Want to know my favorite superhero movie of all time? BvS.And just *because*, I’m going to break down exactly how awesome this movie is, scene by scene.
Cringe jeet
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https://youtu.be/h-gVEvFa33MLet's start from the very beginning with the prologue. Most people see this as just another standard Batman origin sequence, but Snyder is actually laying down the architectural blueprint for the entire movie right here. It is a closed narrative loop. The film starts with a funeral and ends with a funeral. You see black horses pulling the Wayne casket through a bleak landscape, and this is visually mirrored at the exact end of the movie by the black horses pulling Clark's casket. The cycle of Bruce's grief starts and ends with these two wooden boxes.Zimmer's score is a very fragile, melancholic piano melody, but it gets aggressively interrupted by the hyper realistic foley of the violence. You hear the heavy mechanical click of the gun hammer, the deafening blast, and the brass casings hitting the wet pavement like a metronome. Snyder slows down the famous Frank Miller pearl shot to an agonizing crawl. The pearls falling into the sewer grate is Bruce's literal Citizen Kane snowglobe moment. His emotional development permanently freezes right there. That is exactly why Thomas Wayne's dying word, "Martha," is mixed as a raspy, intimate whisper instead of a shout. It is his "Rosebud."The visual transition from the barrel of Joe Chill's gun directly into the dark circular shaft of the Batcave is huge. The gunshot basically blew a hole in the earth that Bruce fell into, and he never actually climbed out. When he hits the bottom of the dry well, the bats swarm him and lift him into the light. The composition here is a direct recreation of Gustave Dore's engravings of Dante's Paradiso. It looks like a holy ascension. But Bruce's older voiceover completely undercuts it.>In the dream, they took me to the light. A beautiful lie.He wasn't lifted by angels. He was swallowed by the dark. The movie is telling you in the first five minutes not to trust this guy's perspective.
https://youtu.be/pNgdwKIAcOYEveryone knows it is a frame by frame recreation of the MoS finale but the point is not just continuity. Snyder completely flips the genre from a sci-fi action epic into straight up survival horror simply by locking the camera to the street. In MoS the camera flies with the gods. Here you are an ant getting stepped on. Bruce Wayne is entirely stripped of his agency. He is not Batman in this scene. He is just a helpless guy driving a Jeep into a literal 9/11 allegory.The destruction of the Wayne Financial building is a macro recreation of the alleyway murder. Bruce is literally on the phone desperately trying to save Jack who acts as a surrogate for his father and his company. He is forced to watch his family get annihilated again while he can do absolutely nothing to stop it. When the building collapses a massive cloud of ash and debris rolls down the street. Instead of running away Bruce runs directly into the blind dark cloud. Visually this is the exact same action as him falling into the dry well as a kid. He is actively plunging back into his trauma because it is the only place he knows how to exist.When he finds the little girl in the rubble Snyder completes the psychological loop. Bruce is trying to retroactively save himself by pulling this kid from the debris. But when he asks where her mother is she just points up at the burning skyscraper. The cycle of the Gotham orphan just got violently exported to Metropolis and the alien in the sky is the one who triggered it.The final shot of the sequence is the anchor for Affleck's entire performance. He is holding this newly orphaned child in the ashes of his own building while glaring up at the sky. He is looking at gods who fight without any regard for the collateral damage below. It perfectly sets up the beautiful lie subtext from the prologue. His twenty years of street level justice mean absolutely nothing when an alien can vaporize a city block by looking at it.
