This week has not been pleasant.
Between jury duty forcing more gas money out of me than I have, schedule shuffling at work throwing my rhythm and time off, and the unfortunate loss of a friend, my schedule has corroded so badly that I have been forced to choose extended exposure to Zack Snyder’s creative train wreck of overacting and CGI shit storms over a Star Trek movie that’s been getting decent reception.
Never before have I had a greater understanding of the term “drawing the short end of the stick.”
If you were fortunate enough to have somehow missed Mr. Snyder’s opus of incomprehension when it released in theaters, I’ll spare you the full recap and simply say that I was not fond of it.
But that’s okay, because if you missed your 2½ hour soul sucking session in theaters, you can experience an extra heaping helping of it on Blu-Ray, now with an extra 30 minutes of brooding darkness, confusing plotting, and droning on pretentiously about the self important faux symbolism of its iconography without a hint of irony, humor or self awareness to be found.
All jabbing aside however, 30 minutes would be a significant addition to any production regardless of how long ago its welcome was spent in the theatrical release. This tire fire of a script may have been unsalvageable but there isn’t really much further down it could have gone based on what has been released, right?
So, is the “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice: Ultimate Edition” an improvement over the theatrical release despite its ludicrously unacceptable length?
In the strictest, most technical definition of the word “better,” yes.
I emphasize that qualifier for a number of reasons, not the least of which being the issues with the film creatively speaking but more on that momentarily. For now, let’s talk about the improvements.
The editing, while far from perfect is substantially less jarring. After Bruce Wayne’s flashback to the battle for Metropolis, the film starts to get underway and it becomes increasingly evident just how much of the completed product had been hacked to the freaking bone for its 2½ hour theatrical runtime.
Ignoring the extra material injected into this cut of the film, the general flow of the movie is just all around better. Cuts feel less sudden and awkward, with characterizations being better fleshed out through interaction and passable establishing shots serving to show the scene’s build up as opposed to the bizarre drop-ins of the theatrical version, as well as decently communicating the end of a scene.
The technical side of things is just vastly superior and the graces of those savings get passed on the characters that are supposed to be carrying the film.
While the character sadly just doesn’t truly get his due from the script, there’s something kind of reassuring about watching Henry Cavill manage Superman’s life as Clark Kent. In highlighting his journalistic skills while getting more tender moments with his mother and girlfriend, this cut actually gives the movie some of the human warmth that it so desperately needed. Additionally Lois Lane actually makes worthwhile contributions to the plot, pitiful and potentially offensive leaps in her own narrative logic notwithstanding.
Every once in a while the film managed to actually remind me of the Superman that I love that it attempts to tear down with its very existence.
The general improvements in the movie’s sense of time and space really do make for a more cohesive narrative, even if the story its telling gambles on an unconvincing master planner portrayal of Lex Luthor that Eisenberg sadly can’t quite grasp. There’s definitely potential for his take on the character but it just wasn’t what this movie was demanding as the better flow to the scenes still can’t disguise that fact that nothing about his end game makes sense if you really think about it for more than a minute or two. This narrative cohesion of the core plot only serves to highlight just how ancillary the Justice League set up and Doomsday fight are to the production, turning the 20 plus minute climax and ending of the film into a giant cinematic tumor.
Which brings us to the core problem with the film itself.
I say that the “Ultimate Edition” is “technically” the superior cut because for all intents and purposes and regardless of the quality of the final product, it does manage to fix major problems with the original release. I said in my original review of the film that “Dawn of Justice” wasn’t really a movie so much as it was a heap of raw footage strung together with no rhyme or reason, moving towards the same loose thematic end.
Unlike that cut of the film, I’m happy to say that this version very much qualifies as a movie. With the glaring flaws in editing removed however, the eye becomes drawn to the content within and it settles in to me that even though it’s definitely a movie, it’s still a really, really, bad one that may actually be less engaging than when it was incomprehensible.
