Category: Entertainment

One of the joys of streaming television is being able to revisit old shows from my childhood and find out if they’re any good.  One of these shows is “Magnum, p.i.,” a Donald P. Belisario production based out of Hawaii.  The show ran for eight seasons from 1980-88, and famously starred Tom Selleck, a bright red Ferrari 308 GTS, and the island of Oahu.

When I was a kid, my Dad was a huge fan of this show.  He’s the same age as Tom Selleck, and could be found throughout the 1980’s wearing khaki shorts, ballcaps, golf shirts and deck shoes with no socks.  He even had an Aloha shirt or two, and aviator sunglasses.  And anyone who knows my dad knows that he’s had a moustache since the 1970’s, so there was that, too.  He and Magnum also have the same wristwatch.

Back in the early 80’s the only color TV in my parents’ house was on a cart in their bedroom, and at night my dad would sit in his VMI rocking chair and watch TV.  My mom would sit on the bed, her back to the headboard, and I would sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, beside the rocking chair.  But not when Magnum was on.  When Magnum was on, my mom usually sat in the rocking chair, and Dad laid on the bed, with his feet up by the headboard and his head at the foot of the bed, a pillow doubled over under his chest, behind his crossed arms, and I’d sit or lay next to him.  I didn’t necessarily follow the storylines back then, but I loved the car, the helicopter, the colorful shirts, the tropical guest house, and all of the Hawaii.  Like all little boys, I also just liked whatever my dad liked.

These days I get teased by some of my friends for being “nostalgic,” and it would be easy to say that revisiting my old favorite TV shows was some kind of way to recapture my childhood.  Maybe it would even be true, I’m not sure.  But a lot of the shows I liked back then are actually pretty awful, and after an episode or two I can’t continue watching them.  Magnum, though, I’ve had a long-standing appreciation for.  Being able to watch it straight through, no missing episodes, has been a treat.

It’s a tendency we see a lot of in the modern world, to judge earlier time periods by modern standards.  I think it’s funny that Magnum is remembered mostly for the car and, these days, for his shorts being very short.  The thing is… the car didn’t belong to Magnum, and in the 80’s, men’s shorts just WERE that short.  Boys’ shorts, too.  That’s just what we looked like.

So, how did the show come about?  CBS television had just ended production on the original “Hawaii Five-O” and they wanted to make use of their assets in Hawaii, so that was the genesis of “Magnum, p.i.”  When Don Belisario, Glen A. Larson and Chas. Floyd Johnson created the show, they had actually intended Magnum to be an American James Bond, a suave, dashing ladies’ man with a visiting stewardess on each arm.  Tom Selleck, however, was tired of being cast in this type of role, and he told the producers he wanted to do something different.

Around this time, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were casting for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Spielberg was adamant that he wanted Harrison Ford for the role of Indiana Jones, but Lucas, having worked with Ford on his last two films (“American Graffiti” and “Star Wars,”) was determined not to be the guy who only makes movies with Harrison Ford.  Selleck read for the role of Indiana Jones, screen tested, and was actually close to getting the role.  But Magnum was another potentially lucrative project, and the producers of the show had him in mind.  So Selleck told them, “I’m tired of playing what I look like,” and said they should either change the character of Thomas Magnum, or he’d go do “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Not wanting to give up their leading man, the producers relented.

As for those famous shorts, they can actually be chalked up to the wardrobe department doing a bang-up job.  Magnum’s backstory is that he’s a former Navy SEAL, who operated in Vietnam out of Da Nang, and in the late 70’s, after the war, he was stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a Naval Intelligence Officer.  Lieutenant Thomas Sullivan Magnum woke up one day in 1978, and realized he was 33 years old and had never had a chance to be 23.  He resigned his commission from the United States Navy, and went into business as a private investigator, operating out of a crummy second-floor office in Honolulu, and driving a rusted out old VW Beetle.

