5) MARTHAAAA!
Let's break this down. One thing the movie does a terrfic job of is giving Batman a good motivation to fight Superman. His clumsiness, incompetence and negligence cost Bruce Wayne one of his buildings and some very good friends, co-workers, and employees. As if that wasn't enough, he drove poor Scoot McNairy crazy. Folks that liked Man of Steel said that we'd see the "Real" Superman in the sequel, but Superman remained dour and surly in this film, giving Batman every reason not to trust him. To top it all off, he broke the Batmobile for no reason whatsoever.
So I'm fine with Batman wanting to take Superman down. What the movie did a poor job of was giving Superman a good motivation to fight Batman. His actions in Man of Steel cost him the moral high ground that Superman normally walks around with. So they made Batman even more brutal in hopes we'd forget about Superman also using questionable methods in this universe. Even if you buy into that, that's all they gave us. Realizing this wasn't enough, they had Lex kidnap Martha to "force" the fight. This is terrible for many reasons.
1) If Superman can see Lois falling off a building from Antarctica and get there in time to save her, why can't he locate Martha within an hour? She can't be too far away if Lex had time to take those polaroids and then get over to his building.
2) If Lex didn't know where she was, how did he have the Polaroids?
3) Why couldn't Superman just force Lex to call them? He had to have a way to reach them to tell them Superman had killed Batman.
4) Why didn't Superman take Lex with him to see Batman?
5) Why didn't Superman just fly to Batman and get down on his hands and knees and surrender?
6) Why didn't Superman try to talk sense to Batman throughout the fight? Talk about his mother?
7) Why did he say "If I wanted it, you'd be dead already" instead of something like "Please don't make me fight you. I need your help. They've got my mother."
8) Why would he say "Martha" instead of "My mother?"
CBM points out that Batman seeing Superman's humanity "went over people's heads." No it didn't. Everyone understood what the movie was trying to convey. It simply didn't make sense that Batman would stop because of that. They had built Batman's case against Superman too well for him to be phased by that. Not only that, the movie had failed to establish Superman's humanity by making him the true force for good that we all know. I understand why they did this - they didn't want to make Batman the "villain" by having it seem he'd lost his mind and was attacking Superman for no good reason. But they painted themselves into a corner and picked the stupidest way possible to get themselves out of it. Fail.
4) Superman is a Murderer...Batman Too!
CBM points out that Batman only takes down those trying to end other people's lives. This is simply a false statement. Batman attacks the folks stealing the Kryptonite, which is really stupid since he had attached a homing beacon to the truck. But the movie needed a Batmobile chase, so we get Batman killing lots of those folks as they try to get away from him. And they do, which doesn't matter because of the homing beacon. So...yeah.
The velocity at which Superman hit the terrorist holding Lois would have killed him even if there wasn't a brick wall. Also, Lois probably would have been killed too. But whatever. I had no issue with Superman killing that terrorist there.
I honestly didn't care about the killing, but since it was addressed here with inaccurate statements, I addressed it.
3) It's No Fun!
I laughed once in the movie - when Alfred said "Let's see...How best to describe what I'm seeing" when referring to Doomsday. I laughed because
I thought it was also the perfect way to describe the movie itself. Alfred was great, and he brought the only light moments to the film. I think everyone agrees more Alfred would have been a great idea.
Perry White took a try at making a joke, but it came off as Zack Snyder flipping the audience the middle finger. "This isn't 1938 anymore!" I got the joke, but when you're asking people to pay for a movie, it's probably best not to yell "I don't care what you people want, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET, NOW SHUT UP ALREADY!" It's one thing to have contempt for your audience, it's something else entirely to write it into the script.
It's not just a lack of jokes, it's how dark, gloomy, and dour the movie was. Not every movie has to be fun. Schindler's List wasn't fun, and I liked that - but that movie was uplifting and hopeful in it's own way. And you know, isn't it a problem when the closest movie I can come to that matches this movie's tone is Schindler's List? It's a comic book movie, for crying out loud. This movie was relentlessly not fun. Superman's one moment of heroism was so brief that it was drowned out by the rest of the film. And he partially ruined it by re-emphasizing that he only really cared about saving Lois.
