Welcome to the second installment of “10 @ a Time: Batman v Superman.” Last week we talked about how the opening ten minutes established the film’s operatic tone and the necessity of seeing the murder of the Waynes one more time. Having met Batman, it’s time to check in with Superman to see how he’s conducted himself in the intervening eighteen months since Man of Steel.
[For those playing the home game, we’re looking at the “Ultimate Edition” home video release; for today’s 10@T installment, we’re looking from 0:10:07 to 0:19:55.]
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| "Among the fishes, a whale!" |
These ten minutes (re)introduce us to Superman, who has embraced his role as the world’s protector, though this sequence in Africa demonstrates that his priority has always been Lois Lane. Of course the relationship has always been a staple in the comics, occasionally to the point where Lois has bristled under the supervision of her hero husband, but it’s of paramount importance to the film that Lois is both Superman’s entire world and his greatest vulnerability. (Lex will say as much in one of his big closing monologues.)
And it’s a real credit to Zack Snyder, Henry Cavill, and Amy Adams that we learn so much about their relationship dynamic without a single line of dialogue to elucidate or explicate. When Superman lands before the African general holding Lois hostage, I love the little smile he and Lois exchange as she subtly lowers her arms from the line of danger. She acknowledges to Superman that she trusts him, and each knows how the other operates well enough to avoid any further bloodshed. When I hear complaints from moviegoers that Superman doesn’t save anyone in this movie, I have to ask if they missed the first fifteen minutes, because it’s literally the first thing Superman does.
Speaking of bloodshed, though, we see Lex Luthor’s thugs round up and murder the soldiers in the village. I had said last July that the Ultimate Edition “clarifies Luthor’s plot by revealing that it’s all his plot, an effort to discredit the Man of Steel.” Remember, at least some of the mourning villagers are on Lex’s payroll, too. The name of the game is reasonable doubt – Lex is throwing everything he can at Superman, from framing him for murder to harvesting Kryptonite and cloning Zod’s body, from putting him on trial to siccing Batman on him. Put another way, as Lois will say later in the film, “Everywhere Superman goes, Luthor wants death.” All of his machinations are designed to come up with something that will ultimately defame, defeat, and destroy an unkillable man. Lex’s plot seems convoluted and desperate, almost as though he’s compensating for his own tremendous insecurity in the face of a god-like being. Hmm...
“He answers to no one – not even, I think, to God,” the villager Kahina Ziri tells Holly Hunter’s Sen. June Finch. But she’s asking the wrong question. Rather than wonder about Superman’s relationship to the deity, Batman v Superman invites us instead to consider our relationship to God-through-Superman. Throughout the film, we’ll see characters attempt to judge Superman based on their reading of him; indeed, moviegoers judged the content of Superman’s character based on Man of Steel, in which he had been Superman for literally one single day. The film clearly positions those judges, though, as in the wrong; Lex Luthor is among them, as is the misguided Batman. “Maybe he’s just a guy,” we’ll hear later in the film, and maybe we should hear what Superman has to say for himself before we judge him based on what we might expect him to be. We’ve seen that what this Superman does is save lives.
Next time, we’ll nip back to Gotham to see how the Battle of Metropolis embittered our Bat.
Observations and Annotations
- As a fan of the comics who’s always wondered why all this
Kryptonite happens to land on earth, I applaud the interpretation of Kryptonite
as terraformed earth left over from Zod’s invasion.
- The Ultimate Edition confirms that the deceased photographer
is Jimmy Olsen. It’s a somewhat radical breach of canon, but then again this
isn’t exactly the kind of Superman that has a “pal.” (Of course, a subsequent
film could reveal that this Jimmy Olsen borrowed the identity of the freckled
photographer.)
- In Africa, we’ve got another close-up of a horse going rogue,
evoking once more that image of Batman astride a horse from The Dark Knight Returns.
- Lois tells the general, “I’m not a lady; I’m a journalist,” which is a much better summation of her character than the on-the-nose “I’m a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter” from Man of Steel.
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