Batman v Superman

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

About that

Spoiler

There's only one Von Schlitz.  RP tried to have him killed, but he survived.  He doesn't really regret it.  He said that he felt bad about doing it, but would still do it again.

[Tomato]

So I've been thinking about the whole no-kill thing as well, because I agree completely with Benton's assertions about several of the Marvel characters... I don't mind Captain America killing an enemy, because he's a soldier. He shouldn't go out of his way to do so, but if he has no other option, he'll do so. But again, it's on a case by case basis... and it's done with an overall respect for human life.

And really, I don't think it's unfair to criticize BvS for that exact reason: There is a difference between killing a person to service the greater good, and mowing people down in the Batmobile. Rooster Teeth recently did a video (basically a rebuttal to BvS) about a henchman who constantly got beaten up by Batman... he wasn't an unrepentant monster, he was just a dude who took a job guarding some drug shipments because that's what he had to do to survive in Gotham. And in the comics, we see this ALL THE TIME... Batman might rough them up to stop the shipment or whatever, but he'll make jobs available for them as Bruce Wayne. Heck, that's a major plot point in "Old Wounds" from the DCAU. But BvS Batman doesn't care about that. He'll just gun down people for being in his way. It doesn't matter if they could be redeemed.

Yes, there ARE people who should be killed. Unrepentant monsters like the Joker, or Zsasz, or a dozen others. And even if you think Batman should kill those people (and I'd argue even that, since I believe that's up to an impartial Justice system)  that's not what we're shown. He doesn't kill the man responsible for hundreds of deaths at the end, he only kills random dudes who happen to be around when his batmobile comes around the corner. That's not only immoral, it's inconsistent to the story's own internal logic. THAT is the biggest sin of all this.

[BentonGrey]

About that

Spoiler

There's only one Von Schlitz.  RP tried to have him killed, but he survived.  He doesn't really regret it.  He said that he felt bad about doing it, but would still do it again.

Cat:

Spoiler

That's what I meant, and the 'multiple ways' was about how much trouble it caused him later.  Von Schlitz never stopped trying to get revenge until he finally died, for real.

Great points, 'Mato.  Right, if you're willing to kill 'for the greater good,' then Luthor should totally be taken out.  Clearly this guy is too dangerous to live.  Yet, there's nothing even remotely just or moral to this character's actions in regards to his stance on lethal force.  He kills for convenience, it seems, rather than for any "good" reason.

Of course, this cuts in more than one direction.  This is why you can't make your villains TOO evil in comics and let them live, because if you do, the end result is just too awful to accept.  This was the problem with Aquaman when Black Manta killed his son.  To have his son's murder just running around out there...that take things too far.

[stumpy]

Two points that this last page or so of discussion has brought to my mind.

First, I agree with the "inconsistent internal film logic" issues and I will add another example. If Batman thinks it's okay to kill because he needs to or because it's a dark world or whatever ends-justifies-the-means excuse he was allegedly holding to, then it totally undermines his criticism of Superman at the beginning of the film. After all, Superman's goal was to stop enemies (Zod & Co.) who were definitely going to kill billions of humans by terraforming ("kryptoforming"?) the planet to be generally unsuitable for human life. If one thinks that the ends justify the means, it's hard to do better than that. If Superman is a poor hero when he (unintentionally) levels parts of Metropolis to stop planet-wide genocide, then what does that make Batman when he runs over random thugs for... expediency?

I also accept that comics are fantasies and there's nothing wrong with holding some of our comic heroes to a standard that might not be attainable in the real world. This goes to my oft-repeated point that portrayals of some superheroes that focus too much on making the hero "accessible" tend to undermine the essence of the character. Many superheroes are who they are because they do things that we would not do, even given their abilities. I really wish Mr. Snyder understood that the fact that I might have killed Zod is a weak, weak, weak rationale for Superman doing it. If, at some point in the movie where Superman (or Batman) has to do something morally unpleasant, if Snyder expects the viewer to think, "I guess I might have done that", then it's an indication that the superhero would have found a better way out of the situation. The fact that a random person (even a good person) might feel "justified" in doing X does not mean that X is what a superhero would do. "Justified" is a low bar. "Heroic" is a better standard for the genre.

