Uncivil War: Why “Batman v Superman” was 2016's best comic book film - The Spread

The Spread breaks down the six reasons why the highly divisive Batman v Superman stunned its fans and will be looked on kindly by history.

In what will, no doubt, be a vain attempt to curb some of the angry feelings that are slowly bubbling to the surface within the minds of some of the people who just read that somebody thinks Batman v Superman is a good film - let me just start by saying that what I’m talking about is the full, director’s, cut of the film; referred to in home media as the Ultimate Edition.

This cut restored a lot of original scenes which pertain to plot elements that viewers of the theatrical cut found to be too incoherent. While I’ll still, ardently, stand by the fact that the theatrical cut of the film, while definitely worse, really wasn’t that bad - the full cut is, by far, the superior film and it’s the one I’ll be talking about.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me irritate you even more and begin with one of the film’s biggest successes.

The Batfleck

Affleck’s casting raised eyebrows, initially, but his involvement became one of the more commonly praised aspects of the production, particularly because he was the main subject of the film. Even more so in the theatrical cut.

Affleck worked not because of his star power, his charisma as an actor, but rather because of his star persona and how it tied into the main themes of the film. Becoming what film academic Richard Dyer called a “perfect fit.”

For more info on this, and the dynamics of politics overall in comic book films, check out our piece on the themes and influences going on in James Mangold’s comic book Western Logan.

“On this Earth, every act is a political act.”

This is the real meat of the film, no matter which angle you approach it from.

Despite people’s best efforts, it would seem that nothing can escape the soul-sucking vortex which leads to the never-ending hellscape that was, and still very much is, 2016’s Election Year Fever.

As Alfred Pennyworth so astutely puts it “That’s how it starts. The fever, the rage, that turns good men cruel.” The film’s most obvious theme is internal conflict, one shared by the other two behemoth ensemble comic book films of 2016 (Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse) and somewhat brought to life by them also. (Marvel Studios started it by placing the release date of Civil War on the same day as Batman v Superman’s, forever assuring that the two films would be compared to one another; but we’ll get into that later.)

The conflict between the characters of Batman and Superman had stood in pop culture for decades before the film was produced. Much like Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas’ Batman films, Batman v Superman was an original story but drew heavily from a particular, canonical, source in the comic book mythos. (Batman Begins drawing from Frank Miller’s Year One, The Dark Knight drawing from Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Rises drawing from Dennis O’Neils’ Knightfall saga and Batman v Superman from Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.)

Both Batman v Superman, and its source, tell the story of an older Batman. Jaded and, like many great heroes of canonical literature as they reach their twilight years, obsessed with his own legacy. Affleck’s Batman is not focussed so much on the wish fulfilment aspect of the character, that draws in so many fans (though it’s definitely there), but rather more on their complexity as a moral icon.

Batman represents order but at the price of fascistic levels of control and physical violence. They accomplish good but always under the shadow of a doubt that the character is truly motivated by personal grief rather than altruism.

The Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman is a man so entombed by the childhood trauma of his parents’ murder that he has moved out of his ancestral home, leaving it to waste and decay into nothing, to live in his playboy playhouse down by the lake. There, he is closer to the cave system which he uses as the lair of his alter-ego (or true ego, depending on how you look at the character) and, also, living permanently within the woods where he ran to escape his parents’ funeral. Forever stuck in his inability to emotionally process their deaths.

Affleck’s portrayal of Batman is a portrayal not of strength but of impotence. He is alone, his companion is dead, he has no significant other and no children. His surrogate father figure fruitlessly frets from the sidelines about his happiness while he goes through the motions of his life with such little regard for his own health that he stays out all night hunting for violence, and fleeting sexual encounters, before waking and washing down his pain medication with wine.

It’s here we must take Affleck’s star persona, his constructed personality, and view it relation to Batman’s constructed, canonical, persona to see what makes this a “perfect fit.” (Being an Oscar-winning director and writer, Affleck is known to bring creative influence to his projects. Something which director Zack Snyder is known to welcome from actors and other crew members; with Affleck bringing on screenwriter Chris Terrio, from his previous project Argo, to revise David S. Goyer’s script.)

