christian bale

“Nobody cares about Clark Kent taking on the Batman.”

I don’t actually think it’s possible to be a little boy between the ages of 4 and 8 who is aware of Superman and not a fan of Superman. It’s like Star Wars or Transformers. You see this:

And something in your little boy soul just chimes.

So I don’t think there was ever a time where I wasn’t a fan of Superman but as I’ve gotten older I’ve certainly become more of a fan. And I have to say, on behalf of my tribe, it’s a pretty good time to be an enjoyer of Clark Kent. James Gunn is going to be bringing us a new Superman movie next year, both Superman and Action Comics have been enjoying high-quality, well-received runs and My Adventures with Superman is, in my humble opinion, the single best animated depiction of the character since the Fleischer Shorts of the forties. Yes. Better than Superman the Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited. No, I will not take that back.

My point is things are good now. We’ve come along way from…y’know.

Fuck. There really was a time there when the guy most responsible for shaping Superman’s presentation to the wider world was Zack Snyder.

Future generations won’t believe it. But I was there. It happened.

Alright, let me pull back a little bit. I know you’ve probably clicked on this hoping for some classic, old-school mid-2010s internet rage with all manner of inventive profanity and performative outrage and I won’t lie, I’m not too proud to dance. BUT I want to draw a line in the sand here and make one thing clear.

I don’t hate Zack Snyder either personally or artistically. He is, by all accounts, a lovely guy and the loyalty that he inspires in the actors who have worked with him is genuinely touching. I can’t say I understand the devotion that fans of his movies have to his work but I don’t for a minute doubt its sincerity. People do genuinely, passionately adore his films and respond to them and that can’t be ignored. This is not some studio hack. This is a man who produces works that people respond to strongly, both positively and negatively. This is an artist.

He should not be allowed near Superman. Ever.

He does not understand the character and he does not understand why he matters.

I realise that this is going to come across as just…foam-flecked fanboy ranting but please hear me out. This character is important in a way that very, very few fictional characters are or ever will be. Remember what I said about how every little boy just, instinctively loves Superman?

Okay. Now you may have heard Superman described as a power fantasy for little boys. And to that I say “yes, absolutely he is” and also “why the fuck are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?”

If Superman is a fantasy, what exactly is the fantasy?: “I want to be an all-powerful demi-god so that I can…devote every free moment of my time to protecting and helping those who have less power than me”?

So…you have generations of young boys who will grow up in a world where they will have disproportionate power (of many kinds) over others being influenced by this character and his worldview, modelling behaviours of selflessness, compassion, kindness and justice. You see why that might be, I dunno, a very, very good thing?

Now here is a quote from Zack Snyder (he’s actually responding to criticism about Batman killing people in his movies but it’s also relevant when discussing his approach to Superman):

“Once you’ve like lost your virginity to this f**king movie and then you come and say to me something about ‘oh, my superhero wouldn’t do that’, I’m like ‘are you serious?’ because I’m down the f**king road on that.

“It’s a cool point of view to be like: ‘My heroes are still innocent. My heroes didn’t f**king lie to America. My heroes didn’t embezzle money. My heroes didn’t commit any atrocities.’

“That’s cool, but you’re living in a f**king dream world, okay?”

And yes, I know juxtaposing that quote with that dialogue from What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way has been done so many times it’s cliché at this point but…I wanted to do it and it made me feel good and it’s my blog so there.

Zack Snyder claims that his approach to comics is rooted in Alan Moore’s Watchmen and sure, Moore did deconstruct the tropes of comic books and created superheroes who were deeply, deeply flawed people. But you know what he didn’t do? He didn’t try that shit with Superman.

Moore didn’t write a lot of Superman stories but the ones he did featured some of the very noblest, most selfless versions of the character.

Moore gets what makes Superman important, and that it is not something to fuck with.

Hell, even Mark Millar and Garth Ennis, the two patron saints of the Shitty Edgelord school of superhero comics. You give them Superman, this is how they write him:

Superman is so fucking good the guy who wrote The Boys can’t hate him.

Anyway.

Hello, welcome to my regular series of movie reviews where I talk about Batman.

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“Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you.”

Martin Scorsese supposedly coined the expression: “one for them, one for you”, meaning you do the movies the studio wants you to do in order to do the movies you want to do. The Dark Knight Rises is, famously, one of the most open and avowed “one for them” movies in recent Hollywood history.

Nolan didn’t want to do it (especially after Heath Ledger’s tragic death) and never bothered to hide the fact that this was the hoop he had to jump through to get Warners to pony up for Inception.

But you know what? It’s a myth that great art only comes from passion projects. Plenty of good and even great films have come from people who just showed up to work that day. And look, if the price we had to pay for every Inception was a Dark Knight Rises, I’d take that deal.

But there are problems with this movie. And (bizarrely, given this is the exact same writing team that gave us the fucking GOAT of a script that was The Dark Knight) pretty much all those problems begin and end on the page.

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“We burned the forest down.”

Do you want to know how I got ~~these scars~~ into writing about movies?

My college had its own version of “The Onion” where I made my bones writing utterly run-of-the-mill edgy early 2000’s college humour (i.e. the kind of stuff that would get me cancelled today so fast it would break the laws of physics) and my editor asked me if I’d be interested in trying my hand at writing a movie review. And the very first movie I ever reviewed for them (if memory serves) was none other than The Dark Knight. And now you know my gritty origin story. And, if you are old enough to remember my earliest reviews (DON’T GO BACK AND READ THEM DON’T YOU DO IT I SWEAR TO GOD) you’ll remember that this movie was a BIG deal to me and those early reviews are chock full of references to it, even when they weren’t relevant or funny. Which was all the time. I see that now.

So, as you can imagine, I approached this one with a great deal of trepidation. Is it really as good as I remember?

No, actually.

In fact, in many ways, it’s better.

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“Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.

This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.

“Coolio as Scarecrow! Ghost Joker! MADONNA AS HARLEY QUINN!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.

But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.

It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?

Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.