Batman fight Superman: Dawn of Brilliant
April 11th, 2016
Hey everybody, did you see the big new Superman and Batman? I know! It was pretty alright, right?
What the heckery was going on with all the bad reviews? They’re really going overboard aren’t they? What’s that all about – fifty bad reviews in the Guardian? Guardian, what are you guarding while churning out such shitness??
Of all the children, this one is my favourite: clever mediasays Donald Trump, being clever, but fails to nail the dynamic at work. What influence the papers have is only their ability to shape potential negative space around an ongoing mass discourse that plainly thinks they’re all wankers. (AKA every Trump hitpiece is free money for Trump.)
It’s not a joke. IT MATTERS* – because check this out: the way things are going Deadpool is a bigger movie draw than Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman combined. Clutch your spells, clutch your pearls: the world is strange and you will need protection.
* I LOVE the byline on the story linked to there: ‘Associated Press in Los Angeles’. Does this embarassing buck-passing mean
- Machine takeover: Algo journalism already far more widespread than reported?
- This pointless shite is still written by humans for the time being, but none shameless enough to take credit for it, in which cas
- Get a real job you useless bastards. Journalists are the worst.
What’s this really all about then – superhero fatigue? (no because come on – there’s not a dry knicker in the house looking forward to the Ballad of Steve and Tony.) Is it Marvel’s first mover advantage? They wrote the script on what these films should be like, and any deviation will not be tolerated. Ridiculous case study in how well-cultivated brand loyalty can be weaponised against competitors, pay attention weak product merchants: get in there fast.
Is it backlash against that last Superman movie that everyone paid so much to hate-watch, media momentum boosted by groupthink and easy headlines? It’s a DC comics superhero comic translated to film, with elseworlds and prophetic dreams and Doomsday. It’s not how could it be – like a Marvel comics superhero story, but the stupid fucking normals who watch films but don’t know shit else don’t know, surprisingly, shit else about the difference.
Forgive them dear reader: is it not a blessed relief to be given permission to just unambiguously not like a superhero movie at last? It’s just a shame they picked the wrong one.
There could be something in that because Childhood’s End or The Agony of This Is Not My Superman or whatever but the hated portrayal of Superman isn’t because handsome Henry is a bit wooden (stony actually – his colours and lighting are pure Superduperman – all rock-hewn and emotionally monolithic and a bit dim), but because he knows we all hated him so much in the last film.
He’s just flying around saving poor people and Lois like it says he should, but Holly Hunter has teamed up with a TED guy called Lex, the rest of the internet and kryptonite to tell him how shit the last film was. Kav-Ell has a perfectly legit take on playing today’s don’t-fuck-it-up-again Superman. It’s not as good as Batfleck, who kicks goonass harder than we’ve ever been seen before and makes tea for Alfred when it’s his turn… but it’s close.
Facing the critical brainiac shitstorm, Zack Snyder – nth-level operator – responds with an impeccable anti-troll attack, reaching into a blu-ray box from the future to unleash a deleted scene upon the heaving, roiling, puking inter-network. Widely misperceived as marketing desperation, it’s pure war magic. It might not save the box office, but it will scar the assailants and they’ll know they were in a fight at least. They won’t – I’m having to write a blog none of them will ever read to explain how hard Snyder has owned them
Vide!
The metal baddie there only looks like Nebuloh the Hunter – our universe poisoned with death hormones and grown up an adolescent bully, eat that internet, you drool Snyder is cool – but it’s Steppenwolf, the King‘s chosen avatar of militarised violence and conquest, an emanation of Darkseid. A nasty roughhousing bastard without his big boss’ melancholy sex appeal.
Snyder’s meaning is dual. On the one hand, it’s a death diss mocking the toothy horde with classic rock riffs and a reminder that they are ‘born to be wild’: the internet’s critical legions as shouting baby beatniks in thrall to a primitive media conditioning they believe to call liberty, freedom, realness, Trump, shit like that. Burn them Zackary!
But harsher still is the further intimation: the critics in their multitude fuse into a single idiot mass and become Wolf of the Steppes, he who walks alone untouched by love and joy – a leader without a pack: a fool, in the cold, deluding itself and despised.
Hesse wasn’t being kind to his fascinating but remarkably arseholeish protagonist. His hints of the Steppenwolf’s redemption is slim, and glossed over, and ultimately unconvincing. The wolf-who-hates-BatmanVSuperman in his narcissistic disavowal of sense and society is too complete and perfect to find apotheosis other than in a neurotic shadow of its own self: the singular multitude; the crying mass; the massive, pounded purple bellend that is the internet.
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