BTW, I haven't followed Cap in comics for some time, but my understanding (and pretty much my expectation) is that Cap is okay with killing soldiers in a wartime situation. And, IMO, he, being someone who has been in a real war, isn't one of those folks who defines pretty much any violent situation as "war" or who sees the various rhetorical "wars" (e.g. "The war on bogeyman-of-the-week") as excuses to kill.

[HarryTrotter]

I like the comparison to law enforcement.Thats kinda how I would explain the whole thing.IIRC for a while JLA was licenced as a gov. Agency.Which made Trial of Green Arrow pretty pointless.
Ehem...there are dozens of stories about heroes who were not emotionaly fit for the job.Superman and Batman should not be counted in those. 

[Jatts]

I personally enjoyed it.  It is at least not the anti-christ of a movie that everyone else on the internet thinks it is...

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Apparently, it's been revealed that every memeber of the suicide squad was captured by Batman.

So yeah, slaughters thugs but spares supervillains.

Jerk.

[HarryTrotter]

Somebody probably said it by now but: Worst.Batman.Ever.

[Shogunn2517]

Apparently, it's been revealed that every memeber of the suicide squad was captured by Batman.

So yeah, slaughters thugs but spares supervillains.

Jerk.

Lol

[stumpy]

That's an an interesting downside to a superhero not having a code against killing. If he kills sometimes, then every time he fails to kill some baddy, it invites a criticism about his lack of proportionality. Of course, in theory (except for characters like the Punisher) he isn't killing to exact justice/vengeance anyway; he kills because it seemed expedient or it met some sort of utilitarian goal (he killed one to save another, etc.). But, that won't stop the comparisons about who got killed and whether or not they "deserved" it as much as someone who didn't.

[daglob]

The Joker is on that list. Few villains NEED killing more than him.

[BentonGrey]

Stumpy, thus the inherent flaw with characters that violate the no-kill code and who are not named "Punisher."  The impossibility of justly weighing one life in proportion to another, a judgement that is quite beyond the capacity of anyone, is key to the no-kill code.  That's what folks like Superman and Batman realize.

DG, ha, I'd argue that NO villain needs killing more than him, at least no earthly villain.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

I wouldn't call this is a problem with superheroes that kill, but rather a problem with this particular case.  It's simply inconsistent.  For the sake of the story, they need all these villains alive, so it creates a strange case of Batman only killing the relatively harmless.  The only case where this might make sense is if they reveal that these were only the lucky ones and that he slaughtered dozens of other supervillains.  Which would be problematic in a different way but would at least be logically consistent.

[spydermann93]

Perhaps he caught them before he began to kill criminals? They might have been in prison for a while, maybe longer than he's been killing goons.

We don't really know how long it has been since the Joker killed Robin (the most likely cause for Batman switching over), so I don't quite buy the "Kills normal people; keeps supervillains alive" argument just yet.

[HarryTrotter]

Stumpy, thus the inherent flaw with characters that violate the no-kill code and who are not named "Punisher."  The impossibility of justly weighing one life in proportion to another, a judgement that is quite beyond the capacity of anyone, is key to the no-kill code.  That's what folks like Superman and Batman realize.

DG, ha, I'd argue that NO villain needs killing more than him, at least no earthly villain.

Which is pretty impressive considering this universe also has Black Manta,Major Force,Dr. Light,Felix Faust,Anton Arcane,Vandal Savage;Joker even manages to stand out in Batmans rogue gallery.Which includes Victor ZsasZ,James Gordon Jr,Black Mask,Deacon Blackfire...and that's not even counting cosmic and universal threats.

It speaks volumes that Joker is the only Bat-villain without any redeeming qualities in the DCAU.