Affleck is, and has been for some time, one of the few vocal A-listers to come out and publicly defend Arabic, and Muslim, peoples from the prejudiced representation they face in American media. (His heated discussions with late night personality, and Islam sceptic, Bill Maher, here and here, are quite illuminating if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) And his portrayal of the character is motivated, hugely, by prejudices that distinctly reflect racial prejudices within American culture.

At the outset of the film, after establishing Batman’s relationship to psychological trauma, the character is immediately thrust, again, into a psychologically fracturing event.

A major metropolitan city is under attack from the air, fire and destruction raining down. In the shock, and the confusion, of a people who thought that they could never be touched by such an event, workers in a high-rise stand stupefied and unable to flee. We see helpless people standing in the streets and staring up as a plane flies into a structure, a skyscraper collapses. The iconography of the World Trade Center attacks in New York is unmistakable and it is what motivates Affleck’s character, his cruelty and anger, throughout the film.

Affleck’s Bruce Wayne is a character haunted by 9/11 stress dreams and a fixation on the “alien”, the foreign invader. He doesn’t know what they want and he doesn’t care. It is, after all, Bruce Wayne’s tower that falls. (Notably, a financial building.) His gargantuan phallic symbol that’s obliterated with complete ease by this social, genetic, cultural, planetary Other. (Snyder is well known for his overt use of phallic symbolism.) As Batman stands in the wreckage of his own monument, he stares up, hatefully, at a Superman who has unwittingly wandered into the path of a man looking for an enemy.

But Batman’s prejudice stems from one thing more than any other and it is both the film’s most under-discussed, and most redeeming, quality…

The Message

If all the discussion, over the past year-and-a-half, about these films has proven one thing - it’s that people have different tastes. But one thing I will say about Batman v Superman for certain, in relation to its two siblings, is that, unlike Civil War and Apocalypse (both also franchise films designed to introduce new characters and set up future sequels), Batman v Superman offers actual, concrete, resolutions to its problems. To put it more bluntly, this film actually has a point.

It became belittled, and derided, as time went on. Mostly by people who are only capable of viewing films literally. (A truly depressing and, moreover, parochial way of looking at anything related to comics; an inherently metaphorical, and symbolic, medium.) But the “Martha” scene contains the crux of the whole film, both emotionally and philosophically. As Russell Crowe’s character states, so eloquently, in James Mangold’s other Western (which has just celebrated its tenth anniversary), 3:10 to Yuma: “Even bad men love their mommas.”

In discovering that not only does this “alien” have a mother but he would use his dying breath to beg for her life (much like Batman’s father did), Batman understands that Superman is, in fact, just a man. A man like him.

Masculinity is a huge aspect of the story, from commentary on gender roles to Zack Snyder’s trademark homoeroticism, but perhaps the most important part of the film’s understanding of “a man” is that a man is capable of, perhaps even destined towards, imperfect contradiction. They make mistakes. You understand that they try to do good and end up maybe just making things worse, which is pretty much what Batman is all about. A courtesy that he has not extended to this “alien” because he does not view him as a man.

“You’re not brave. Men are brave.”

Don’t dehumanise people - that is the film’s message. Its core. Because when you dehumanise people then, even with the best intentions in the world, you can convince yourself to commit horrible acts of injustice that fly in the face of everything that you have ever believed in - and you won’t even realise you’re doing it.

It makes the far more complex point, also, that dehumanisation is not just viewing the Other that you’re fixated on as lesser than you. But glorifying a person, or a people, into something greater than yourself can have the same effect. A point which was, more directly, made in Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror hit Get Out.

“You were never a God. You were never even a man.”

One of Batman v Superman‘s defining qualities is its utilisation of horror genre techniques and tone, much in the same way that Logan did with the Western genre. Serving as a kind of a social horror that satirises a society’s fixation on Otherness. The film, like the vast majority of comic book films, contains overt visual references to Christianity and, as usual, allusions to Superman being the Christ figure. Superman’s worship as a God ultimately leads to his downfall, having been ascribed a set of expectations that no one could live up to.