Then, sometime around ’79 or ’80, before the start of the show, he was hired by best-selling author Robin Masters, to work security on his Hawaiian estate, Robin’s Nest.  Robin doesn’t live at Robin’s Nest, opting to spend most of his time in one of his other estates around the world, but he keeps Robin’s Nest as a resort for his friends, and for hosting various parties and charitable functions.  In exchange for his services, Magnum is quartered in the Guest House on the Estate, and has access to the tennis courts, the private beach with tidal pool, the wine cellar, and the garage – including a luxury sedan, a GMC Jimmy (later a Jeep Cherokee) and the Ferrari 308.  This is where we find Magnum, a 33-year old man in an Aloha shirt and his khaki, Navy-issue swim trunks, deck shoes with no socks, and a Detroit Tigers cap, living in a tropical bungalow surrounded by the few items collected from his life so far – a duffel bag, his handgun, a lot of empty beer bottles and pizza boxes, a gorilla mask, and a rubber chicken.

Yeah, you read that right.

Other visual reminders of Magnum’s service can be found in his wardrobe.  In the earlier seasons he frequently wears sailor dungarees and work shirts, and throughout the entire series he can be seen wearing a Navy-issue web belt with a Navy SEAL buckle, a navy blue ballcap with a VMO-2 Da Nang insignia, and a ring with a French Croix de Lorraine, the symbol of his old unit from ‘Nam.

He is not alone on the estate, however.  The estate is managed by a fussy little British majordomo, a retired Sergeant-Major named Jonathan Quayle Higgins III (John Hillerman), who served in the British Army in Africa, and in the Pacific Theater in WWII, where as a POW he helped build the famously ill-fated Bridge on the River Kwai.  Like Magnum, Higgins returned from his own war to go into intelligence, serving in MI-6.  Short, stocky, sporting a receding hairline and a not insignificant paunch, Higgins cuts a comical figure who takes himself, and everything else, far too seriously for Magnum’s tastes.  He rambles on in his posh accent about boring old war stories, fusses over his Dobermans, Zeus and Apollo, and hacks away at his memoirs in Robin’s study.

Although he lives in the lap of luxury, Magnum is perpetually broke and frequently enlists the help of his two best friends, also members of his old unit: retired Marine Corps helicopter pilot Theodore “TC” Calvin, and his diminutive old door gunner turned night club manager, Orville “Rick” Wright.  TC (Roger E. Mosley) is a hulking man with a kind disposition and the build of a heavyweight fighter.  He now runs a charter helicopter service called Island Hoppers. Rick (Larry Manetti)  can best be described as Joe Pesci wearing a Ray Liotta mask, and although in the pilot he runs a club called Rick’s Place, modeled on the club from Casablanca (hence his moniker), by the second episode he ends up managing the King Kamehameha Club, on the board of directors of which Higgins sits.

Magnum’s needing favors from his friends leads to some friction between them, as TC and Rick are perpetually putting themselves in harm’s way and expending resources in order to help Magnum run down leads, but they never see a penny from him, despite the fuel costs and frequent damages to TC’s Hughes 500D, and the fact that Magnum insists on meeting his clients in the King Kamehameha Club and has run up an extensive tab.  In addition, in the early seasons, Magnum is constantly having to barter with Higgins, using as currency his access to the tennis courts and wine cellar, and even, in desperate times, the Ferrari.

So does it still work?  Mostly, yes it does.  Although the production value is not always superb, what saves the show is its refusal to take itself too seriously.  Tom Selleck plays Magnum as a laid-back guy with a goofy sense of humor, who has seen and done enough rough things to know how and when to put on a hard face and put a bullet in a bad guy, but his narration, his dialogue, and his mannerisms are pretty quirky.  He also frequently breaks the fourth wall, looking directly into the camera with a self-deprecating grin when things don’t go his way – which is often.  At its best, the show is either very funny, or surprisingly dark.  As all of the main characters are veterans, mainly of Vietnam, and as it was the 1980’s, they used that to tell some very compelling stories (and made use of the  beautiful Hawaiian landscape to recreate southeast Asia).

I’m also at a point in my life where I find Magnum’s storyline compelling.  Not a womanizer, Magnum has been in love a couple of times and has lost his loves.  He is kind and respectful towards the women in his life, frequently charming but never smarmy, and always shows genuine compassion and tenderness.  Instead he is a grown-ass man living like a kid, not haunted by much of anything, but always searching for something that he can’t name.  As the series progresses he grapples with the dissonance between his age and his lifestyle, and the character begins to take on a deeper melancholy that he continually masks with his quirks.   Maybe I do cling a little too much to the past.  Maybe I constantly wrestle with the distance between where I am and where I’d like to be.  I don’t know where to find it.  I sure can’t afford to look for it on Oahu.  But the sunrises, the blue waters, the flowery shirts, the red Italian car and the flying Easter egg of a chopper all buoy my spirits just as they once did.

