10 @ a Time - Batman v Superman, Part 10

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Part Ten: Transfigurations, Part I

Welcome to the tenth installment of “10 @ a Time: Batman v Superman.” Last week we talked about the Washington hearings, Bruce’s (orchestrated) reaction, and why the Ultimate Edition is still so much better. Today, Superman hits another Jesus moment, and Doomsday approaches.

[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 1:35:00 to 1:44:51.]

If I can get ahead of myself, I was a little surprised to see that the next installment of “10 @ a Time” will take us to the top of Lexcorp for Lex’s big monologue and the beginning of the end – a testament, perhaps, to how much can happen in ten minutes of this movie. There’s also the acute sense, though, knowing that this is the end of the second act, that Batman v Superman is hitting a kind of mythic cyclical button, as if to say, “And so we return and begin again.” This segment of the film moves everyone into the places they need to be for the film’s narrative and thematic climaxes – Superman is at his vulnerable nadir, Batman is assembling his death trap, Lois is two steps closer to proving Lex’s guilt, and Lex is (like Batman) moving his final schemes into place.

"Found your photograph, but it doesn't belong to you... it is you."

And then there’s Wonder Woman, who doesn’t appear on screen as such per se in these ten minutes, but we do get our first ironclad confirmation of her identity when Bruce finds her sought-after photograph which places her in the Wonder Woman costume in Belgium, November 1918. (For the full story behind the photograph, you’ll have to see Wonder Woman.) Zimmer gives us the percussive beats and full energy to match the mysterious electric cello heard earlier, and it’s a divine theme for the character and for a superhero movie more broadly, though I do wish its first two appearances weren’t tethered to characters puzzling over their computer screens (more on that, later).

It’s Bruce who discovers the photograph nestled in Lex Luthor’s cloned computer drive, alongside a bevy of Easter eggs teasing the future of the DC film slate. Alongside Wonder Woman, we’ve got nods to Cyborg, Aquaman, and Flash, which we’ll see more fully when Diana opens her copy of the drive. It’s also a showcase for Bruce’s detective skills, cyberhacking his way into Lex’s scheme; indeed, this whole montage is about Bruce at the height of his powers, both physical and intellectual. He’s also a master geologist, a welder, and a chemist, assembling a bevy of weapons to use against Superman. The scene, however, is careful to foreground Bruce’s intense humanity; where Superman had lifted a spaceship effortlessly above his head, Bruce strains under the weights in his workout room, and his body is lined with scars.

"It's not an 'S.' On my world, it means 'hope.'"

Superman’s scars, on the other hand, are all internal. He has his first major moment of doubt in the hotel room with Lois Lane, and it’s practically his Garden of Gethsemane. Christ’s doubts in the garden took the form of questioning his father’s purpose for sending him to earth and whether his mission would actually accomplish the goal of saving humanity. As for Clark, he sees himself “righting wrongs for a ghost, thinking I’m here to do good. Superman was never real, just the dream of a farmer from Kansas.” We’ll see that farmer next week, but for now Superman is existentially vulnerable, despite Lois’s reassurance that Pa’s dream is “all that gives [some people] hope,” reminding Superman of the literal symbol of hope he wears on his chest. I’m struck also by the fact that “Superman” is referred to as an abstract concept; Lois refers to him as Clark, and he references Jonathan Kent, not Jor-El, as his father. In Man of Steel, recall, there was some consternation about what to call this man, and I had observed in my initial review that Henry Cavill plays a first-rate Kal, “not heroic Superman, not geeky performance Clark Kent,” so it’s intriguing to see how the dynamic has shifted from Kal to Clark as the dominant personality. Again, Zimmer’s score is ably supportive, conjuring the soft piano motif that was associated with Clark in Kansas.

Really, though, can we blame the poor guy for feeling a little moody? He’s faced with CNN footage of his effigy being burned and lynched – at the same time, no less – while the anchorwoman accuses him of collaboration with the bomber. I’d go off into the mountains to die, too, if the whole world were resolutely against my very existence. Fortunately, he’s not about to die – at least, not yet – but he’s going into the mountains for another reason altogether, and if we remember anything from our Gospel readings, it’s that Christ’s transfiguration took place on a mountaintop. If the Biblical transfiguration can be understood as the moment when man meets God and becomes blessed with His power, it’ll be interesting to watch the transfiguration of Clark Kent and the absence of a transfiguration when Lex Luthor ascends his own skyscraper.