Interestingly, throughout the film Superman is associated with military drone technology. (He destroys one at the beginning of the film, as he did at the end of Man of Steel, and a model drone, painted in Superman’s red and blue, is seen at the protests against him at the US Capitol building.) The association playing on the idea of Superman being representative of the United States (Jon Stewart appears in the film and quips that the only way the metaphor could be any more obvious would be if Superman wore the Declaration of Independence as a cape) both as an abstract, philosophical, idea and as a literal, real world, military presence. The predator drone now being a symbol of America’s ability, and willingness, to kill silently, swiftly and unstoppably all around the world. A power shared by Superman, which is what forms the inciting conflict of the film. The drone program is also intrinsically linked the legacy of the Obama administration which Batman v Superman, and the cultural state which it parodies, arrived at the close of.

Some people have theorised that this places Batman, within the film’s dynamic and the political spectrum, somewhere close to Donald Trump.

Given Batman’s obsession with Superman’s Otherness, in relation to his own age and raging impotence, there is an argument to be made that this echoes Trump’s long-standing obsession with Barack Obama.

There exists a far wider political subtext within the film, however, thanks to the casting of Jesse Eisenberg.

It basically predicted the future

Batman v Superman was, if nothing else, an act of pure cinematic irony in that it was a film about vicious, partisan, polarisation which inspired deeply polarised responses. In a sense, that’s why I’m taking such a long time to defend it. Because, unlike the vast majority of films that Hollywood produces these days, it actually made its audience feel something. They may not have liked it, some of them loved it, but in a marketplace of never-ending, inoffensive, wish fulfilment sequels and reboots this, at the very least, tried to be something provocative.

One of the film’s most provocative choices was the casting of Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor.

Some people adored the choice for the subtextual implications he brought to the role, others hated it because (as is always the case with such old, and famous, characters) they had their own idea about what the character should be and how they should be portrayed.

In DC’s comics, Lex Luthor is a villain, much like Batman’s Joker, defined by his obsession with his heroic counterpart. He is a man who has, seemingly, everything but is driven insane by the mere existence of Superman; a man who, no matter how much power Luthor gains, will always be better than him.

“I don’t hate the sinner, I hate the sin. And yours, my friend, is existing.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s appearance in the film serves to offer another, connected, insight into the obsession with Superman within the film. He compares the discovery of the Superman to Copernicus displacing Earth as the centre of the known universe and to the Darwinian theory of evolution disrupting humanity’s belief in divine creation. Superman, as some kind of cultural Other, represents, potentially, the death of established hegemony in America but also, potentially, the death of American exceptionalism. America is perhaps no longer the most powerful force on Earth and, if it is, that powerful force is not what people believed it was.

This idea ties into the film’s second chief undercurrent.

“Men with power obey neither policy nor principle, Miss Lane. No one is different, no one is neutral.”

Many people enjoyed Eisenberg’s casting for his, basically inextricable, association with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Having famously played Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network.) And others enjoyed it because of his similarities to then-presidential-candidate, and now-president, Donald Trump. (From his orange-ish, uncannily fake-looking, hair to the constant sniffing which denotes a cocaine, or other nasally ingested amphetamine, habit.)

Truthfully, you can enjoy it from both of those angles and it still paints the same picture. Batman v Superman taps into a very real social phenomena which defined the 2016 nightmare and that the public at large is only now coming to grips with.

Despite the film’s title implying physical confrontation, the two principal characters of the film barely ever interact directly with one another. Each one comes to know about the other, and hate the other, through the media: news reports, speculation, sensationalism. A system played like a fiddle by Lex Luthor to engineer chaos for his own benefit. The Zuckerberg connection plays into this from people’s growing understanding of how Facebook’s influence over millions of people, and the company’s lack of scruples, has allowed misinformation campaigns to spread like wildfire throughout democratic processes.

But while the internet is a part of the misinformation machine that the film shows you, it primarily focuses on those aspects which became the pillars of Donald Trump’s campaign: TV news, print journalism and talk shows. The film even manages to get Nancy Grace to do a flawless impersonation of herself playing devil’s advocate against Superman for ratings.

The most revealing line of the entire film comes near the end of the heroes’ violent clash. Both battered and weary, having dropped all pretence by this point and consumed by a primal rage, Batman curses his enemy one last time and lets slip his true motivating ethos…

“…the world only makes sense if you force it to.”

Increasingly, since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the public has been learning of cyber-intelligence, and counterintelligence, operations that are employed to spread false information and incite social discord around the world. From whataboutism to the inescapable buzz term “fake news”, the defining element of all of these tactics of disorientation is one simple maxim - there is no truth. The world is simply what you make it. Society, wealth and happiness are only a state of mind. You are superior if you believe you are superior. Humanity must be shaped and if you don’t do it then someone else will. There is no truth. (Which is, of course, a lie.)