2) Lex Luthor's Plan Makes No Sense!
This is where I expected CBM to explain Lex's plan, but they didn't bother. Because you can't. But I'll try, just so you can appreciate how little sense it makes.
Lex doesn't like Superman. There's no reason given for this in the film. We can assume he doesn't like him for the same reasons Batman doesn't, I guess. Does anyone know what Lexcorp makes? What Lex's skill set is? The movie doesn't tell us.
Regardless of his motivations, Lex's plan is in four parts:
1) Get Kryptonite and kill Superman with it. Seems pretty basic.
2) Frame Superman for...something?!? This is the part that makes the least sense. As we've already discussed, Superman's a clumsy dunce - there's already a reason for folks to dislike him and for Congress to have hearings on him and such. It's my opinion that the script originally called for the Senate hearings to be about the Battle of Metropolis, but they added the terrorist scene in the beginning to give Lois a little more to do and also to remind folks that may not have seen Man of Steel that when Lois is in trouble, Superman comes running. And I guess this is ok, but the Senate hearing should have still been about Metropolis. Why else would Scoot McNairy's character have been there? Lois' investigation goes absouletly nowhere in the film. It's just busywork that is dropped halfway through.
3) Get Batman and Superman to fight. Ok this seems like something he decided to do only AFTER the World's Greatest Detective stole Kryptonite from him and left behind a Batarang as a clue...because why? Ok, Batman's an idiot in this movie, but we're talking about Lex here.
This is where it gets really confusing. So Lex rigs Scoot's wheelchair with explosives, then goes back in time and steals his paychecks, and scrawls notes to Bruce Wayne on them hoping he'd see them, but not until after he'd stolen the Kryptonite. Wait...what? Yes, Lex admits to Superman that he was the one who had written those notes on Scoot's rejected checks. Now perhaps we're meant to think that Lex had stolen the checks over the course of the past 18 months, kept them, and then decided to send them back with the notes scrawled on them to piss Batman off after he stole the Kryptonite. That actually answers Bruce's question of "Why am I just seeing these now?" BUT WHY DID LEX STEAL THE CHECKS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!
And then of course Lex is somehow counting on Superman not going over there and saying "Hey Bats, they've got an innocent woman held hostage. Can you give me a hand? Nevermind, I've got X-Ray vision and superspeed. Have a good night."
4) Doomsday. I don't even know where to begin here, but let's try. Lex takes Zod's body to test that Kryptonite can hurt Superman, but then somehow learns that there's a handprint console and that if he takes Zod's fingerprints he can access the ship. And the ship just blurts out that if you bleed human blood on a Kryptonian corpse and then take a bath with it you get a giant fire breathing ork. But all of this happens so fast - and not just in the 2.5 hours of the movie, but in the actual timeline of the movie, that...Christ, movie. Maybe if this was the only component of Lex's plan it would have made more sense.
Overall, the problem with Lex is the same problem Zod had in Man of Steel - none of his motivations or actions make any sense whatsoever. Lex's
only role in the film is to move the plot along. But he doesn't actually have any reason to be there within the construct of the movie. The movie would actually have worked a lot better if Lex and all his confusing subplots were simply removed entirely.
1) Why didn't Superman stop the bomber?
This wasn't one of my complaints about the film. It was a cool scene, even if it was completely unnecessary. If anything, my complaint isn't "why didn't Superman stop the bomber?", It's "Why didn't Security at the Capitol stop the bomber?" Seems pretty unrealistic that a guy could get a bomb that deep into the Capitol building. But this was a minor thing in a useless scene in the film, so whatever.
I suppose a related complaint could be "Why the heck did Superman leave after this?" Didn't he care who bombed the Capitol building? I'd think that would have annoyed him. Or someone. Anyone? Nobody really cared about that. It happened, and then was never brought up again.
Hopefully Josh has a sense of humor about all this and hope you all had fun reading! The one thing I'll say about both of Snyder's films - they're fun to talk about!