[stumpy]

I had sort of a long post criticizing some of the other aspects of Snyder's Batman-kills portrayal in this light. Let's face it, Batman didn't seem all that new to the policy when he ran down that thug or used pretty-clearly-lethal weapons on others. He wasn't shocked or upset at what he had done. So, it would seem unusual if he has only recently decided that killing is okay. Meanwhile, both BvS and Suicide Squad are movies set in the present-day. And, the Suicide Squad characters aren't 50-year-olds who Batman put away decades ago, so these terrible killers (who are often really vicious, homicidal, and remorseless) somehow escaped Batman's ultimate judgement in the not-too-distant past. I think it's a legitimate criticism to point that out and to point out a pretty serious moral incongruity, at least without some pretty serious backpedaling.

(And, yes, I admit that there are several potential loopholes here, arguably in the classic comic book tradition. Batman might have been brainwashed by the Luthor/Darkseid video. We don't know how many of the Suicide Squad characters are part of Batman's rogue's gallery in this movie universe. Etc.)

But, part of the problem in discussing this is that the portrayal of Batman vis-à-vis killing in BvS is just not very consistent. As noted before, despite the scenes where it may seem pretty clear that he is just straight up killing low-level baddies, there are other parts of the movie where it totally seems like that must not be what Batman does. The most obvious example of this is Clark's confrontation with Bruce at the Luthor party. There is no way that that Clark would have limited his criticism of Batman to "civil rights violations" if Batman was actually killing people. I mean, that would be ignoring the mountain to complain about the mole hill.

So, Snyder has presented a character who kills and seems not that bothered about killing. At the same time, he presents a character who must not really be killing. Why? Because an in-movie critic who would clearly have pointed out that killing as an egregious flaw ignores it, instead highlighting a serious-but-unquestionably-lesser issue.

BTW, this isn't at all to let Snyder off the hook. To my mind, presenting a character who isn't coherent within the framework of the film is a serious problem. I think the framework itself is likely flawed, but we can't even definitively discuss it because there isn't a consistent portrayal of what the character is really doing.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

People working on Suicide Squad recently stated that every single member of the squad was captured by Batman.  Which also means the police, military, and all other superheroes are basically incompetent if no one else in the entire country can manage to capture even one of them.

[stumpy]

Well, it means that Batman caught them before anyone else who was trying did, not necessarily that Batman is the only person who ever would have caught them.

But, even if the latter were the case, I would not be terribly bothered by it. Batman is traditionally way better at catching the bad guys than ordinary people (police, etc.) and at least on par with most superheroes. Additionally, many of Batman's rogue's gallery don't normally come up on the radars of other superheroes, so most superheroes wouldn't have tried to catch them. On top of all of that, the premise of BvS seems to be that there aren't that many superheroes active yet, at least who are operating with a public profile, which is why Lex's video was news to Batman.

[murs47]

I finally saw this last night. Sadly, I can't un-see it.

As I watched the credits roll down I pondered how something so horrendous like this was made. Then I saw the words "Frank Miller" littered around. Everything suddenly made sense.

[BWPS]

I still haven't seen it. In large part because based on the things I've heard/seen combined with how I feel about these characters, there is almost no chance I won't hate it Still, I'm willing to give it a shot eventually.

[daglob]

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/You-Can-Now-Explore-Batcave-Through-Google-Maps-120877.html

[daglob]

I should probably let this just die down, but I saw part of an interview with Zack Snyder:

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/2/11565932/zack-snyder-justice-league

It makes me wonder who in their right minds would ever think he was the proper director for a Superman movie.

[spydermann93]

What in the....

Are we sure that Zack Snyder isn't just Lex Luthor trying to end the Justice League once and for all?

Well, at least he's getting people talking, that's for sure.

[HarryTrotter]

So he wanted to do Watchmen 2,but WB wouldnt let him?Thats the message Im getting.

[Talavar]

Ugh.  He's one of those guys who looks at superheroes and thinks "wouldn't it be better if they killed people."  Get this man away from DC as fast as possible.