It’s not a solution, and my little voice won’t let me forget it, but for the time being it’s a coping mechanism, and until I find the way forward, I guess it’ll have to do.  I’ll carve off little pieces of paradise, 45 minutes at a time.  I mean what the hell.  They still make beer and pizza.

George Lucas knew what he was doing with the prequels.  Don’t get me wrong, he made a lot of mistakes, which are mostly owed to the fact that he rushed through the scripts and didn’t take time to fully develop the ideas he was putting into them.  It’s no secret that he didn’t write Empire or Jedi.  What you may not know is that he wrote at least four drafts of A New Hope, and probably had some uncredited assistance from others, including his wife at the time, Marcia.  Not only that but Harrison Ford, and, if my instincts do not deceive me, Carrie Fisher, re-wrote much of their own dialogue.

But the prequels are largely unfiltered Lucas, and not properly polished, so the issues that the scripts have live in that realm.  However, I want to talk about Anakin Skywalker, and his arc, and why it’s actually very cleverly conceived, despite not being well-executed.  Especially, people complain about Anakin being a creeper towards Padme in Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  I can’t believe I have to float this out there, but did you ever consider that Anakin is SUPPOSED to be a creeper?  He’s Darth friggin’ VADER.

Oh, I know, he wasn’t Vader at that point, but a turn to the Dark Side can’t be a snap decision.  It has to be built around a character flaw, a flaw which sinister forces (no pun intended, although…) can exploit in order to compromise him.  Lucas spent a lot of time discussing this in interviews, particularly as the prequel years went on and criticism of his choices continued to mount, but he laid a lot of it out there from the start.

With “The Phantom Menace,” he said that he made Anakin a young boy because it was important to the story that he should be at an age where being taken away from his mother would cause trauma.  So old enough to feel the pain, young enough not to handle it effectively.  And although we didn’t see much of what it meant to Anakin to be a slave, this was significant, too.

We are given to understand that the Jedi take force-sensitive children from their parents as soon as they are born, before bonds have formed between them.  This sucks for the parents but makes life easier for the kids, who are raised in a temple, essentially as monks, right from the start.  They are indoctrinated.  And if you think that sounds like a bad idea, well, good, you’re catching on to what ol’ Tio Jorge was up to.

So Anakin demonstrates his deep compassion and unselfish love towards others, does so repeatedly, and also has a pretty much instantaneous crush on teenage Natalie Portman.  What little boy wouldn’t?  Little boys always catch feelings for their teenage babysitters, which was basically her role in much of that movie.  Anakin also has a good relationship with his mother, and so he knows how to behave towards women at this point.  But it’s all about to go wrong.

It turns out that Shmi conceived him without partaking in any kind of horizontal dance party, and she has no idea how to explain it.  Qui-Gon reports to the Jedi Council that he “may have been conceived by the midichlorians.”  He manages to convince Shmi to let him take Anakin away from her, away from his life of slavery, and train him to be a Jedi because he believes that Anakin is the figure spoken of in an old prophecy about the Chosen One who will “bring balance to the Force.”

So now, Anakin’s one good relationship in life is taken from him, and he is dragged out into a galaxy full of ulterior motives and killer robots, paraded before a council who is skeptical that he belongs there.  His presence creates a rift between Qui-Gon, his newfound father figure, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon’s Padawan learner.  Then Qui-Gon is killed in battle with a Sith Lord and Obi-Wan promises he will train Anakin.  The council reluctantly agrees and promotes Obi-Wan to the level of Jedi Knight.

So flash-forward a decade.  Padme, no longer serving as Queen of Naboo, is instead serving as Naboo’s senator, and is in her mid-20’s.  Somebody is trying to kill her and the Supreme Chancellor asks the Jedi Council to assign Obi-Wan and Anakin to look after Padme, as they are familiar faces and will likely put her at ease.  Seems like a reasonable request, but of course it’s the first time Anakin has seen Padme in a decade, and he not only is carrying brokenness from his severed relationship with his mom, but he never fully made peace with his feelings for Padme, and now here she is, grown up, more mature and more beautiful, and he is now himself a man.

