Does 'Batman v Superman' Make Sense?

On the outside, Batman v Superman is a complete mess from beginning to “MARTHA!” Now I’m not going to ever claim it’s a great movie; to be sure, it has its storytelling flaws and would certainly be better if some characters were moved around or replace, or you didn’t have a studio that deleted entire scenes that explained what the plot.

I won’t try to list the complaints about the film because there are too many, however, I will venture to dare say that not only did I enjoy the film, I was also able to follow its plot without needing the extended edition.

Let us break it down; our story opens with a flashback to the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne, witnessed by young Bruce who was 100% helpless to stop it. This scene is important to the plot, and for once not to explain Batman’s backstory. Mostly because we just got off the Nolan trilogy and if you DON’T know Batman’s origin… why are you here?

Superman is operating in the world without government oversight; essentially, he asks no one’s permission to do anything. He is a blue suited flying international incident because he is identified by the world as an American superhero.

At this same time, Batman is operating under basically the same manner in Gotham, without answering to any presiding authority, assaulting, murdering, and branding criminals without regards to silly little notions like ‘due process of law.’ It is never established in this film that Commissioner Gordon is endorsing, publicly or privately, Batman’s darker stance against crime and it is actually heavily implied that this more violent stance is a new thing. Bruce Wayne establishes in dialog with Alfred that they’ve been doing this for twenty years, and in the very same scene establishes that he lost at least one sidekick along the way.

Clark, on the other hand, is balancing his work as a reporter, which apparently occasionally puts him at odds with his boss Perry White, with being Superman, and balancing Superman with his relationship with Lois Lane. Lois, at this point, is, shall we say, not doing well. Established in the scene in their apartment, Clark tends to avoid the harder questions believing that he’s doing what’s right and it doesn’t matter that the nay-sayers say nay. Unbeknownst to him (because this Superman doesn’t have mind reading powers… yet), Lois seems to be debating whether their relationship is for the long haul or if Clark is just not ready to face reality at large. Now, does the ‘anti-authority attitude’ sound the least bit familiar? Maybe like a certain black leather wearing billionaire with a penchant for punching criminals?

From the outside looking in, these two men have very similar operating methods, and that is part of what draws them into direct conflict with each other. Basic psychology will tell you that the habits and actions that you don’t like in other people are generally the same habits and actions you do the most.

Clark begins looking into the Batman story, even though he’s been assigned somewhere else and expressly told to drop it, and Batman becomes suspicious of Superman, because Bruce Wayne has a fear of not having control. Where did this fear come from? Well, from watching someone with unchecked power inflict his will on his parents with fatal results, of course. He is afraid of Superman because Superman has the same power as the mugger in the alley, only on a global scale. This isn’t a leap in logic; if you pay attention to what he does and the attitude with which he does it, what is on screen spells it out for you.

Superman’s gripe against Batman is because he’s murdering people and branding them, which gets them killed later in prison, and Superman’s experience with killing someone at the end of Man of Steel put a bad taste in his mouth for that kind of behavior. But that’s not enough to get them to come to blows; no, we apparently need Lex Luthor to stoke the fires.

There are a hundred different ways this character could have been done and honestly I think they did go with the best one for this film. Lex in BvS is a modern self-made millionaire, a millennial with unchecked power and resources. He is in fact what Superman and Batman fear the other is going to become, and that’s not ironic. That is on purpose. He has, at this point, already deduced Batman and Superman’s true identities and is using that information to manipulate them; he sends taunting messages to Bruce to get him to remember all the times he failed to protect those he cared about, kidnaps Lois for the single purpose of getting Superman’s attention, and then kidnaps Martha Kent to goad Superman into taking on Batman, whom he has manipulated into ‘stealing’ the kryptonite.

What frustrates audiences is the fact that his motivations are never made clear. We never find out why he’s taking so many extreme measures to engineer not just the death of Superman but the deconstruction of his public persona—at least, not right away. He makes it clear that the endgame of his plan is to kill Superman but there is another, more subtle thing going on in his portrayal. Lex is portrayed as someone who has a steady rapport with the media. Reporters speak casually with him but when he starts acting erratically like going off on tangents at his gala or shoving a candy into the mouth of a politician, this is treated as new, unexpected behavior on the billionaire’s part, like he’s all of the sudden going insane.

In the middle of all this we have Wonder Woman’s subplot where she discovers that Lex is investigating meta-humans, and has a back and forth with Bruce Wayne about what Lex is up to. Wonder Woman is revealed to have been in operation since World War I, and later when she enters the final battle against Doomsday its clear she had her costume on hand which means she’s been operating basically in secret but still active.