This swirl of bias and sensationalism being created by a dying media structure that must provoke people in the most sordid, and underhanded, ways in order to stay alive.

As Superman first takes notice of Batman, he defines him as a tool of the police that’s used against the poor. (If Superman is the Obama Deep State problem to Batman, then Batman is certainly the police brutality/corruption issue to Superman.) And he wants to spotlight the issue as a social concern. His editor, Perry White, refuses and instead demands a piece on a football game, seen at the beginning of the film, in which the considerably more wealthy Metropolis City unnecessarily humiliated the team of their neighbours, the poorer Gotham City. Perry pitches the headline: “Underdog dreams dashed, ten yards between Gotham and glory.”

It’s very important to note the various moments in the film, like this, that serve to highlight the division that exists within the film’s universe, if we are to understand it.

Perry may just be doing his job, and trying to sell papers, but he does so by playing off of real sentiments; negative aspects in society that should not be oversimplified and manipulated for profit. Which is ultimately what he does to Superman by seizing upon the idea of public resentment towards him as soon as it presents itself. (Immediately after witnessing the incident where Superman’s statue is defaced, he requests an article with the headline: “End of love affair with man in the sky?” The copywriter reluctantly accepts.)

Batman v Superman’s reflection of America is of an America divided. Divided by wealth and geography. (Aside from almost constant displays of extreme wealth in relation to extreme poverty, the film makes the decision, as the first live-action film to visually present both, to show Batman’s Gotham and Superman’s Metropolis as neighbours; physically separated by a bay of water.) Divided by gender and race. (Characters make frequent reference to their sex and gender and how they form their social standing in the world, while Black and Latin Americans are often seen to be relegated to poorer, working class, ends of society.)

Both Perry and the football game’s announcers make subtle denigrations of Gotham City inhabitants because of their poorer status. The announcers remark: “You know how they are about their football team, things could get ugly in the city tonight.” All but referring to them as “thugs” and transitioning the scene into the introduction of Batman, long seen as a pastiche of a militarised police state’s overly violent response to impoverished crime. Perry also adds to Clark Kent that he should watch himself “over there, in Gotham. Don’t let ‘em take your lunch money.” Again, dehumanising the inhabitants as poor muggers and also continuing a running joke about how Perry is somehow completely fooled by Clark Kent’s disguise.

The point being that, while the film acknowledges that tensions in society are being manipulated, the tensions are still very real. The problems, and inequalities, of American society are still very real and have appeared organically. Just as Lex Luthor implies on his taunting series of photographs sent to the heroes, the question is how far will you go to get real justice? What will you sacrifice in others and in yourself?

“Do you know what the oldest lie in America is, Senator? That power can be innocent.”

Moral paradoxes and inconsistencies are used by Lex Luthor to justify his actions but they are also what drive him towards madness, ultimately making him the loser of the film even though his incredibly complicated plan succeeds. It also links him to the new, young, political Right. (Aside from his smug affectations towards “logic and reason”, despite having no useful applications for them, he is fixated on European culture; namedropping Euclid, Prometheus and the Epicurean paradox throughout the film.) It is Batman’s ability to see the simple, human, truth that makes him a hero.

One of the film’s smaller arcs, pertaining to Batman’s wider narrative arc, is his relationship to guns; and its quite demonstrative of the characters flirtation with damnation.

This is one of the things which prompted such vitriolic backlash from self-appointed Batman experts.

Batman has been defined in the mind of the modern reader by his staunch opposition to firearms, but he uses several throughout the film. Snyder teases the idea of Batman actually shooting a person. (As opposed to using weapons mounted on a vehicle to shoot around people and cause explosions, as he’s done in previous Batman films.) Firstly by depicting Batman actually doing this in an extended dream sequence. (It’s important to note that this is a nightmare, presented as the opposite of what Batman wants, and that the model of handgun that he uses is the same as the one which murders his parents at the beginning of the film.) And then by creating a moment of tension where you believe Batman may shoot someone, but it is revealed to be tracking device. Then again, at the end of the film, where he shoots a flamethrower tank to cause it to explode rather than shooting the man holding it. (Batman’s “No Killing” rule is something which is adhered to much more in theory than it is in practice.)