Add to that his growing frustration with the Jedi Order: he was not indoctrinated from birth.  He was a slave, and now he’s a monk; he owns no property other than his clothes and his lightsaber; he goes where he is told and does as he is commanded.  He is a student, essentially feeling his manhood challenged by the fatherly guidance of his big brother / mentor, Obi-Wan.  A nineteen year-old man still being told what to do, his heart is full of rebellion and his hormones are going nuts, and his life experience is that the people he loves he is always forced to abandon, or they are killed in battle.

Padme being back in his life is, for him, like a gift; she’s water to a man dying of thirst.  But for her, life has gone on and she has lived it, fully, and well; Anakin is just a fond memory and an unsettling presence, lecherous and a little too solicitous.  His heart is clearly somewhere hers is not, and she has no wish to hurt him but he does make her uncomfortable.

Sadly, much of her line of reasoning was cut out in the final edit, though the deleted scenes do exist on some of the various home video releases.  Some of it, however, in still in the film: Padme says she has been serving her world since she was fourteen; while not the youngest queen ever elected she does believe now that she was too young.  Hers has been a life of service, and she too is restless, hungry.  Though Anakin’s advances are not encouraged, and though she’s not sure she likes the tone of them, nor does she believe it appropriate, part of her does at least appreciate the possibilities.

The deleted scenes show that she has an older sister, who has children, and she watches wistfully while her sister’s kids play in the yard at their parents’ homestead, thinking how much she has given up in service of her world.  And her sister points out that Anakin is a very handsome young man who clearly is into her.  She does, after all, have options.

Anakin’s dreams about his mother’s suffering lead him back to Tattooine, with Padme in tow, but he is too late.  Shmi has been taken by Tuskens and, it’s a Star Wars movie so we don’t know what they did to her, but the parallels to “The Searchers” should be enough to telegraph it to anyone who knows that movie.  One thinks of John Wayne saying, “don’t ever ask me that again.”  Now Anakin has lost his mother twice, and forever.  His anger, then, is about the repeated pattern of loss in his life.  The loss of everyone who loves him, his having in effect nobody to love.  That his love is somehow a force of destruction when it ought to be a force for good.

As he and Padme face almost certain death at the end of the movie, Padme confesses a love for Anakin that may or may not be genuine; her life might be about to end and she is aware of all that she has never had.  When they do survive, she decides to throw caution to the wind.  There are a million reasons why they shouldn’t be together, but they almost died and all either of them can think about is what it would mean to die without having known love.

George Lucas said in an interview around this time how that was Anakin’s character flaw, that his inability to let go was what would be his undoing.  He talked about how true love is unconditional, and when you can’t let go, that’s selfishness, it’s a kind of greed; and that leads down a dark path.

So in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin begins having dreams about Padme’s death as he once did about his mother, and he knows how that story ended.  He can’t countenance letting the same thing happen to Padme.  Note how carefully the Chancellor has escalated the tension between Anakin and the Council, stroking Skywalker’s ego and making political moves that piss off the other Jedi and encroach on their authority.  Finally, in a quiet moment at the opera, Palpatine tells Anakin that he knows of a possible way to stop people from dying using the Dark Side of the Force.  Notice that in that speech, as Palpatine tells the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise, he tells Anakin that “it is said he could even influence the Midichlorians to…create…life…” and the pregnant pause and meaningful look the Chancellor throws in Anakin’s direction.

The implication being that perhaps Anakin was created by the Sith in the first place.  You can’t trust Palpatine, of course; he’s evil.  He talks out both sides of his mouth and his schemes, from TPM on down, have always been about playing two sides against each other to weaken them both and strengthen his own position.  But he’s exploiting Anakin’s love for Padme, pushing him to hold onto her ever tighter, to compromise himself and all that he holds dear.  For fifteen years, Anakin has been serving the Jedi Council.  Before that he was a slave of a junk dealer named Watto.  His whole life he has been doing the bidding of others, never allowed to have anything for his own.  Now, if he has to choose between Padme and the Jedi Order, the fogies in the monk robes are going to lose.