"Kraang! Kraang! Kraang! Doomsday is coming!"

The Ultimate Edition does restore a brief shot of Lex watching a sunrise from the roof of Lexcorp, as if to say that the dawning new day will be his, and it provides a nice bit of symmetry with the Fight Night monologue to come, which happens at the darkest hours of the night. And if you’ve been a little mystified by Lex’s plot so far, a kind of “throw everything against the wall” approach, Lois spells it out in a conversation with Jenet Klyburn: “Everywhere Superman goes, Luthor wants death.” But despite Lex moving his scheme into its final stages, it seems he’s still hampered by his own inferiority complex; when he enters the Kryptonian wreckage, he has to clear his throat to address the hovering robot, as if to overcome his own timidity. Lex, ever the scholar, asks to learn the knowledge of 100,000 worlds from the Genesis Chamber (a delightful bit of comics hyperbole) before creating the next phase of his plot. I’ve said before that I don’t mind how overfull the movie is, and so I’m not perturbed by the inclusion of Doomsday, particularly the creature’s reinvention as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster by way of Lex Luthor’s blood (his “foreign genetic material”). It gives Lex an opportunity to show off his classical education with a reference to Icarus, and it’s also indicative of Lex’s own Icarus-like proclivities in his defiance of the Kryptonian Council’s advice. Despite being told that reanimating Zod’s body will create “a deformity so hateful to sight and memory, the desecration without name,” Lex proceeds. Why wouldn’t he? After all, the warning comes from a long-dead alien race, and Lex is insistent on believing that he alone can save mankind.

Finally, Lois Lane turns up to remind us that she’s about the only character to have a real handle on things. After reminding Superman that he’s a symbol for hope, a lesson that will become painfully posthumous by the film’s end, she determines that Wallace Keefe didn’t know about the bomb, through a Sherlockian deduction predicated on Keefe’s recent grocery purchases, and she vindicates Superman in a line that absolutely needed to have been left in the theatrical cut when she learns that the bomb in the wheelchair was lined with lead, one of the only limitations on Superman’s x-ray vision. (Magic is another.) Lois knows just about everything she needs to know at this point in the film, leaving her task to tell the tale, like Horatio in Hamlet. She’ll also be the spiritual battleground in the film’s climax, but that’s a story for another day.

Next time... it’s the third act already? Mother of God, will you look at the time! Fight Night begins.

Observations and Annotations

• I love the sonic boom given off in Superman’s wake every time he takes flight. When he leaves Lois at the hotel, it’s perfectly jarring for such an emotional moment, but it’s also a sobering reminder that he’s a god among men, hopelessly outmatching mankind but nevertheless compelled to love them.
• Lex uses Zod’s fingerprints to open the Kryptonian wreckage, which is absolutely savage. Lex has steadfastly refused to cede any kind of humanity to the Kryptonians, which is a particularly obdurate feat when you’re slicing their unique identifiers from the tips of their fingers.
• Carla Gugino returns from Man of Steel as the voice of Kelor, the hovering Kryptonian robot. Kelor and Kelex are relatively recent additions to the Superman mythos, circa 1986; they serve as ostensible butlers at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, digital caretakers of his alien legacy. Additionally, Gugino is something of a Zack Snyder staple, having appeared as the first Silk Spectre in Watchmen and as a madame in the regrettable Sucker Punch.
• We learn from Kelor that General Zod hailed from Kandor, which should send a giddy little thrill into the brains of superfans. Kandor was, of course, the Kryptonian city (and sometimes capital, depending on who’s telling the tale) famously shrunken and bottled by Brainiac before the planet’s destruction. Safeguarded in the aforementioned Fortress, it’s been both a tether to Superman’s ancestry and a painful reminder of the one thing Superman can’t do: he can’t save his homeworld.
• Kelor also nods to the comic book origin of Doomsday, a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong in the ancient history of Krypton. Doomsday was created by a mad Kryptonian scientist who repeated his cloning efforts until he achieved an unkillable life form, which eventually made its way to Earth and managed to kill Superman. When Superman learned of these origins in his second encounter with Doomsday, he wondered if their shared ancestry led Doomsday to seek out Superman as an unconscious urge to kill his creator.