https://youtu.be/mZ_S26vzhe0Moving into the Nairomi desert sequence. This is the inciting incident for Superman’s entire arc in the film and the moment that completely recontextualizes his presence on Earth. The theatrical cut completely butchered the geopolitics of this scene, but the Ultimate Edition lays it out flawlessly as a grounded, cynical geopolitical thriller.In the discussion Lois Lane has with General Amajagh, one could view America as an analogy for Superman. Superman tries to be neutral, but that is an impossibility. He has power, and he has no choice, as a good natured person, to use his power for the sake of good. What that means, inevitably, is that he will have to de facto “take sides” in conflicts. He can’t not do it. >“No one is different; no one is neutral.” Conversely, you could view Superman in the entire film as a metaphor for the US. Look at the setup. Lois thinks she is a journalist chasing the truth about rogue factions, but she is actually being used as a pawn. Jimmy Olsen’s reveal as a CIA operative hiding behind press credentials is a direct, scathing critique of American interventionismYou might, if you’re a comic book fan, be annoyed that Superman is taken through the ringer in this film, faced with choices and problems as difficult as he is. What Snyder believes is that Superman is strong enough, as a character, as an abstraction, to survive what is thrown at him in this film:>“And it’s the only way to move forward with a hero, because otherwise the hero drowns in the mire of his own morality, in that he never can go forward, he never can evolve. He becomes an allegory, he’s a lesson, like, ‘This is the way to be, kids,’ not a real story. He becomes like one of the Ten Commandments. He’s not like an actual [person].”
>>221380611Its incredibly underrated, MoS still clears ofc as its perfect
https://youtu.be/sQjaMbaIqqgOn another hand, when Superman arrives, he doesn't fly in with a boy scout smile to salute the troops. His very first action in the sequence is destroying a U.S. military Hellfire missile. He is literally intercepting American military hardware to protect Lois. This visually establishes that he is not a state asset. He operates completely outside of government control, dictating international conflicts on his own terms.Furthermore, look at how Snyder frames Superman's physical power when he rescues her. He doesn't just disarm the warlord. He tackles the guy at supersonic speed straight through multiple brick walls. It is a terrifying, desperate, and unrestrained display of kinetic force. He isn't holding back, because he is acting purely on micro-empathy: the woman he loves is about to die, and he will break the sound barrier and a militia to save her.Lex Luthor's genius is that he doesn't try to beat Superman physically; he weaponizes that exact micro-empathy to create a macro geopolitical disaster.Lex uses KGBeast to execute the militia and burn the bodies. The burned bodies are simply to destroy the evidence of Lex's experimental LexCorp bullets. The real trap is the narrative Lex feeds to the fake witness for her congressional testimony.She paints a highly realistic, terrifying picture for the politicians: Superman dropped out of the sky to impose his own will, saved his girlfriend, and then just flew away, leaving a massive power vacuum. Because of his unilateral intervention, the government forces swept in and slaughtered the villagers in the ensuing chaos.This hits the absolute core thesis of the movie. Superman involved himself in a complex human warzone only to make it exponentially worse for the people living there. It proves to the world that an alien acting on his own emotional whims is a global threat. He brings fire to the sky and leaves mortals to deal with the ashes.
>>221380611kek
https://youtu.be/3gtupCiVwZUThis is where Snyder completely shatters the illusion of the traditional superhero and pays off the "Beautiful Lie" prologue we established earlier. Batman’s actual introduction in the film is not shot like an action sequence; it is shot identically to a horror movie.When the rookie cop enters the dilapidated house, the cinematography invokes films like Se7en or Alien, not a comic book movie. The lighting is completely stripped away, leaving only the aggressive, intersecting beams of the police flashlights cutting through the pitch black.When Batman is finally revealed, he isn't standing in a heroic, statuesque pose. He is clinging to the ceiling in the darkest corner of the room, completely shrouded in shadow. When the cop spots him, he scrambles across the ceiling and the walls like a feral animal or a Xenomorph. He has completely shed his humanity. He operates exclusively as a monster in the dark, proving the voiceover from the opening scene: he was never a creature of the light.The most telling part of this scene is the reaction of the trafficked women. In a standard superhero movie, the rescued victims would be crying tears of joy, thanking their savior. Here, they are huddled together in absolute, paralyzing terror.They don't even look at the dead/beaten traffickers; they stare into the dark corner where Batman is hiding. The older woman literally calls him "the devil." Bruce's methods have become so excessively brutal that the very innocents he is trying to protect cannot distinguish him from a demonic entity. He is a source of trauma, not a source of hope.
