8. It’s not that civilians can’t die, it’s that you need to care that they died.
The controversy about “Man Of Steel” and its disregard for collateral damage is much gone over at this point, but there’s no denying that it’s been influential on the way that the superhero genre has played out since: “Avengers: Age Of Ultron” felt like a direct response to the controversy, and ‘Civil War’ picks up where it left off, while “Dawn Of Justice” makes blowback to Superman’s sloppy care for civilians a key element of the plot.
But the trouble is that it decidedly misses the point: characters are at pains to explain that the final battle takes place on a deserted island far from any people, but Snyder has his violence cake and eats it, and gets Batman to gleefully waste a bunch of Luthor’s mercenaries. ‘Civil War,’ far more so than ‘Age Of Ultron’ seems to get the balance right — it doesn’t stretch your suspension of disbelief to hard (“oh, that building was fortunately empty when I threw you into it”), but it ensures that they have consequences. ‘Batman V. Superman’ genuflects in the direction of correcting its predecessors problems, but it feels like a child apologizing because they know it’ll get them out of trouble: contrast the genuine emotional weight that the bombing of the UN has in ‘Civil War,’ versus the aftermath, or lack of it (it’s basically shown on TV and then never acknowledged again) of the bombing of the Capitol in ‘Dawn Of Justice.’
9. Understand that stakes come from emotional investment in the psychologies of the characters, not the size of the threat.
Quite sensibly, ‘Civil War’ spends most of the movie not trying to make you think that Iron Man is going to stab Captain America through the heart. They’re on different sides of a battle, sure, a position that neither finds themselves happy about, but they’re also stubborn, and convinced that they’re doing the right thing, and only turn to physical conflict when it’s unavoidable, when Tony is blocking Cap’s way. When they battle at the airport, basically everyone is pulling their punches. But that doesn’t mean we don’t care — we do, because we’re emotionally invested in the characters.
And it also doesn’t mean that there can’t be awful consequences — like a playful playground brawl that gets out of control, it all ends in tears, with a mis-fired blast from Vision crippling War Machine permanently. It’s notable that it’s an act of friendly fire — a sign that this conflict has gone out of control as far as everyone’s concerned. The stakes get raised later, with a no-holds barred battle between Tony and Steve, but it feels earned after nearly two and a half hours, and a brutal revelation. . Even then, the extent of their violence is a reminder of how far they’ve fallen — the neat contrast of Black Panther, a man with a serious grudge against Zemo, rejecting violence reminds us what a hero is meant to be.
But in “Dawn Of Justice,” Batman seems intent on killing Superman from the moment we meet him, driven to vengeance against someone he doesn’t seem to have any interest in actually looking into, convinced that he has to kill this person BECAUSE OF A DREAM HE HAD. And Superman doesn’t exactly seem to be averse to taking a life (“If I wanted it, you’d be dead already”) if it comes to it. Snyder and his team don’t seem to trust their audience to care unless the stakes are life-and-death, and want you to believe that the heroes would murder each other if they got the chance. And as ‘Civil War’ demonstrated, there are other ways to make you care.
10. If you have to use your movie to set up other franchises, do it organically.
‘Civil War’ had a natural advantage, in that it had twelve movies and eight years of build-up to make you care that the characters were being pitted head to head, whereas “Batman V. Superman” wasn’t just having to introduce a new Batman, it was also taking time to set up the rest of the “Justice League” and subsequent franchises too. “Dawn Of Justice” did at least succeed on one front — people seem to like Ben Affleck’s version of Batman and Bruce Wayne enough that they’d be prepared to see him in other films.
But the reverse-engineering approach is mostly done inelegantly in the film. Wonder Woman figures into the plot — kind of — but she’s behaving more like a “Catwoman”-type character when we meet her, and is more or less a deus ex machina by the time she rocks up in the final fight (in an admittedly crowd-pleasing moment). Worse, The Flash is introduced via a dream-within-a-dream-sequence in a completely baffling way, and one that makes even less sense if you’re unfamiliar with the character, while he and some of the other characters are hinted at via viral video. You could almost mistake it for a wry jab at Marvel’s post-credit sequences, 1) were it not placed slap-bang in the middle of the film, and 2) if there was a trace of wit anywhere else in the film. All these macro-franchise-serving moments pretty much stop the film dead in its tracks.
Marvel have absolutely been guilty of the same level of clunkiness — witness basically all of “Iron Man 2,” for instance, or even as recently as the baffling Thor sub-plot in ‘Age Of Ultron’ — but they’re improving, and given that this marks really the first time that they’ve introduced a character in one film who’ll be going on to their own solo pic (everyone else got their own origin story), it’s done relatively seamlessly. Both Black Panther and Spider-Man fit into the story organically, and more important, pay off thematically — the former a spectre of vengeance and fury who pulls out of the nosedive, the latter a young, naive hero starting out who reminds the others what it means to be a superhero. And none had their logo designed by the supervillain, more importantly…
11. Pay Critics To Give Your Film A Better Review And To Trash The Opposition
Not sure how much plainer we could make it, DC. Till those bribery dollars start rolling in like they have from the devious geniuses at Marvel, immensely powerful and influential pundits like us are going to continue to declare for the opposition irrespective of the quality of your $400m underdog. Never too late though (the beach house we bought with our Marvel bucks still needs furnishing) — DM us for our bank account details, and we’ll publish a retraction tomorrow.
