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There’s a certain appeal about bringing in your favorite pop culture characters and having them duke it out. The crossover concept isn’t at all new. Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein is a stellar example of how much mileage a good crossover can get.
I picked up a collection of DC vs Marvel comics back in the day (no idea where that is now), but it had Spiderman vs Superman (I’m going to let you guess who ultimately won that matchup). I’ll even be the first to tell you that I loved the Freddy vs. Jason crossover (if it would’ve been the rumored Freddy vs Jason vs Ash, I’d have died of a content heart by now).
There’s a reason we used to sit in class or at work (two days ago) arguing who would win in a fight between Green Arrow and Hawkeye or Batman and literally anyone else in comic book history.
So of course, it comes down to Batman vs Superman. Finally, our childhood wishes of seeing these two on the big screen come true.
I just wish it was a better movie.
Is it so much for me to ask that I not only see these two titans finally take it to each other on the big screen but also have it be something more than a capitulating and amateur trainwreck of a film? Zack Snyder is a technically competent filmmaker. He crafts some beautiful shots and uses, on more than a few occasions, his signature style. At some point though, DC fans deserve more than beautifully composed slow motion shots of Superman floating down to earth or pearls falling to the ground. They deserve characters that are true to their source material with a story that is told coherently, logically, and isn’t a weird advertisement for the next 5 years of films.
This is where the MCU has truly succeeded with films like Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. Sure they are leading toward a far larger threat and they are essentially pieces of a greater whole, but they are more than just fan service. If there were no MCU, those films would stand on their own as successful pieces of cinema. As we head into Captain America: Civil War, it’s important to remember the journey it took to get there: multiple phases, character development, relationship development and a backstory that we’ve shared with them. When Captain America and Ironman inevitably come to blows, the impact of that moment is because it’s been built up to.
Where Batman vs Superman fails is in the faulty assumption that it can make the audience truly care about the battle of its titular characters without establishing a shared emotional history through a systematically built cinematic history. BvS expects us to automatically care about Batman vs Superman; it expects us to rely only on the memory of our schoolyard arguments to heighten our emotional tie. It EXPECTS the hardcore fandom to prop it up. We’re expected to inherently treat it as our childhood dreams realized, but it’s just a shell of something greater.
I sincerely hope that Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman turn out to be great films. Under the right hand, the DCCU has the potential to do some amazing things… Batman Vs Superman just isn’t one of them.