A lot of people have been waiting for March 25 to come around so they can finally see the much-hyped about DC Superhero movie, "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," and while fans are flocking into theaters to catch some epic superhero action, critics are not too happy about the film. This also goes for Rotten Tomatoes which only gave Snyder's film a rating of 33 percent.
Critics have expressed their disappointment with the film's structure and some have even bluntly expressed that the narrative is too chaotic, if there is even a plot, but the biggest claim of all is that Snyder's film did not deliver after all the hype and defending.
What critics did appreciate is Gal Gadot's appearance as Wonder Woman but even those scenes were short and could not salvage the mess that "Dawn of Justice" was seen as. There were a lot of ideas and conflicts thrown around in "Dawn of Justice" but not all of them were tackled well enough or at all as most attempts to focus on the issues only grazed the surface.
"Juggling all of these strands while steadily beating the drum toward the battle promised in the title, Snyder sometimes loses track of his various allegories [...] Yet the essential clash of ideologies promised by the central conflict [...] never develops quite as forcefully as it should, and the life-or-death battle between the two icons ultimately comes down to a series of misunderstandings," Andrew Barker writes.
The narrative is really what the critics find hugely lacking. The execution, especially with the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), made the film visual spectacle for sure, but without a compelling plot the film still falls below expectations, especially since Warner Brothers' marketing set it up so high.
"I wouldn't dream of denying you the thrill of discovering just how overstuffed and preposterous a movie narrative can be [...] Mr. Snyder, for his part, deploys signifiers of importance without having anything much to say," A. O. Scott claims.
One thing we know for sure is that Snyder intended for the film to show why the two superheroes are so against each other and why they think of the other as a threat. This would mean that the audience should have been able to see how their minds work and not just how strong their punches are.
"[The] way films like this tend to be constructed - racing from one thunderous set piece to another, with only a few seconds of downtime between them - ends up militating against it [...] It's a lot of ground to cover, making the resulting film feel both overstuffed and abnormally extended [...] For a film so concerned with its characters' inner lives, there's a fundamental disconnect going on here," Andrew Pulver observes.
Critics also claimed that "Dawn of Justice" would be a disappointment to the comic book fans and that is mostly because of its weakness in establishing the heroes in its own film. It is a great injustice, indeed, since Batman and Superman are the biggest heroes of DC Comics.
"It's a trying and utterly deflating thing to spend hours watching two well-intentioned heroes fighting for no reason at all. The hollowness of Batman and Superman's actual beef effectively neuters everything that's interesting about juxtaposing these two heroes [...] Much of the film's failure is in its utter refusal to justify its own existence, beyond serving as a stepping-stone to the other superhero movies in the DC factory queue," Jen Yamato explains.
In short, "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" seems to have been sacrificed and made only as a very expensive stepping stone for the next set of DC Superhero films. Then again, if this is really the case, it may not bode well for "Justice League" since Snyder is also directing it.
Of course, these are the critics talking and no one is stopping you from seeing the epic battle yourself.
"Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" is already playing in cinemas.