In making this choice, of course, he unknowingly signs her death warrant; it is his treachery that breaks her heart, and her own sense of loss that weakens her to the point of death during childbirth.  The battle with Obi-Wan is Anakin’s final rejection of the last fifteen years of his life.  No more Jedi, no more giving away what is precious to him; no more letting go.  Except when Padme dies, he’s permanently gutted: he’s lost it all anyway, and now it’s his own fault and there is nothing left for him to do but help his new master force the galaxy into some kind of order that he can understand.  Gathering power unto himself.

That’s a lot of anger for a person to carry around inside, and it’s the kind of anger that burns cold, the kind that would totally fuel a guy to do the things we saw in Rogue One…or across the Original Trilogy.  The anger of a perpetual loser who never learned humility from defeat.  There’s a lot of things in the Prequels that are not done well, but Anakin being a creeper isn’t bad writing.  It’s emblematic of the real problem with the prequels:  it’s a clever idea, poorly executed.

What follows was originally meant as a rebuttal to the Den of Geek article written by David Crow comparing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to the Joel Schumacher film Batman & Robin. I will not be addressing the actual comparisons themselves; rather my focus is on addressing specific remarks that Crow makes about the actual content of Batman v Superman, and through careful analysis of the content of the film, to illustrate that his points are largely assumptions based on misrememberings at best, if not misunderstandings or full-on intentional misrepresentations of said content.

My own assertions regarding the film will be drawn mainly by reading the events shown in the film itself and how those events relate to each other; in other words doing an explication of the film. I will occasionally address Crow’s points of out of order for the sake of clarity, for instance I handle Batman’s entire arc at once, so any comments from Crow relating specifically to Batman’s arc will be addressed in that section of this piece. Where applicable I will also draw on interviews, scholarly sources regarding dramatic structure, crisiscenter.org, and even Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

To begin with, before we get into David Crow at all, I’m going to open with this quote from Henry Cavill talking to JOE.ie at one of the press junkets (you can find the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEo…):

“It’s not just the characters pulled straight from the comic books and then there they are on screen; we’re looking into the minds, the psychologies, and the why of the characters.”

“Like, the way we expect movies to be now is to have some kind of […] psychological accuracy. That the person is coming from a place probably diagnosable in some way.”

That’s exactly what I see when I watch this movie; it may not be precisely the versions of the characters that we know, but I’m more interested in whether the motivations make sense in the film itself, and to me, psychologically, they do. But I’ll get into specifics about why as we explore Crow’s words about the film, and how those words do or do not reflect the film itself.

The first several paragraphs of Crow’s article are full of nothing but generalizations with no evidence from the film or anywhere else to back them up. It takes Crow until the eighth paragraph to say anything specific about the movie that is even worth challenging. Up until that point it’s all conveniently glib, carefully crafted sentences containing only rhetorical statements.

Finally, in the eighth paragraph, Crow begins to break down the film as he sees it:

“Ben Affleck is introduced as Bruce Wayne, the only First Responder in Metropolis during the climactic bout between Superman and General Zod in Man of Steel. He saves a little girl from the debris of a collapsed building, and in the midst of so much devastation, the Man Who Would Be Batman stares up to the skies as two gods fight to the death, and he plans to ensure there will be no victor.”

This is problematic on a couple of levels. I’m assuming that his assertion about Wayne being the “only First Responder” is a bit of snark. We know from the end of MoS that all hell had broken loose, and we see a bit of it here. We know the military was helping fight Zod. We see a police horse with no rider walking in the dust clouds as Wayne explores the rubble that used to be the Wayne Financial building.

The second issue is the statement that “he plans to ensure there will be no victor.” How did Crow arrive at that conclusion? What we saw was Bruce look up with a pissed-off expression while holding a little girl who just lost her mother. Let’s put that in context.

The opening of the film, the “Beautiful Lie” sequence, was a dream where Bruce relives his parents’ deaths, funeral, and his discovery of the Batcave. In this telling, Thomas Wayne’s final word is “Martha.” These events are sequenced so that the falling pearls, the falling parents, and Bruce falling into the shaft, are all intercut to heighten the impact of the falling imagery. As Bruce falls into the shaft, a single pearl falls beside him. Traditionally, pearls symbolize purity and innocence, so the broken strand of pearls used in nearly every telling of this sequence symbolizes the end of Bruce’s innocence. Adult Bruce’s narration says something like:

“There was a time above, a time before.  There were perfect things. Diamond absolutes.  But things fall; things on Earth.  And what falls... is fallen.” 