Both of these last two are also direct visual references to Miller’s Dark Knight Returns.

Which leads us to our fourth reason…

Larry Fong

Director of Photography Larry Fong may have been working with Zack Snyder’s, highly divisive, colour palette but he still infused every scene of the film with his own, distinctive, visual flair. Not that this wasn’t also a, somewhat, divisive element.

Debate has existed ever since Ang Lee’s, also extremely polarising, film Hulk as to whether modern comic book films should actually look like comic books and Fong takes a hard line against the digital brightness of the monotonous, modern, Marvel Hollywood. (Marvel Studios shoots all of its films digitally and this has been described by DOPs as non-negotiable.)

Probably because of their heavy use of digital effects, it often comes as a surprise to people that Snyder is fairly insistent on shooting on film. (Batman v Superman was shot on 16mm, 35mm and IMAX 65mm.) And, while there are a huge number of effects shots, the number of sets and practical elements that were built for the film, containing no digital extensions whatsoever (such as the Batcave), far exceeded the average for contemporary tentpole filmmaking.

But the, essential, reason that Fong makes the list, above any of the many detailed and dedicated production aspects, is that he exemplifies the reason why people enjoy this film so much. Which is that it is simply enjoyable. People actually have fun watching this. The social and political elements of the film aren’t coldly considered, and deathly serious, to the people that enjoy them - they’re entertaining.

I cannot even begin to understand the thought process that would expect to take a film called “Batman v Superman” seriously, or expect anyone who made it to be taking it seriously. There is something so inherently ridiculous about comic books that the fact that some people need a comic book film to constantly pause itself, to remind the audience that it’s aware of its own silliness, is baffling to me. I don’t need a character to turn to the camera and say: “This is weird and nonsensical.” I know it’s weird and nonsensical. That’s why I’m watching it.

Fong’s cinematography, almost constantly, plays with framing, movement, perspective, depth of field, focus, light and shadow. As a well composed frame of a film, or comic book, should. Batman v Superman communicates a huge amount of ideas, and tone, visually. Cramming as much detail into each shot as possible but still leaving room for spontaneity and experimentation. There is no sequence, in any of the comic book films released in 2016, that came close to being as ambitious as the 360 degree single-take action sequence in the middle of Batman v Superman.

It is very rare, in fact, to see the level of detail that went into Batman v Superman being put into any film. Small details are its lifeblood. Enriching the audience’s understanding of the characters, like Thomas Wayne’s portrait looming behind Bruce in his boardroom, and demonstrating the attentiveness to even the most fleeting of moments. Moments like Fong’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it recreation of Dark Knight Returns’ front cover [pictured above] and the appearance of both The Mark of Zorro and Excalibur on the cinema marquee at the beginning. (The Mark of Zorro is, canonically, the final film that the Waynes see together and Excalibur foreshadows the end of Batman v Superman where Superman must pull himself along Doomsday’s spike in order to get close enough to kill him, as Arthur must do to kill Mordred at the end of Excalibur.)

Not to mention all of the spoken nods to DC comics. Certain lines, like “The world only makes sense if you force it to”, are taken directly from Dark Knight Returns and numbers, which are spoken throughout the film, have a significance to characters in proximity of them. The police call which leads to Batman’s introduction mentions that the disturbance is at “1939 Harbour Way” (Batman first appeared in 1939), Perry White tells Clark Kent that “it’s not 1938” (Superman first appeared in 1938), Lex Luthor’s prison number is “AC-23-1940” (Lex Luthor first appeared in Action Comics #23 in the year, you guessed it, 1940). And many more like “Kane Avenue” in Gotham (Bob Kane is one of the original creators of Batman) as well as Zack Snyder’s typical references to his other comic book adaptations 300 and Watchmen. (The phrase “who will watch the watchmen?” appears several times, once in Latin.)

For a superhero film, it’s actually quite consistently unconventional. In line with the film’s theme of social inequality, the majority of principal photography, both indoor and outdoor, took place in Detroit. A far cry from the staple of tourism shots for major metropolitan cities that offer tax breaks for flattering blockbuster crews.

This unconventionality is a positive not just for pretension’s sake but also because this film is a drop in an apparently infinite ocean of similar films, making the ability to stand out from the crowd an increasingly impressive feat.

