Boys! Mm, Bruce Wayne meets Clark Kent. Ah, I love it! I love bringing people together! How are we?I haven't seen Batman Versus Superman yet, but I'm quite curious as to how good or bad it actually is. Reviews have not been kind, but the box office results are more positive - so far BVS has pulled in close to $500 million dollars globally after only four days in theatres.
Lex Luthor, Batman Versus Superman
Personally, I wasn't surprised by the negative reviews I saw in advance of the film's actual release. The trailers I'd seen had left me cold, and let's face it, if a superhero movie doesn't provide the editor with 90 seconds worth of excitement for a trailer, there's something very wrong.
The reviews seemed to match that opinion, and yet there's that impressive box office total. It's difficult to think of another movie which has been panned to this extent by critics, but has still managed to attract so many viewers.
From the perspective of the long-term comic book fan, Batman Versus Superman appears to be an odd mashup of three or four different comic book storylines. The base concept comes from The Dark Knight Returns, a brilliant and innovative four-issue 1986 miniseries by Frank Miller. The story is set many years in a future where the government has outlawed superheroes. Batman has retired, Wonder Woman has returned to her people, Green Lantern has left Earth for the stars, and Superman leads a shadowy existence as a tool of the government, accepting anonymity in exchange for permission to continue saving lives and averting disasters.
An aging Bruce Wayne sees a world in chaos, and can no longer resist the lure of the cape and the cowl in spite of the prohibition against vigilante crimefighting. In the final issue, the government dispatches Superman to put the Batman out of business, but with the help of a one-armed Green Arrow, a female Robin, and some synthetic Kryptonite, the Batman shows his old friend who’s really in charge.
The second source is the equally classic Death of Superman sequence from 1992, wherein an ancient Kryptonian monster named Doomsday goes head-to-head with the Man of Steel, resulting in the death of both combatants. As is often the case in the wonderful world of comics, both eventually get better.
And then there's the whole Wonder Woman thing...not to mention the Justice League of America tie-in as per the Dawn of Justice subtitle for the film.
On top of all these disconnected storylines, there's the question of how Batman and Superman originally met in the comics. For that story, we have to go back to Issue 76 of Superman (Volume 1) from 1952, in which Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent are forced to share a stateroom - and a bed - on an overbooked cruise ship.*
When a fire breaks out, the two crimefighters catch each other changing into their costumes - marking the start of an ambiguous friendship that would last throughout their careers (not to mention several reboots and a LOT of retconning).
From what I've been able to tell from trailers and online hints, the plot of the movie combines a lot of elements from the source material - okay, probably not the cruise ship thing. Some of it looks interesting, and I'm hoping that there may have been some clever combining of comic book storylines and the events of Man of Steel. However, I've also seen some things that don't appear to have been well written or well executed. Oh, well...I guess I'm going to have to see the film in order to find out what the real story is. Wish me luck...but really, half a billion dollars worth of ticket purchases would seem to indicate that it can't be that bad.
- Sid
* This is actually the most improbable story idea in this entire posting - why in
the world would a rich playboy have to share a room with a penniless
newspaper reporter?