[BentonGrey]

That's quite telling.  You know, it's understandable to have that point of view when you're 16 and stupid (I did to a degree, and I was), but to still have it when you're 50 is something else entirely. That speaks volumes.

[stumpy]

I should probably let this just die down, but I saw part of an interview with Zack Snyder:

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/2/11565932/zack-snyder-justice-league

It makes me wonder who in their right minds would ever think he was the proper director for a Superman movie.

[Orange emphasis mine.] I am hoping that it's someone who had not seen that interview.

I was never a huge fan of the Superman movies of the 70s and 80s. But, I liked them and at least didn't feel like they were portraying a character I didn't recognize. Then, the 2006 Superman film came out and I cringed a little. Sure, the pacing was too slow and the plot of Lex basically running the same scam that he did in Superman (I) were problems, but that really wasn't the real flaw. The flaw was in the character. Superman as someone who left a pregnant Lois to explore his past didn't really work for me. (Whether he didn't know that she was pregnant when he left or left anyway doesn't really matter. Neither works.) Superman as someone who stalks Lois and undermines the stable life she has built for herself and her child didn't work for me. The character was off.

Then Man of Steel comes out and the technical parts of the movie are great. Awesome special effects, Superman's flight and powers looked like they were brought totally up-to-date with today's impressive special effects. And, I can ignore dumb plot devices like Jor-El basically being alive and Lois being involved in things for essentially no reason except that the actor needed to be on screen long enough to justify a kiss later on. But the characters were still off. And, way more off that even the 2006 film. Jonathan Kent telling Clark that, given a choice between letting his secret out and standing by why people die right in front of him, maybe he should let them die? Really, Mr. Snyder? That's who you think raised Superman? And, of course, Clark takes his "revenge" on some bonehead trucker by destroying his truck (and his cargo) in a way that definitely definitely would have ended up on a thousand Facebook walls and at least the local news. Yes, a cool visual and I can forgive the secret identity plot hole that creates. But, that's who Snyder's Superman is? Someone who can't let go of a petty confrontation in a bar?

I am getting old. I don't want to wait another ten years for Warner to reboot the DC movie universe and "get it right".

I don't want a generation growing up thinking that Superman would be a cooler hero if he killed more people. Or the same of Batman.

I don't want a Justice League with a Cyborg who makes peoples' eyes explode with his sonic attacks or a Flash who snaps peoples' necks at super speed or an Aquaman who swims the baddies down 30 meters while their eardrums burst and leaves them there to drown. Does Zack Snyder think those things would be okay? Can anyone say "no" with any confidence?

Not that all comics characters should be decent or even have a code against killing. Here's an idea for WB: Ease Zack Snyder out of the driver's seat by putting him in charge of the Suicide Squad franchise and let that be it for him. His brand of "heroism" works in that group. Where, notably, most of the characters aren't really heroes.

[Silver Shocker]

Nothing to add that hasn't been said already, except to joke that DC hired 90's Kid from Atop the Fourth Wall or the overzealous violence-obsessed fanboy from Shortpacked to direct their movies.
Superman is supposed to be about wonder (as in, "You'll believe a man can fly") and hope and inspiration and optimism ("Truth, Justice, and the American Way", "The Man of Tomorrow"). The sequence where Clark first takes flight in Man of Steel definitely delivered on the wonder, but the rest doesn't really seem to be much of an element in the new movies.

[BWPS]

Zack Snyder reminds me of Jennifer Garner in 13 Going On 30. A young teenager who overnight gets to live out his dreams of being a grown up but he can't actually do it right because he lacks any kind of maturity.

[HarryTrotter]

Back to an earlier theme-Batmans whole justification for killing Superman is that hes not human so that makes it okay.Kinda racist?

Having grown up with Loebs Superman-Batman,I never really considered them enemies.People tend to forget DKR is an Elseworld story.Just wanted to say that. :-)