Some movies are so heavily reported on they feel devoid of any surprise. By the time Warner Brothers released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and it’s unwieldy title into the wild, they had loaded a pre-emptive strike bullet into their PR gun: already, across the pond, film was rolling on its follow-up, Justice League. No one knew details on the story. No one knew if it was going to be any good. In many ways, it didn’t matter: they just needed the public to believe they had something already cooking.
Here’s a core relationship that you need to understand as a moviegoer: Marvel and DC are the two biggest comic book companies, and have been rivals since the 1960’s. DC has historically always been associated with Warner Brothers. You’ve seen their work in both animated and live-action form. Until 2006, Marvel was rather polygamous, selling its properties out to Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four, Deadpool), Sony (Spider-Man), and Universal (The Incredible Hulk) because it desperately needed the cash to stay afloat. But from the time Iron Man hit in 2008 and Marvel’s 20-movie plan culminated in last May’s Infinity War, Warner Brothers-DC has been looking through the window, drooling at their rival’s unprecedented success.
It knew it wanted some of that Marvel movie money. It just didn’t know how to get there.
So after Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy ended, DC did a little bit of everything. It made itself darker. That didn’t really work. It decided to do a soft opening of a team-up in Batman v. Superman before going hard with Justice League. But they barely crawled through to that, a leaden zeppelin scraping the tops of buildings in its reach for flight. Then they ultimately decided to disband the whole shared universe concept to focus on different stories while pulling their Justice League around to surround the one undeniable success so far: 2016’s Wonder Woman.
It looks like Warner Brothers is still guessing. You can’t look like you know what you’re doing if you’re trying to make 3 different Joker movies at the same time.
So here’s the very specific criteria it took for me to finally watch a $300 million dollar movie that came out 8 months ago: I had a 3.5 hour flight, limited movie options on-board, and needed it to be something that had closed captions and probably did not rely on a totally bitchin’ soundtrack.
Warner Brothers: there’s your audience.
So I decided to do a little bit for a running diary. Here’s the thing: it’s easy to make fun of a $300 million dollar movie like this, but it’s important to remember that a lot of very talented people worked on this with the best of intentions. Some movie births are relatively painless. Others are like 36 hours in labor without an epidural in sight. You never know.
Immediately after the credits: Much has been made about the space above Henry Cavill’s lip. It’s responsible for my favorite movie business story, maybe ever. And yes, it looks just as bad as expected. Who knew that Hollywood could be so adept at removing limbs, deaging famous stars by 30 years, and creating new worlds, but a single goddamn mustache would completely trip it up? I love it. The point is clear: facial hair is something that will continue to equally vex and fascinate humankind for the rest of time.
14 min – I don’t have any problem believing that Jason Mamoa talks to fishes. I mean, have you seen the guy? If you told me he could do Monty Python coconut-claps to draw an entire herd of horses to his feet, I would believe you 100%. It doesn’t even bother me that his hair is very NOT aerodynamic, or that he’s choosing to live in very cold waters when he could be easily lounging about closer to the equator – dude clearly likes to be shirtless, ya know?
But here’s what does bother me: any good swimmer enters the water with a dive. Doesn’t matter if it’s face down or face up – it’s common knowledge that lining your hands together above your head as you dive is the slickest, most efficient way to enter the water. So of course, because this is a backasswards movie, Arthur Curry aka Aquaman aka King of the Seas enters the water in what can only be described as a trust fall with the beginnings of a backflip that somehow miraculously becomes a streamlined fish form. When you control the seas, you can apparently get away with some pretty uncool shit.
22 min – For 3 summers in college, I worked as an extra help grunt for the local school district’s maintenance department. I learned a lot that had nothing to do with maintenance (like how to legally play a forbidden game of volleyball by calling it ‘hand soccer’), but one thing I definitely learned is that the custodians hold the keys to the kingdom. They don’t just have a massive ring full of keys that threaten to pull their paints down. They have access to every room in the building AND your ability to get in these rooms is entirely contingent upon their presence and if they like you or not. It’s a display of power that’s weirdly disproportionate to how the general public tends to value a custodian. This just made me love custodians even more. But for all the access that these many keys may provide, I have never known a custodian to have such free after-hours access to an alien ship. A little bit of an oversight there.
27 min – I don’t know if this was something added late in the game (again, these are very talented people at work), but the entire attack on Themiscyra may as well have happened in a video game. Tons of weightless CGI with a weightless CGI villain and weightless CGI fights. What was once an enchanting, empowering place in 2016’s Wonder Woman has been rendered an afterthought by 2017. Here’s hoping Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 restores a little bit of that Themiscyra shine to the island.
40 min – Seeing this crazy Frankenstein of a movie so late meant that I saw Justice League and Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp within a week of each other. An interesting bit of product placement tidbit that I can’t get over: all of Justice League’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Mercedes-Benz, and all of Ant Man and the Wasp’s cars, including the souped-up concept cars, are made by Hyundai. There’s a lot of ways to look at this, but this is my favorite: many people who drive Mercedes-Benz take themselves a little too seriously and think the name alone will draw people to it, whereas Hyundai knows it has to be a little more fun to stand out above the crowd and is a hard-working, reliable brand that gets the job done. Now, was I talking about the car brands or the movies? You can’t separate the two, right?
71 min – In case you were wondering, Clark Kent/Superman does not get buried with a Superman tie. This is highly disappointing and a clear missed opportunity in branding.
75 min – After Superman wakes up and is clearly not himself, the Justice League needs to band together to stop him. Barry Allen aka The Flash tries to run around him, and the look of recognition on both The Flash and Superman’s faces (they have time to recognize each other because being super fast means the movie slows way down for them) that they’re both looking at someone with hyperspeed abilities is pretty hilarious. In The Flash, we see fear. In Superman, we see pure annoyance. This is the moment where the movie seems to realize Superman CAN be a little funny!
ALSO: If you ever wondered how Wonder Woman and Superman would fight each other, this movie answers in a way I never expected: head-butts. Lots of head-butts. And supercharged ones at that.
77 min – Superman lifts Batman up by the chin, because he knows that’s how they’ll be measured: not by the content of their character, but by the strength of their chins.
*There is a 35 min gap between observations. This is no accident. Nothing particularly notable.*
101 min – Superman and the Flash, in the middle of a massive CGI battle against CGI monsters, participate in a dick-measuring contest. Barry saves a family in a truck from certain death. Superman, however, carries a whole apartment complex over his head. No team is above pettiness!
There’s not much that’s memorable in this movie (at least for the right reasons). Everything you heard seems to ring true: Ben Affleck looks bored and a little sad in his role; Wonder Woman is clearly the best character, even if she’s underwritten here; The Flash has some serious potential if they can finally get a movie made; Aquaman could be fun if it’s not drowned by CGI water.
The next year and a half is going to be a very interesting one for Warner Brothers, with Aquaman (Dec 2018), Shazam (April 2019), Joker (Oct 2019), and Wonder Woman 1984 (Nov 2019). Those four films offer quite the potentialmix of adventure, color, humor, camp, and darkness. Warner Brothers should know much better but the end of this cycle what works for them and what doesn’t.
Let’s just hope another mustache doesn’t trip them up.