>>221381382BvS > Snyder League > MoS
This scene gives us the physical, stomach-turning reality of the Bat-brand we discussed earlier. The cop finds the human trafficker chained to a radiator, and the sound design forces us to hear his agonizing screams before we see him.Snyder gives us a visceral close-up of the searing, branded flesh on the man's chest. This is Bruce Wayne completely corrupting the romanticized heroism of his childhood. The Mark of Zorro was a bloodless, theatrical slash to humiliate the corrupt. The Bat-brand is a sadistic, permanent torture device. It proves Bruce is no longer acting out of a desire for justice; he is acting out of pure, unadulterated rage and cruelty.Notice the reaction of the police. The veteran cop knows not to shoot, but the rookie cop panics and immediately opens fire on Batman with his shotgun. Batman is not deputized. He is not Jim Gordon's trusted ally anymore. After twenty years in Gotham, he has alienated everyone. The police view him as an erratic, violent threat that needs to be put down.This introduction perfectly sets the stage for his conflict with Superman. Bruce Wayne has become the exact kind of unaccountable, terrifying monster that he accuses Superman of being.
https://youtu.be/r5OjTrJoT6sClark shows up holding flowers, which feature prominently in the film.In Christian art, flowers are symbols of rebirth, life, and resurrection. Superman, while associated with Sun-god Apollo, is also (obviously) a Christ figure. You might think this contradictory, but I think the multi-layered symbolism of Jesus is directly relevant to what the film is trying to dramatically represent: the lack of meaning that flows from the absence of religion.Jesus said: >“I am the way and the truth and the life.” Superman, in turn, represents:>“Truth, Justice, and the American way.” Apollo, again, is the god of the Sun and the god of Truth. Interesting, to say the least, that Superman’s antagonists in the film are Lex, who is a god of Lies, and Bruce, who is Hades, the god of Death.That Bruce is a god of Death is made obvious in the film itself, with no added commentary necessary: his entire being is motivated by death. He dresses like a bat, a symbol of death. He “lives” underground. His entire psychological state is based on the death of his parents. He fully intends to die in his quest to kill Superman. Superheroes in Snyder and Terrio’s world are elevated to mythological archetype.
This scene is actually the emotional core of Clark's tragedy. It perfectly contrasts the micro empathy of Clark against the macro geopolitical reality of Superman.Look at how Snyder visually frames their priorities. The scene opens with Lois examining the experimental bullet she pulled from the Nairomi shootout. She is actively trying to untangle the massive geopolitical conspiracy surrounding them. She drops the heavy, metallic bullet into a bag right as Clark walks in holding a paper bag of groceries and a single rose. It is a brilliant visual dichotomy. Lois is burdened by the cold reality of the world's hatred, while Clark is desperately clinging to fragile, domestic normalcy.Clark's dialogue completely exposes his internal state. He tells her:>"I don't care what they're saying. The woman I love could have been blown up or shot." He completely dismisses the international hearings and the global fallout. To the politicians and to Bruce Wayne, Superman intervening in Africa is a rogue nuclear state acting without jurisdiction. To Clark, it was just a guy breaking the sound barrier to save the woman he loves. He is incapable of viewing himself as a global weapon, which is exactly why the world is so terrified of him.Lois hits him with the most devastating realization of the film: >"I'm saying there's a cost. I just don't know if it's possible... for you to love me and be you." She understands that the world will never allow Superman to have a personal life. Because his sheer existence shifts global power dynamics, every time he acts out of personal love (micro), the global ramifications are catastrophic (macro). He cannot be the omnipotent savior of the world while holding onto human attachments without someone else paying the price.Clark drops his glasses when enters the tub with Lois, a not-so-subtle indication that he’s comfortable with her; he doesn’t have to hide or pretend when he’s around Lois.
