The Unappealing DC Cinematic Universe

Well, Batman v. Superman is upon us. I'm not going to see it. That one trailer -- the one with Wonder Woman battle-crying her way into our hearts -- did look cool. But I can't deny it anymore. DC characters are generally too powerful to be interesting or to let me suspend my knowledge of biology and physics.

Plus, the Superman of the DC Extended Universe is no longer the enjoyable boy scout that Christopher Reeve played with well-timed smirks. Now he's just a boring "flying brick" who doesn't seem to care about humanity the same way Christopher Reeve's alien god did. Reeve made us love Superman so much that we mourned his crippling accident and later his passing. I really don't see us ever caring that much about Henry Cavill.

It's funny. Christopher Reeve was a dyed-in-the-wool progressive liberal (which really shows in the lamentable 'Superman IV: The Quest for Peace', which Reeve helped write and direct, but which was ultimately butchered). Maybe that's why his Superman was so earnest. So nice. Reeve's alien with god powers wearing primary colors gave human form to an ideal United States. It gave Americans a chance to feel good about their own superpower nation-state, even if they didn't realize it.

To this day, when I hear that stirring John Williams score, I want to run out and help save people from danger. I want to make sure that nobody dies.

I also got this feeling when I was watching Henry Cavill's Superman in action in "Man of Steel". But for the wrong reasons. I wanted to save all the thousands of people who were dying as a direct result of Superman's rumble with Zod.

I'm far from the first to write about how disappointed I was with Superman's latest cinematic incarnation. But it's important because this disappointed shadow is so long and so dark that it has actually scared me away from attempting another DCEU experience. I don't want to be so terrified or sad during a Superman film ever again.

I suppose "Man of Steel" had to happen. America had to see its god-powered avatar powerless to stop a  9/11 event. That doesn't mean it belongs in a Superman movie, however, because it betrays the Superman mythos. Superman would have stopped the planes from reaching their targets. Superman might have even been able to get aboard the planes and disable the terrorists with minimal loss of passenger life. And maybe nobody would have died at all.

Christopher Reeve managed to save everybody. And when he discovered that this meant the death of the woman he loved, he used his god-like powers to fly faster than light and turn back time. Henry Cavill couldn't be bothered to fly Zod a few miles out of the urban sprawl. He even pulled Zod miles into outer space, but couldn't manage to alter their re-entry trajectory a few degrees so they didn't land right smack in the middle of the same couple of acres of Metropolis.

Henry Cavill is one of the best-looking men on earth, easily in the top tenth of a percent. But there is something wolfish about his handsomeness. His looks predatory, like a man who knows his looks outstrip any other quality he has, so he might as well use them for personal gain. His lantern jaw is certainly supermanly (in fact, his jaw is almost a character in itself ) but the rest of his face -- his smiling blue eyes beneath those fierce eyebrows -- strike me as a bit callous. His face doesn't say pretty, guileless boy scout the way Reeve's face did. And the look of (not "on") Cavill's face didn't tell me he really cared about the mortals that were exploding around him as he and Zod knocked buildings down. Cavill was perfectly cast for the Superman of Zack Snyder's visually impressive but joyless film.

It's a shame I probably will never see this film because I keep hearing that it got Batman exactly right. Like everyone else who cared, I initially guffawed at the choice of Ben Affleck for Bruce Wayne/Batman. But then I read an article that pointed out why Afflecek, whose acting career was a well-worn joke at that point, would be perfect for the role of an older, more bitter Batman based on the coming-out-of-retirement Batman of Frank Miller's classic "The Dark Night Returns." I was sold since then and looking forward to Affleck making the scoffer's eat crow.

And from what I've heard from I've read and heard, no matter what anyone thought of the overall movies (and most critics do think it's a mess), Affleck's performance was the best thing in the film. Sadly, this is another indictment for the DCEU. The Batman Affleck so superbly inhabited is an out-and-out neofascist.

Look, Batman has never been a friend to the people. He's a man born into one of the biggest fortunes on DC earth. Then he uses that wealth to outfit himself with high tech weaponry to beat the hell out of the criminal poor. He does not use his wealth to prevent crime by helping alleviate poverty in his city with programs to help poor Gothamites to learn how to program computers. Batman clearly votes Republican. He's too smart to be one of the xenophobic racist goons that bay and howl in approval at a Trump rally, but you get the impression that Bruce Wayne nods along when he watches an interview with Dick Cheney. And this is the best character the DCEU has to offer.

Superman is almost impossible to make interesting. Your best bet as an actor or a writer is to make him likable. Christopher Reeve managed to do so to such great effect that he has become the standard by which all Superman actors past and present have been compared. Brandon Routh might have been almost as memorable if he'd been given a better movie to work in. It's too bad that DC has chosen to distance itself so much from the camp of the late 70's. Surely they needed to make the material a bit more serious, but it looks like they went over the cliff in an effort to stand apart from Marvel's effort. These movies are some depressing shit that serve the jackbooted Batman, but tarnish the Superman myth.