How Wonder Woman totally vindicates Batman v. Superman

With Wonder Woman getting good reviews all over the place (except from Fox News who seem offended that the title character isn't American because reasons) and Batman v. Superman getting a post-mortem bashing in the process, I just wanted to throw out a ray of hope for people who liked BvS:

Wonder Woman's success totally vindicates the creative vision of BvS.

Seriously. I'm not kidding. I'm not being mean. This isn't going to end with me praising BvS with faint damnation. It also, to be frank, doesn't end with me changing my own poor opinion of BvS but I seriously believe this whole situation works out for everyone in a way a lot of people aren't considering.

First of all, if you liked BvS (and Man Of Steel and Suicide Squad) then nothing can change that, that's how you feel. Furthermore, those films did well so you can rest assured that you are a commercially viable audience and DC isn't going to stop making films like that any time soon. The creative visions of Zack Snyder and David Ayer will continue to be present in their films.

And there it is!

See, since DC got into the shared cinematic universe game one of the big distinctions they tried to make between their operation and Marvel's was that they wanted to give their directors more creative control. Now, I don't hold that all Marvel films are directed exactly the same or have a totally unified aesthetic but there is an obvious effort to present a similar tone and production design so that when characters from different ends of the MCU meet it doesn't look weird.

Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman has a very different feel to the other three existing DCEU movies but Suicide Squad also has a different feel to the two Snyder-led efforts, just not as pronounced. It was, perhaps, a mistake to lead with two films by the same director and then follow up with a third from a new director whose style was not quite as distinct from Snyder's as it could have been but this does all show that DC is willing to pursue very different creative visions even with characters who are going to meet up.

Long story short: everybody wins. If you liked the Snyder (and closely allied Ayer) approach, that isn't going away even if Warner takes the success of Wonder Woman to heart. Justice League and Gotham City Sirens will continue that approach because that's what their directors were employed to create: Zack Snyder's Justice League and David Ayer's Gotham City Sirens. Then down the line we get Joss Whedon's Batgirl and Matt Reeves' The Batman.

Now, the down side of this is that unlike Marvel the audience of any one film in the franchise will not go into any of the others with the reassurance they're going to like what they watch. For my part, though, I'm more than willing to take that risk for a more varied approach to these properties. 

Why Logan works and Batman v. Superman didn't

(NO SPOILERS HERE. I'll probably put up a review at the end of the week but this is just a short, general terms discussion of things that are absolutely clear from the trailers and advertising).

Logan is a good film. Actually, its a bloody excellent film but the problem is that what makes it work is basically impossible to copy. Its not the 18 rating (in the US, over here it passed as a 15), though it certainly helps that Wolverine can finally use his claws on people as well as props.

No, what makes this film work is that Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart have been playing these characters for nearly twenty years. Watching these two living in a Mexican shack as broken old men has an emotional resonance that just telling Ben Affleck not to shave and trying to pass him off as an older Batman couldn't hope to.

This is actually a pretty big problem for DC: they keep trying to deconstruct things they never properly constructed in the first place. They tried to do the big blow out fight between Batman and Superman with a Batman we've never met before and a Superman we barely know; they've commissioned a Nightwing movie without doing any work on the idea of what Robin is so we can't appreciate what it is in this world for Dick to have moved on from the role; we were expected to care about Wonder Woman over a year before we got her origin story.

Not that I think DC are the only ones scheming away trying to work out how to make their own Logan. You can bet your arse that some misguided soul at Sony is trying to wrestle Spider-Man: Reign into a pitch document, an idea that might just have worked if Tobey Maguire was still in the role but there's not enough make-up on Earth to turn Tom Holland into Old Man Peter Parker so we'd end up with yet another live action Spider-Man.

So let's... not, okay? Let's allow a unique film based on unique circumstances no one could have planned to remain the singular little gem it is and move on to good ideas.

Please?

Batman v. Superman trailer reaction: meh

Yes, the Hollywood hype machine has convinced me to pick this particular scab again. Let's just do the high points:

It seems Batman's actual plan is to straight-up murder Superman for the good of the human race; Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor looks very young but at least he gets some decently whimsical lines; the DKR-inspired Bat-suit looks even worse in motion; Ma Kent has taken on her late husband's low opinion of humanity; and, Wonder Woman gets blown up at one point but wasn't judged enough of a draw to get a line in this trailer.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised the movie franchise that had Superman snapping necks would decide to jettison the “one rule” that Batman's meant to abide by.