Where the theatrical version of “Dawn of Justice” instilled a sense of torture within me born from confusion induced irritation at the editing, anger over the misinterpretation of characters that I’ve grown up with my entire life and utter boredom at the convoluted lengths the film felt it had to go just to have the title characters meet each other for the first time, “The Ultimate Edition” only succeeded in damn near boring me to tears.
I may have been angry watching this film in theaters, but at least I was moved to some sort of emotion.
Every joke I’ve made about this film sucking the life and energy out of the room gets doubled down in this cut. The movie is just way too bleak, ugly, and thoroughly unpleasant but not in the way that it intends to be.
“Dawn of Justice” builds up its beacon of hope and light as a potential messiah figure that just wants to selflessly do good for the people that he has lived amongst, yet glosses over his lack of hesitation to violently and needlessly murder people with no capability to stand against him while hypocritically chastising a man that acts no more gruesomely than he does with his own bare hands.
We’re presented with a Batman obsessed with taking down an alleged threat to the common good despite throwing away his own moral code to act as judge, jury, and executioner for mundane criminals that don’t fit his own childishly black and white morality filtered through the lens of a twisted unendearing sense of self-righteousness.
What we’re left with is two unlikeable protagonists fighting to save a world populated by sheep and monsters that’s constantly on the brink of destroying itself, while breaking every rule of their own personal codes of conduct without thinking twice.
Nothing is endearing, Nothing is worth fighting for. There is no reason to hope.
A scene in which Clark Kent converses with his deceased father in a dream perfectly encompasses what’s wrong with this setting and its story. Kevin Costner’s regaling of a childhood adventure that led to him saving the farm and being rewarded for it only to immediately discover that his actions also destroyed the neighbors property and killed their animals had me in unintentional stitches.
A scene is so generically designed as the “uplifting second wind for the hero” and it couldn’t even get that right. All it had to do was tell a simple happy 35 second story and it couldn’t even manage that.
This film’s efforts to be edgy and dour out of a belief that this is what the real world is like is so miscalculated that it would almost be adorable in how immaturely it desires to be taken seriously were it not put together by men who should be far passed such an emo stage of emotional development.
DC has been trying to chase the white rabbit of “The Dark Knight” for almost 8 years now with results that have been laughable at best and intellectually offensive at worst, which is almost ironic.
“The Dark Knight” may have reinterpreted its source material by stripping it of fantastical context to make Gotham City a real place on Earth with a real history and all of the darkness of humanity that comes with it but it was never bleak or depressing.
It was a deconstruction of the superhero narrative that wasn’t afraid to have characters discuss how crazy you would have to be to run around at night dressed up as a giant bat. It had gangsters referring to a supervillain disparagingly as “the clown.” It wasn’t afraid to show the circumstances of its subject matter as something ridiculous but still studied the implications of having such figures running around and successfully making a difference despite their conceptual absurdity, making for a feature that was consistently thought provoking and exciting despite being less fantastical.
“Dawn of Justice,” regardless of whatever edition you watch of it, is riddled with problematic content from top to bottom that would have sunken it down from the get go but that it feels like it was made by people who are ashamed of the source material they’re writing for just makes it too much to bear with too little reward.
I could say that the “Ultimate Edition,” for the clarity that it brings and the slivers of potential for what this vision of the DC Universe could be, is the best version of “Dawn of Justice” to watch but that really isn’t high praise when the movie in question is a murky, depressing, self-loathing slog that thinks it’s smart for bringing up ideas that it never really develops to fruition.
A more accurate summary of this experience would be, I kind of wish I had never seen “Dawn of Justice” at all.
The only reason I’m not angry this time around is because now, even the world knows this approach wasn't going to work. Between disappointing at the box office, polarizing every audience it was after, and scrambling to enact damage control on the sequel by gradually forcing out the guy who wasn’t the right fit for this project in favor of a committee of knowledgeable producers that can guide future features down a better path, even Warner Bros. and DC knows that they can’t let anything like this turkey ever happen again in any medium.
Knowing the characters I love will be actively moved away from this perversion of their core values in favor of something actually watchable is pretty much the best thing to come out of this nightmare.
4 Corporate Course Corrections out of 10
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