“In the dream, they took me to the light: a beautiful lie.”

As fans we know that Bruce became Batman in order to prevent what happened to his family from happening to anyone else. The bats are his totem. We know all of this from every version of the character we’ve ever seen, and we have effectively just received a Cliff’s Notes version of it, but we’re also being told here that becoming Batman was “a beautiful lie.” What redemption it may have granted him, didn’t last. Because the sequence is presented as a dream, this should imply that it’s not just about when he was a kid, it’s also about what the character is currently facing. That’s why he’s dreaming it. He had fallen, the bats metaphorically lifted him up, but now he’s fallen again. So Batman’s journey is to be one of redemption in this movie. That’s the set-up for his entire arc.

So when we see him save that little girl in Metropolis, the imagery is clear. Her mother is gone (note that it’s the mother!), and Bruce has failed to prevent this from happening. He was unable to help. And then he sees Superman and Zod. Now we know from the opening that he thought that by becoming Batman, he had taken control back, had assumed power over his destiny, but Superman’s existence shows him that he’s really powerless after all. This is his second fall. It’s not just the buildings falling around him (falling, again!): the order in Bruce’s world has fallen apart. The illusion of control is shattered. All a beautiful lie. So when he looks up at Superman, he’s seeing the cause of this catastrophe, and thus the target of his rage. He ends up taking that rage out on others, branding human traffickers, marking them for death. Assuming absolute power over them, falling into a kind of depravity. Alfred lets you know this is a recent develpoment when he holds up the headline “BAT BRAND OF JUSTICE” and says, “new rules?”

Alfred also highlights the change with his trailer line:

“That’s how it starts: the fever, the rage. The feeling of powerlessness that turns good men cruel.” 

Incidentally, this theme recurs throughout the movie, as with the dream where the bat monster busts out of Martha’s tomb. It begins with blood (what bleeds? Open wounds) because Bruce has been feeling the same sense of helplessness he felt in Crime Alley; perhaps also he is troubled by the blood on his hands. Then the bat busts out: his totem is no longer a symbol of rising out of the darkness, but rather embracing the darkness. An image of horror, the monster he has become.

The idea of making sense out of his world again is spoken aloud by Batman himself when he has Superman all but beaten during the big fight later on:

“I bet your parents taught you that you mean something, that you're here for a reason. My parents taught me a different lesson; dying in the gutter for no reason at all. They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to.”

“Criminals are like weeds, Alfred; pull one up, another grows in its place. This is about the future of the world. This is my legacy.” 

Now, I understand that this isn’t necessarily the version of Batman that everyone wants to see. The Millerbat has taken precedence in popular culture in the last few decades over many other, more nuanced portrayals, but the movie has already demonstrated to us from the very first scene, that this Batman has fallen. That he isn’t what he used to be. All through the film we see things, like the Robin suit with the Joker graffiti, or hear references to good guys being gone, or not staying good, etc. As the opening line, “there was a time above,” these other moments tell us that he hasn’t always been this way. Bruce is looking for a way back up, looking for redemption. He thinks he has to kill Superman in order to do it. When you seek redemptive power in killing, that’s called revenge, and the phrase “redemptive power in killing” makes it pretty clear how misguided that is.

Meanwhile, at Den of Geek, Crow goes on to say:

“However, like everything else wrong with this film, the intriguing idea is left unresolved in a movie that is too busy juggling its commercial duties.”

Left unresolved? Batman spends most of the film gearing up to take Superman down, and as detailed above it’s shown repeatedly that Batman has indeed lost his way, so that’s one way we know that we’re meant to understand he’s in the wrong. Another way being that Superman is Superman, whom we’ve met previously in Man of Steel, and know to be a good guy. Zack Snyder, who seems not to be a good interview at all, did at least pay this some service by telling Stefan Pape of HeyUGuys that the story deals with “the difference between revenge and justice,” which is significant, albeit not specific.

Some may feel that the film is taking too long to get anywhere with this revenge business, but it’s structured as a revenge tragedy, like Hamlet, where there’s a lot of planning and second-guessing to get to the climax. Chris Terrio specifically referenced this when he told Empire Magazine:

"For Batman V Superman I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies…”

“The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury. The term, revenge tragedy, was first introduced in 1900 by A.H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras.” 

