Our Heroes is allowed. For another thing, she excels at focusing on the Actual Enemy at Hand, possibly because she is not preoccupied with a dick-measuring contest. It is a sign of how underwhelming much of this movie is that 8 seconds of Aquaman and 4 minutes of Wonder Woman are the best moments of this 2.5-hour behemoth.

Her expression of irritation at the end -- I totally get it.

The final battle takes place at a deserted location in Gotham -- you know it's deserted because Bruce literally says so, so, I guess I owe Zack Snyder props for listening to the criticism of MoS's stupid ending battle? -- and there's a lot of whiz-bang smashy stuff and a villain that looks kind of like a cave troll, and then some sad things happen but they're not too sad because we all know that the stars of this movie have already been signed to multiple sequels.

At the very end of the movie, Bruce tells Diana, "We break things, tear them down, but we can rebuild. We can be better. We have to be." Here's hoping this applies to the new DC universe of movies, too.

The Hero We've Been Waiting For.

I'll let you in on a secret: I'm a woman in my mid-twenties, and I love comic book movies. Even the debacle that was last year's The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer could not manage to quench my enthusiasm for the genre. After all, it has everything that I think makes for a great movie-going experience: hot guys in tight clothing, a little existential discussion on the nature of good and evil, and things that go boom.

I've been looking forward to The Dark Knight since I knew they were making it. I saw Batman Begins in cinemas five times, and while it's far from perfect, it opened the door for movies like this year's Iron Man, which blends a stellar cast, a bit of fun, a bunch of big toys, and some serious post-9/11 discussion on the nature of war, the nature of responsibility, and perhaps most importantly the nature of guilt. I was blown away by Iron Man and, while I hoped The Dark Knight would be as good, I couldn't imagine it would be better.

I was wrong. The Dark Knight takes the "I'm-not-really-a-comic-book-movie" ethos of Iron Man a step farther, into territory darker than most crime movies dare to go. It has more in common with hardboiled flicks like The Departed or Layer Cake than fluff like The Fantastic Four. While it's only rated PG-13, this is definitely not a movie to take your kids to: although there is very little onscreen gore, I haven't been this monumentally uncomfortable watching movie villains do their thing since The Silence of the Lambs. And The Dark Knight has more in common with that film than it'd appear to, at first. The antagonist and protagonist here also dance circles around each other in a relationship that becomes surprisingly codependent: "We could do this forever," purrs the Joker in one climactic scene, and by that point we understand why. Batman and the Joker are the Yin and the Yang of crime.

But The Dark Knight is more than just a masterful crime thriller, although it has its fair share of perfectly-timed mayhem. It's also a highly effective look at the torn post-9/11 American psyche. Batman wants to hang up the mantle and live a normal life, but he's also created a world where his very existence means he can't. He's a character compelled to continually clean up the messes of the world, but in the act of doing so he creates the possibility of endlessly worse ones. He's playing a game with an opponent who doesn't have any rules, and so he is faced with the question that haunts so many films of this type: where does one draw the line? And how does one fight a force that doesn't want anything but, as the wise Alfred puts it, "to watch the world burn"? Wisely, the film doesn't offer any tidy answers, and it doesn't put everything back together in a neat montage at the end. Things get broken that will never be fixed.

Because of its obsession with deep psychological issues both political and personal, The Dark Knight is Gotham Noir. It's not a happy movie. Children have guns pointed at their heads. Women get hurt. People die. Even the overall look of the film is murky. But every once in a while it shows a glimmer of very dark comedy, and surprisingly the humor in this film comes almost entirely from its darkest denizen: Heath Ledger's Joker. This performance has been talked about for months, and while I've always been a fan of Ledger (even in godawful movies like A Knight's Tale), I had to wonder whether the performance could possibly live up to the hype.

It does, and more. Nicholson's Joker was a ham with wacky clown makeup; Ledger's, a deeply psychotic, tragically wounded young man who sucks on his scarred cheeks as he talks and likes to kill with knives, he says, because he likes to "savor all the emotions" that a blade brings out. Yet he also brings a deadpan humor that verges on slapstick in some scenes: the physical comedy Ledger brings to one scene involving a malfunctioning bomb timer is nothing less than brilliant. The balance is perfect. He's disturbing to watch, but you can't take your eyes off him. I can say without reservation that he'll be not only the quintessential Joker but the gold standard for psychotic movie villains in general for a long time to come, and would have been even without his tragic and all-too-soon death.

The rest of the cast are excellent, although nobody else comes close to touching Ledger's level of connection with his character (perhaps to the benefit of the audience, as this film is emotionally draining to begin with). Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne is as slick as ever, and although the raspy voice he uses as Batman can be distracting, he holds his own admirably against his opponents - no easy feat in this film. Aaron Eckhart is your typical handsome blonde good-guy as D.A. Harvey Dent, but even before his inevitable downfall we sense there's something not-so-noble lurking under the attractive surface. Gary Oldman's flawless Gordon makes it easy to forget he's acting. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are, well, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. And thankfully, Katie Holmes is nowhere to be seen, replaced by a competent if outshone Maggie Gyllenhaal.

The Dark Knight has raised the bar for not just comic book movies, but movies in general. One reviewer claims that if it gets anything less than a Best Picture nomination, he'll be outraged, and I agree, particularly with the last few years of Oscar-nominated (and winning) movies like The Departed, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men, all of which deal with the psyches of the deeply disturbed and question if any of us are really normal. My one real quarrel with the film is that, even at 2 hours 32 minutes, it's too short. I wanted in particular to see more of one character's transformation, but I think there's room for that in a third movie, hints for which are definitely dropped in this one.

Just do me one favor, Chris Nolan: don't bring back Robin.