Memo to Warner Brothers: when Zack Snyder wants to make a
three-hour movie about superheroes, let
him. The studio is now oh-for-two in theatrical releases when compared to
“ultimate edition” director’s cut. They did it in 2009 with Watchmen, and seven years later Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice sees
Snyder’s longer vision improve upon the original. This time out, the difference
is more negligible – theatrically, I thought BvS was more successful than Watchmen
– and while the Ultimate Edition won’t change many opinions on this highly
polarizing film, it does deepen the experience and even clarify a few things in
such a way that we really don’t need the theatrical cut any more.It’s impossible to discuss the differences without throwing up a major SPOILER WARNING for anyone who either missed the theatrical cut or would like to go into the Ultimate Edition without knowing the differences. Suffice it to say, though, that the Ultimate Edition is not a substantially different movie, with the added half hour consisting mostly of added beats and deeper plots but no major additions (in the vein, for example, of Hollis Mason’s death in Watchmen).
Perhaps the most significant change is that in the film Lex Luthor becomes a much more prominent character – not because Jesse Eisenberg gets any more screen time than before (he doesn’t) but because the film reveals or clarifies the extent of his scheming. The desert plot against Superman now involves implicating his heat vision by using a flamethrower, the African witness Kahina Ziri is revealed to be a Luthor stooge, and Clark’s reassignment to the charity beat is implied to be at Luthor’s request. By extension, this clarifies Luthor’s plot by revealing that it’s all his plot, an effort to discredit the Man of Steel. And in an extension of the prison cell confrontation with Batman, Lex slyly admits he’s pleading insanity to conceal the extent of his crimes. (Batman’s response is too good to spoil here but perhaps winks toward what Lex Luthor’s future holds.)
Then again, if Lex Luthor becomes a much more visible puppet-master, we also have to acknowledge that Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) has a much more prominent presence in the plot of the Ultimate Edition. The theatrical cut includes a few beats where Clark updates Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) on several journalistic endeavors, but the Ultimate Edition goes more cinematic by showing, not telling, these interviews. We see firsthand the terrified Gothamites interviewed by Clark, see him and Lois (Amy Adams) confront the witnesses and evidence against Superman, and we also learn – I think crucially – that many of Lex’s machinations involve lead-lined bombs and bullets (which, we all know, is a weakness of Superman’s super-vision). Seeing Clark Kent humanizes Superman, so crucial to the last act’s turn in Batman’s character, and we finally feel that this isn’t a Batman movie with Superman in it: it’s the collision promised by the title.
As for what the Ultimate Edition doesn’t do? That’ll probably continue to irk detractors; the much-ado’d “Martha” moment isn’t changed, nor is the frankly jarring moment when the plot stops so Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) can read her email and tease the next decade’s worth of franchises. But similarly, neither is Wonder Woman’s nor Batman’s role much changed; Gadot is still stunningly able as Diana Prince, and Ben Affleck might just be the definitive cinematic Batman (apologies to Christian Bale, on the grounds that Affleck seems to have emerged wholesale from Batman: The Animated Series). The promise that each of these dynamic stars will soon helm their own films – Wonder Woman in 2017, Bat-fleck some time further on – is more than enough to keep fans salivating. These performances are, in the words of the film’s opening narration, “diamond absolutes.”
That peculiar choice of phrase, intoned by Bruce Wayne in the film’s opening moments, brings me back to the thing I still love the most about Batman v Superman – its sweepingly and unapologetically operatic tone. I had said of the film’s self-serious approach to its own epic scale, “Batman v Superman takes the claim that superheroes are modern mythology to its logical extension – this is comics mythology writ large, in which men and women stand shoulder to shoulder with gods, do battle, and discover something about both god and man.” And I stand by those words. If The Avengers proved that superhero movies could be big in terms of quantity, Batman v Superman continues in its Ultimate Edition to demonstrate that comic book films can be big in a different way, in a way that doesn’t just underscore their cultural importance – it foregrounds, reinscribes, and literalizes it.
By and large, the Marvel films have been intellectually uncomplicated – and I don’t mean that as an insult. There have been big ideas in Marvel’s recent output, like Winter Soldier’s concern with oversight or Iron Man’s meditation on intellectual property rights. It’d be hyperbolic, however, to claim that those movies are “idea films”; rather, they’re films with ideas. Batman v Superman, however, is smart, perhaps even overburdened by existential, metaphorical, theological, and political questions. (A surfeit of intellectual discourse is, for my money, never a bad thing.)
To push the comparison once more to Marvel – again, not to diminish the illustrious competition to DC’s cinematic universe, but to illuminate how successfully Batman v Superman moves in the opposite direction – Marvel permits readers to read symbolism beneath and into the surface level. Batman v Superman demands that we instead read the surface as symbol, and it teaches us to do this in the opening shots. We begin with the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne, juxtaposed with young Bruce’s fall into a proto-Batcave. We’ve seen this before, we think, recalling the heights of Christopher Nolan’s recent trilogy.
But then the film shows the impossible – we see Bruce Wayne fly, ascending on the wings of bats. Immediately, Batman v Superman instructs us that the surface is densely symbolic, representational in a way our eyes initially reject. The rest of the movie proceeds in this vein; as our protagonists uncover the layers plotting against them, we viewers uncover the cerebral depths of the film’s contemplation. Where Nolan included young Bruce’s fall as a way to demonstrate how humanity picks itself back up, Batman v Superman veers religious, rendering instead a world in which humanity must permit itself to be lifted by a higher power. Consider, then, the Lex Luthor monologue delivered, atop a skyscraper of his own construction, about the problems of evil in the world and his own belief that devils come not from hell but from the sky.
The end result, I believe, points to Lex’s greatest sin – his blindness to his own hypocrisy. What makes Batman heroic, by comparison, is his willingness to have his eyes opened, to realize how much he has become the thing he hated. What makes Superman godly, then, are his struggles with the great burden of power and responsibility he bears, his Christ-like moment of temptation coming in the Ultimate Edition when he wanders to a mountain, presumably to die. There, he speaks with his father, who reassures him that human life is worth saving, that each of us can save the other, if we only had eyes to see our own abilities and theirs.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a stronger film in its Ultimate Edition, albeit one that won’t win over entrenched disparagers or hardline cynics. It is, however, evidence that when it comes to comic book movies Zack Snyder is better than his theatrical editions give him credit. (Sucker Punch, though, remains exploitatively creepy and more than a little bit lame.) I just hope that we won’t need an “Ultimate Edition” of Justice League to see it, that Warner Brothers wises up and lets Snyder run wild.
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