Clark's physical reaction to this existential crisis is incredibly telling. He completely rejects her warning and steps into the bathtub fully clothed, shoes and all. It is a perfect physical metaphor. He is forcefully asserting his human persona into her space, refusing to be more than just Clark. When Lois warns him that he is going to flood the apartment, he just pulls her in. He is literally and metaphorically ignoring the flood of consequences spilling over the edge. He would rather drown in this isolated micro moment of love than face the terrifying macro reality waiting for him outside that door.This is exactly what the people crying for the 2025 Superman movie miss. In that movie, the character arc is spoon-fed through literal mock interviews directly to the camera so the audience doesn't have to think. Here, you have to read the subtext of a guy ruining his own apartment just to desperately prove to his girlfriend that he is still a human being.Lois plays a central role in the film (unlike other love interests in superhero films), both thematically and on a basic plot level. You are likely familiar with the pagan idea of woman as nature and man as culture, or civilization. The Christian worldview takes it in a slightly different direction. In the Christian worldview, women represent all earthly things, both civilization and nature, and men represent the divine or heavenly.This might be considered sexist, but Christianity does not take the view of material world = bad and metaphysical world = good. The proper mode of being is the reconciliation of physical and metaphysical. This is what Christ is, and why the New Testament insists on a physical and literal, not (only) metaphysical or metaphorical, resurrection. The physical, which is to say Earth and the body, are exalted. This is why the relationship between Lois and Clark is central to the film. It is the union between the metaphysical and the physical.
There’s also the Excalibur connection. Lois is the Lady of the Lake, who appears in pools of water. The bathtub scene foreshadows her central role regarding the Spear in the last act of the film. Again, if you’re thinking “this is all a stretch,” remember that Chris Terrio said this was the most rigorous intellectual exercise in his life. This is Zack Snyder, without a doubt the most creative and ambitious director working in the genre today, working with an Oscar winning writer who has an academic background in Western literature.
>>221380611Like all of Snyder's movies, it has some great scenes here and there, but it's mostly nonsense. This one was especially bogged down by the studio mandated JL crap they shoved into it. If it was just the Batman/Superman fight with Lex manipulating them and that's it it might have been certified kino.
WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH
>>221380611>>221380787>>221380958>>221381382>>221381534>>221381609>>221381652I like you. I’m reading every single one of these. I believe BvS to be one of the best movies ever made, let alone comic book films. There are elements of DKR present, obviously, but it’s so much more than that. Warner tasked Zack and his creative team with jump-starting their cinematic universe. They did it, then the cowards didn’t even have the balls to let him finish the story. Snyder delivered that rarest of things - a story that invites you to explore, to think, to imagine, and the questions it encourages its viewers to ask are answered in its imagery, with showing, not telling. It is a world where our myths are real - all of them, and even the worlds themselves are metaphors.
https://youtu.be/z_lqQ3ZgVJAMoving right into the next crucial beat: the confrontation between Bruce and Alfred in the Batcave. This scene strips away all the superhero posturing and gives you the naked clinical diagnosis of Bruce's mental state.In their conversation, Bruce lies about the potential of a dirty bomb. On a political level, Bruce represents the post-9/11 American, who is paranoid about “aliens” and their ill-intent. A common concern among American neo-conservatives is the potential of terrorist entities to detonate dirty bombs in major Western cities.Alfred slams down a newspaper, headlining Bruce’s branding of Gotham’s criminals, asking “New rules?” Bruce is in denial. Bruce tries to justify his new brutal methods by claiming that they have always been criminals and that nothing has changed. He is desperately trying to normalize his sadistic use of the Bat-brand by lumping it in with his traditional vigilantism. He wants to believe he is the exact same Batman he was twenty years ago, just operating in a harsher world. It is pure cognitive dissonance.Alfred completely dismantles this lie. He refuses to accept it and tells Bruce that everything has changed. He traces Bruce's devolution directly back to the Black Zero event, reminding him of the day men fell from the sky and the gods hurled thunderbolts while innocents died. Alfred is pinpointing the exact moment Bruce's psyche broke.Then Alfred delivers the absolute thesis statement for Affleck's character:>"The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness, that turns good men cruel".Bruce is not acting out of a hyper-evolved sense of justice. His cruelty is a direct trauma response to being rendered completely helpless during the Metropolis attack. He is brutally beating and branding street-level thugs because it gives him a microscopic sense of control in a macro world where aliens can vaporize buildings by looking at them.