Also, the US government has decided that Zod wrecking Metropolis is all Clark's fault. Considering they have no means of punishing him and no means of restraining him and that this might count as the most self-defeating act of victim blaming in history.

Eisenberg gets some nice lines as Lex, even if whimsy isn't a quality typically associated with the character it is at least a moment or two of humour in a DC movie.

Everything else, though, is no more or less than you'd expect from the bastard child of Christopher Nolan and Frank Miller: dark and dreary, good looking but ultimately vacant.

I mean, I wasn't expecting much from the sequel to an origin movie that failed to explain its main character, a sequel so desperate that it gives Batman top billing so it doesn't have to admit to being a Superman movie AND THEN turns out to be a Justice League prequel.

I want the DC Cinematic Universe to work. I strongly believe in creative competition as a the only way to stave off complacency and we really need some competition here. It increasingly looks like that's not going to happen and we're heading for an invincible orthodoxy where Marvel-Disney = great, Fox = middling and DC-Warner = dire. No, I didn't mention Sony in that list because I don't really believe we'll be able to call Spider-Man films “Sony movies” with a straight face anymore.

Also, turns out the Green Lantern reboot is going to be a Green Lantern Corps movie which... sounds interesting but probably won't be. 

Batman v Superman v Frank Miller

The Batman v Superman trailer, then...

No, just no. Dismal and dark and “Can you bleed? You will.”, oh dear. Its not like I was expecting anything else, this is DC Warner we're talking about, but there was the slightest glimmer of hope in my mind that Chris Nolan's departure might have changed things a little.

Nope. The closest thing to levity in this trailer was the fact that Ben Affleck seems to be wearing the Batman costume from The Lego Movie...

And all of this because The Dark Knight Returns is, for some bloody reason, still the touchstone for writing Batman. Can we just get over this, please? It isn't that The Dark Knight Returns is bad, as such, though it isn't to my tastes. Rather, its that it has this horrible gravity in the minds of Warner Bros. where it seems to be seen as the “real” Batman from which all other interpretations are just deviations unworthy of discussion. And of course the most flashy component of the Frank Miller Batman is his apparent total philosophical opposition to Superman instead of their being friends who disagree on methods, which is the far more common interpretation in the source material.

It's not like I'm hoping for the Adam West interpretation to make a comeback but I was hoping for some sign of influence from, say, Batman: The Animated Series where Batman was dark and grim but functionally human and capable of smiling.

But everyone likes Frank Miller because his version of Batman appeals to that oh so Nineties desire to make comics dark and mature, which in the minds of far too many are the same thing and... can we just get over it? The culture war here is kind of won and we nerds don't need our nerd media to pretend at maturity to pursue a vague sense of cultural acceptance because we have the cultural acceptance already.

What's truly baffling about this all is DC are actively trying to imitate Marvel's interlinked film continuity without imitating the things that made people want to watch the individual films. Marvel's films, whilst often having dark themes and subplots, are always pitched as fun films. People go to see the fun films and like them so much that they'll invest the time and money to follow them as a serial. DC are just offering the serial without the fun.

Maybe the logic is that DC doesn't want to “just” imitate Marvel and this dark, washed out aesthetic is an attempt to be different. Or maybe, as SallyP pointed out to me in comments when I talking about “sinking” Marvel Studios last week, DC Warner are just plain embarrassed by the fact that they're making films about superheroes. I know it sounds strange when you first say it but it makes sense to me, after all why inject grimdark into Superman of all characters except to lessen the embarrassment of something as “immature” as a wish fulfillment figure in red pants?

Even in this they could learn lessons from Marvel. Marvel don't usually make “superhero” films, really. Captain America was a straight war film that happened to feature a superhero, the Iron Man films were techno thrillers, The Winter Soldier was a conspiracy thriller and so on.

Its sad to think, though, that DC are embarrassed by their own properties especially considering there's no need to be. They own some of the most recognisable superheroes on the planet and, unlike Marvel, they own all their own film rights but they only really do Batman because Batman can be done grim and dark and “adult”. Marvel is at peace with its silliness and the artefacts of its past. Marvel will make a film with a talking raccoon and his talking tree sidekick or aliens who are really the Norse gods, they even did Captain America with a total lack of irony.

DC, meanwhile, have such trouble with getting an angle on Superman that they've had to bring Batman (and several other characters) into the second film to save the series. Its sad, really.