The competition really isn’t that good

I’ve touched before on how absurd it is to me that critical consensus, and our measuring of it, can be so out of whack that Captain America 3 was rated more highly than the previous two years’ Palm d’Or winners but let me be clear: I completely understand why someone would not like Batman v Superman.

Indeed, the reason that I like it, personally, is because it contains moments that many people would not like. It’s weird. It takes risks. It’s a film where Lex Luthor metaphorically mouth-f**ks a US senator with a Jolly Rancher. That’s not going to be for everybody.

What I do not understand is why anyone would get angry about someone else’s level of enjoyment, or their own level of enjoyment, and how they could, as a film, consider it be demonstrably worse than the other films to which it is compared.

Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse were two fun entries into the canon of a film studio that made the cool decision to kickstart this modern wave of comic book films and the, perhaps, even cooler decision to allow such inconsistency in tone, and quality, that they’ve produced some of the best, and worst, films in that wave. Suicide Squad is a thoroughly average Hollywood star-splurge that will be remembered for the film it wasn’t rather than the film that it is. (Unlike Batman v Superman, its editing woes caused irreparable damage to the final cut.) And Doctor Strange was an entertaining romp that, like virtually all Marvel Studios films, excels at the relatively simple task that it sets itself.

Marvel Studios’ other 2016 release, on the other hand, set itself the same task as Batman v Superman and, as mentioned before, invited the comparison. It was 2016’s box office champion, topping the global box office for the year, and ushered in a new phase of production at Marvel Studios with a host of new franchise opportunities to tinker with. It claimed the crown of King of the Franchises but completely at the expense of filmmaking.

Captain America: Civil War is a fun film in parts, this is very true. It’s also intellectually unstimulating which, again, is something that some people consider to be an obstacle to having fun.

It is a film about conflict where the conflict makes little, to no, sense. It is riddled with plot holes, clichés, inconsistencies, unfinished effects and terrible sound editing. The cinematography is, to put it lightly, uninspired. The score mostly forgettable and the acting is, considering the immense breadth of the talent involved, disappointing. Seriously, try watching the film with the sound off during a dialogue scene. Most of the actors just look bored out of their minds.

Marvel Studios has been noted for achieving a Hollywood dream in the form of their interconnected mega-franchise, creating films which both stand alone and form links within a larger narrative chain. Our final reason, however, serves to demonstrate just how much more accomplished the new DC team have become at Marvel’s own party trick.

Wonder Woman

Since her solo debut earlier this year, there’s been a huge a response to Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. And, while the importance of Patty Jenkins’ direction is very rightly focussed on as a sign of change, it’s a little sad to see the lack of appreciation given to producers Zack and Deborah Snyder.

Comic book franchise films are, after all, more producers’ films than they are directors’ films. (The Snyders have produced all of the so-called DCEU films to-date. With Zack directing Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and most of Justice League, before the tragic death of his and Deborah’s eldest daughter, as well as co-writing the story for Wonder Woman.)

From the photograph linking the stories of Batman v Superman and Wonder Woman (debuting the principal cast of Wonder Woman and setting them in stone a full year before its release) to Gal Gadot’s mannerisms (her reaction to Luthor’s anecdotal flippancy towards Zeus and the story of humanity’s creation is a good example, as well as the nice touch of her socialising with the oldest people in the room, as they’ll have the most similar life experience to her) you can really feel a clear sense of direction going from one part of the story through to the next. Achieving a consistency that Marvel Studios has never achieved, once, in its near decade-long run.

It’s nice to see some people having retroactive revelations when they realise that many of the things that they like about Wonder Woman were created by the same people who created Batman v Superman and were present in that film.

Far more important than that, though, has been Wonder Woman‘s ability to make people see that films like this must be viewed as films. Within their proper context. With awareness of how they were made, when they were made, what their message is and why that would be of relevance to their audiences within that time. If they are judged, solely, as comic book paraphernalia, two-and-a-half-hour-long advertisements designed to validate your obsession with an action figure, they are utterly valueless.

Comic books have found an incredible home within modern studio filmmaking and films like Batman v Superman actually give people hope for the future of that relationship rather than an apathetic acceptance to bad, blockbuster, habits infecting good, iconic, characters.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is available now on DVD and Blu-ray.