Look at how this sequence acts as a bridge from the bathtub scene. The juxtaposition is brilliant. You just watched Clark desperately trying to hold onto his humanity and domestic normalcy, literally stepping into a bathtub with his clothes on to just be a normal guy with his girlfriend, while Bruce is locked in a dark, subterranean cave actively shedding his humanity to become an unaccountable monster. Clark is a god desperately trying to be a man, while Bruce is a man desperately trying to become a demon.This soundtrack piece perfectly underscores the heavy, melancholic atmosphere of Alfred realizing just how far Bruce has fallen into darkness.
>>221382056I like how, I’m much the same way that Clark/Superman represents the invisible/visible immigrant, Bruce/Batman represents two different aspects of Americans - the “native son” and the soldier. His arc is basically a more expansive and complex exploration of the arc Colonel Hardy follows in MoS.
>>221382139Yeah, there's a log of dialogue between both movies. I'll have to step away for a bit, but i will be back to continue with my musings.
>>221382244Take your time. I’m going to break out into some musings of my own. To an old-school comics guy like me, it became increasingly clear with repeated viewings that Zack, et al., were concerned with introducing the characters and their world in a way that had internal consistency. Their world is one where both magic and myth are real, their power waxing and waning in response to humanity’s collective belief in them. It is a world where mankind’s collective imagination and belief gives rise to gods under the right circumstances. Magic has been largely dormant since the first Heroic Age, but there are hints that others, namely Bruce Wayne, have managed to harness a portion of its power even if he is himself consciously unaware of it. Like Superman, the Batman has iconography around him, only of a darker, more chthonic nature. He is the god of the Underworld to the citizens of Gotham, and jail and Arkham are their own respective Hell and Tartarus. To the rest of the world, he’s just an urban legend, but to the people of Gotham, he’s boogeyman who drags you to “Hell.”
>>221382589It feels like something straight out of Grant Morrison's DC comics, especially Seven Soldiers of Victory, where he introduced the idea of multiple versions of Camelot throughout history. This included a new take on the DC character, the Shining Knight. Before Morrison’s run, the Shining Knight was Sir Justin, a knight of Camelot who ended up in the future. Morrison reimagined the role with Sir Ystina, from an earlier version of Camelot. In the story, he suggested that his Seven Soldiers were yet a new incarnation of Camelot’s heroes, and even hinted that the Justice League might be the same kind of legacy. Then in the pages of his JLA run he started to hint that the JL heroes were also present echoes of the Greek pantheon, and everything in between.
>>221381645BvS > MoS > Snyder LeagueSorry but no green lantern present is an issue
>>221382755Yes indeed. And I’ll tell you something else I came to suspect through other films as far-flung as King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Aquaman, and even Black Adam. At least in Zack’s world, Camelot is an echo of Atlantis, the King Arthur movie is set in that same world, and we see what kryptonite really is - fossilized magic. Krypton’s magic(myth) fossilized and became poisonous to them when they embraced nice, safe, rational science, though just like the New Gods, they’d discovered its potency as an energy source. We see Earth’s version of kryptonite in Black Adam - eternium. Only magic draws blood from magic.
>>221382099>>"The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness, that turns good men cruel".Ngl this is the best line in the movieEven if you remove it from this movie, this statement holds trueThis is evident by all the people who commit these mass murder events, because in their mind, they have no other recourse, that they must do it because there's no other way (powerlessness)Honestly the trailer for the movie was one of the most awesome things I saw in IMAX in the 2010s. Too bad the movie itself had extensive studio meddling, fucking Hamada.
>>221383524This visual lives rent-free in my head. Not a word spoken, just pure heroism.
