What Happens When Our Superheroes Lack Honor and Humanity?

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is a superhero movie for people who don’t believe in heroism. Moreover, it is a movie that tries to build a cinematic superhero universe, but one inhabited by no superheroes. The characters in this film named “Batman” and “Superman” are cynical deconstructions of the comic book heroes whose names they bear. (Wonder Woman fares better, mostly by virtue of being in the movie for only a short span of time.) Zach Snyder’s directorial vision doesn’t allow for much decency and kindness. “Nobody stays good in this world,” says Superman, and in this film it’s hard to say he’s wrong. Snyder seems to have taken all the tropes of superhero critiques (that superheroes are fascist, immature, selfish, and/or id-driven power fantasies) and made them a blueprint for his versions of two of the best-loved superheroes of all time.

I wanted so much for this movie to be something I could like or recommend. Superman is one of my favorite characters, and though Man of Steel ultimately disappointed me, I thought there were glimmers of hope in that film that could be brightened in a sequel. With a talented cast and a whole superhero universe being brought to the silver screen, this film had so much exciting potential. Maybe the filmmakers would learn from the negative reaction to endless CGI destruction at the end of Man of Steel and give us more humane heroes. I walked into the theater resolved to find redeeming features in Batman V. Superman. Boy, was I ever disappointed.

When I wrote on this site about Superman, I emphasized his optimism and aspirational quality. This movie’s Superman never cracks a smile while wearing his cape and tights. He cracks many other things though. The visual effects render Superman’s powers inherently destructive: His heat vision distorts his face, his strength is used mostly for flinging people through walls, and even his flight is never gentle, never graceful—he creates sonic booms whenever he flies and shatters the ground when he lands. This is Superman by way of the Hulk, all scarcely contained mass destructive potential. Near the beginning, onscreen text portentously exclaims that “The Day Mankind Met the Superman” was the climactic battle of Man of Steel, which devastated Metropolis to the extent that it is this universe’s equivalent of 9/11.

No wonder this Superman’s default position is hovering impersonally above the mass of humanity, an isolated melancholic. Batman cracks a joke about Superman savings cats from trees, but if this version of the character ever did that he would first agonize for an hour about whether he should just let the cat remain stranded, then laser-vision the tree down to hide the evidence. Snyder doesn’t see Superman as aspirational: No one will leave the theater wanting to be anything like this Superman.

I wrote once that Batman’s defining feature is his compassion. By that criterion, this film’s Batman is broken. A Robin costume covered in Joker graffiti displayed in his Batcave suggests that Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne has found and then violently lost his surrogate family before the events of the film. Stately Wayne Manor is a burnt-out husk, left to molder in an overgrown field save for when Batman needs to come back there to brood. This Batman’s reluctance to use guns comes across not as humane restraint but as an excuse to be more brutally violent in hand-to-hand melees (and, when push comes to shove, he’ll spray bullets from his Batmobile without any compunction). Here is a Batman who decides fighting crime is pointless because criminals will always spring up “like weeds,” and so his true legacy should be murdering Superman with a Kryptonite spear. This Batman, finally, has no great interest in protecting the innocent: he is mostly motivated by insecurity, by a burning need to prove himself to his dead parents.

Ultimately, Zach Snyder’s cinematic obsessions with violence, angsty characters, and military ordnance (I lost track of the number of fetishistic shots of bullet casings) serve the DC universe ill. The adolescent, “edgy” nihilism of the movie is more akin to Image Comics’ output in the early nineties. It boggles the mind that the filmmakers in charge of DC’s staple of classic, colorful heroes would work so hard to smear their supermen with blood and grime and urine.

The moral universe of Batman Vs. Superman is a stark, zero-sum game: every act of ostensible heroism merely moves suffering elsewhere. This is a movie where the President of the United States decides to shoot Superman with a nuclear missile—and it is not wholly clear that decision is wrong.

In the past I’ve often found myself defending Superman as a character from those who think his virtue boring and his faith in humanity corny. If I left the movie heartened about one thing, it’s that my arguments in favor of the classic vision of Superman have been vindicated: this movie’s experiment proves that there is truly nothing more trite and yawn-worthy than a cold, vacillating Superman. My hope is that viewers dissatisfied with this dour Clark Kent will seek out better portrayals, like this one in Grant Morrison’s “All-Star Superman” who helps a suicidal young person step back from the brink.

It’s sometimes said that superheroes and their clear-cut morality come from a “simpler time.” This is untrue; superheroes were born in a world wracked by war and depression and fear. Their creators chose to make these heroes brighter and better than the world surrounding them. We need to ask for more from our superhero movies: Heroes that don’t simply reflect the darkness of our time, but offer us a better way.