Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Annotation for KRRR! 2017 by Daniel Krátký

Last year's blockbuster Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice was supposed to kick off a series of comic book films from the DC stable, thus creating an opposition to the booming Marvel. It follows directly on from the end of Man of Steel. While that focused on the duel between Superman (Henry Cavill) and his archenemy Zod (Michael Shannon), the opening of Batman vs Superman adds Bruce Wayne's (Ben Affleck) perspective to their destructive showdown. In the dust and rubble of the city, Wayne realizes how great a danger Superman can be. Superman, in turn, sees Wayne's alter-ego, Batman, as a criminal. Their confrontation is inevitable, but neither of the heroes suspect that everything is being orchestrated from afar by the young billionaire Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who wants to use their duel for his own benefit. The mysterious Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), the legendary comic book heroine known as Wonder Woman, is also involved in this clash.

However, the long-awaited film strongly polarized critics and fans, the sales did not reach the expected billion dollars, and everything culminated in Zack Snyder being dismissed from his position as the studio's "quality controller". In addition to emphasizing action scenes, the director tries to problematize and justify the motif of (super)heroism, while continuing to direct all events towards the promised confrontation between the central superheroes Batman and Superman. He gradually limits the roles of the supporting characters in the narrative as well as the justification of individual steps. Despite the criticized narrative shortcomings, the film offers an unconventionally conscious, subversive and non-classical view of blockbusters and comic book adaptations in general. On the one hand, Snyder sticks to comic book models, when he literally reconstructs the well-known birth of Batman and tries to copy compositions known from cartoon panels. On the other hand, however, he ingeniously subverts these traditions. Iconic images are stripped of their original context, the Batman myth is rationalized, and the “hero” becomes a soldier who executes criminals and does not care about the number of victims. Some important comic book characters are not even named, and may even be unexpectedly eliminated. Similarly, Snyder calmly inserts a minimally motivated post-apocalyptic action sequence into his film, which serves to simply introduce an (irrelevant to the development of the plot of this film) alternative universe. Batman vs Superman thus brings an overly ostentatious, highly stylized and introspective fictional world that does not care about the traditional construction of (not only) comic book films. It is a representative of the beauty of the surface, a film of large ensembles, impressive images and simple biblical analogies. But most of all, it is a film for the big screen. So if any contemporary film deserves a projection from a 70mm film print for its monumentality, Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice is certainly it.