But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves, we still have Superman and Batman’s brawl to talk about, or rather, what shuts it down.

Superman says, “Save Martha!” when it looks like Batman is about to finish him off.

Bruce freaks out when he hears his mom’s name uttered by the alien he’s trying to kill. Not just said, but said in context with saving her life. This completely ruins Batman in this moment because as was established in the opening flashback, it was his inability to save his parents, and his father’s dying word, that shaped his future, that turned him into Batman to begin with. When Lois shows up and explains what he meant, it turns Batman back around. He clearly sees Superman not as an alien, but as a person that’s not too dissimilar from him. Batman isn’t stupid, and he’s not portrayed as such in the film; rather, he’s portrayed as single-minded in his mission to protect as many people as he can regardless of what he has to do to the perceived threats. It is in this moment, and you can see it on his face, that he realizes how far he fell from his original mission, how much like the monsters he used to fight he’d let himself become. Suddenly he saw himself not as the hero standing between the world and chaos, but as the mugger in the alley causing the death of people who were just trying to do the right thing.

Batman’s sudden heel turn isn’t as shocking as it seems. He does have a character-changing moment, donning his regular bat-suit and hopping on his plane to go save Martha Kent. But he does so by killing and maiming a bunch of nameless henchmen. Baby-steps, I guess. Regardless, he saves Martham and in doing this shows Lex that plan A failed, so Luthor enacts plan B, Doomsday.

I’ll be honest, I had a problem with this at first, the use of Zod’s body to create Doomsday; but thinking about it, it kind of makes sense thematically. Zod is, or was, not dissimilar from Clark in the first film. He was fighting to protect his people, and so was Clark. It became clear in Man of Steel that for one culture to live the other had to die and it came down to deciding who was going to do what was needed to be done in order for their culture to survive. Clark won by killing Zod, so Zod being brought back to fight Superman in the context of the film universe only made sense, because Zod was the only thing that was established as being able to stand against Superman. It’s one of those ‘eh, I don’t have to like it but I get it’ kind of things.

Outside of an awesome introduction for Wonder Woman proper in the DCEU, the final battle doesn’t offer a lot in the story itself save to end the career of Superman (for a while). Batman and Wonder Woman decide to work together to bring out the other meta-humans in the world, because when Batman confronts Luthor in prison, Luthor tells him that something is coming and he just goes off like a lunatic about bells not being able to be un-rung and that ‘he’s’ coming and if you were paying attention you start to understand what Luthor’s portrayal was trying to say… and maybe a bit of Batman’s as well.

Luthor came unhinged and he starts talking about how something was coming, and sending him messages and whatnot. Luthor was just as manipulated, it seems, as our heroes were. While Luthor was pulling the strings to make Batman and Superman dance, something outside of Luthor’s control was pulling his strings, and the dream sequence Batman has earlier in the film gives us the clear clue as to what.

During the course of the film we are treated to a dream sequence set in an apocalyptic wasteland where Superman controls an army of armored humans and bug-like creatures. At one point we see Batman overlooking a massive ‘omega’ symbol burnt into the earth during this dream. Unless he’s seen these things before, the images of the bug-men and the omega seal are alien to him and have no business being in his dream. If anything, had this just been a paranoid dream, like he assumes it is, it would have been the Superman crest, not the omega symbol. Immediately, he starts acting erratically and begins his quest to stop Superman.

It’s implied by Luthor’s ramblings at the end that he may have seen something very similar, only instead of holding true to the course of his life’s mission he came unspooled and went coo-coo for kryptonite.

If you take a step back and examine the final product as is, you can see it’s a much smarter film than a lot of people give it credit for. Is it perfect? Oh heavens, no, there are some serious storytelling errors that could have been smoothed over, but neither is it the overt train wreck critics make it out to be. It's… smarter than what we are used to for superhero films. Up until this point, everything followed a very basic formula for the hero’s journey plot line, even in sequels to superhero films, and even the chief rival film for Batman v Superman in Captain America: Civil War. Many herald the latter film as being “better,” but it isn’t. It is just more predictable and familiar with its pacing and storytelling style.

You don’t actually need the special edition to make everything clear in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Does it help to better unpack information, making it more digestible? Sure, but at the same time, the same information is available to you in the theatrical cut.

So don’t sell the film short just because it has Ben Affleck with bangs, Lex Luthor’s voice cracks, or Clark thinking that spilling water all over the apartment bathroom floor is romantic. Maybe give it another shot, but treat it more like a murder mystery than a superhero flick.

Thanks for reading.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and all related characters and images are owned by Warner Bros Entertainment and DC Comics.

Captain America: Civil War is owned by Disney Entertainment and Marvel Comics