That’s exactly what Batman is doing. He’s seeking revenge for, a.) the actual injury of losing so many of his employees in the Black Zero Event, including the little girl’s mother, and b.) the imagined injury, breaking Batman’s purpose of making sense out of Bruce’s world, turning him back into a helpless child in a dark alley. Later on in this piece, I will discuss in more detail the structure of revenge tragedies, and how that relates to this film.

And of course Batman nearly does kill Superman, culminating in the infamous “Martha” scene. I’m going to bring Crow’s comments about this scene in now, instead of later, because it makes sense to me to do it here while we’re talking about Batman’s arc. David Crow:

“Apparently, shocked that Superman’s seeming last words were the same as his father’s—as the Wayne parents’ murder (reenacted for the 900th time in BvS) culminated in Thomas whispering “Martha” before his death—Batman is shaken out of his desire to kill his foe. “Why do you say that name?!” he repeatedly demands.   “This moment, in which Batman pivots from desiring Superman’s head on a plate to wishing to team up with him because of a potentially supernatural intervention by providence, is as ludicrous now as when M. Night Shyamalan used the exact same ending in Signs with the magical meaning for “swing away, Merrill” reinstating religious faith into Mel Gibson’s lapsed minister.” 

Here’s the stuff Crow’s not talking about with regard to that scene, which I have to assume means he didn’t get it. First of all, during this fight Batman has repeatedly treated Superman as something other than a person. As with the line, “you’re not brave. Men are brave.” Also, what is the last line Batman speaks before Superman says Martha? “You were never a god. You were never even a man!”

Now, taking the rest of what I’ve just laid out, about Batman in this movie, and his journey toward redemption, consider Superman’s exact line. “You’re letting them kill Martha.”

So we see the dream again, about the murders, from the Beautiful Lie sequence. And in context in the opening, it was a dream, not just the event itself. What was the dream about? His loss of innocence, and his fall from grace. Why did young Bruce feel powerless in the dream? He saw his parents die, he couldn’t stop it. Why did he get mad at Superman during the Black Zero Event? The little girl’s mom died, he blames Superman, and he probably blames himself because he couldn’t stop it. Why is he trying to kill Superman now? To reclaim control, by removing that which offends him; to undo the failure, the fall from grace.

“You’re letting them kill Martha.” 

And indeed he is. Not just Martha Kent, for if Batman kills Superman, he won’t have saved himself, he won’t have undone the fall, he won’t have avenged his mother. He will have completely undone everything he’s supposed to stand for, which already at this point hangs by a thread. It will be a defeat, not a victory.

Hearing the name of his mother, after the dreams he’s been having about her death, and the powerlessness he felt… it jars him. It’s not just that their moms are both named Martha, or that his dad’s last word was “Martha.” It’s at least three other things as well. First, he sees Superman as a man now, to know that he has a human mom and not just a Kryptonian one. Secondly, it’s the fact that Superman was begging for his mother’s life, not his own. That’s something Batman understands. Lastly, and probably most importantly, it also means that Batman has a chance to do what young Bruce couldn’t do in Crime Alley. He can save Martha. It’s the completion of the hero. THIS will carry him back into the light. He abandons revenge in favor of saving an innocent. That’s why the best Batman action scene is the rescue. Like Boromir at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, he’s fighting to reclaim his soul. Hence the layers of meaning in his line to Superman, and Terrio’s exact choice of phrasing:

“I’ll make you a promise. Martha won’t die tonight.” 

“Men are still good. We fight. We kill. We betray one another. But we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.”

“Twenty years in Gotham, we’ve seen what promises are worth, Alfred. How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?” 

Bruce’s point of view has just been demonstrated to have changed. He has risen above. Then in that final scene, Batman visits Lex Luthor in prison. He’s got his bat-brand ready to go, but instead of branding Lex, he punches the wall. He didn’t brand him. He’s changed. He’s redeemed himself. He’s finally undone the fall.

Batman has a clear character arc, which has just been laid out. Setups and payoffs.

Back to David Crow:

“A few scenes later, Henry Cavill’s Superman is given a proper introduction when he straight up murders a terrorist threatening the life of Lois Lane in the deserts of Africa, but it has no more artistic value than when he later fails to stop Lex Luthor from blowing up Capitol Hill. These acts of terror do not inform the film’s story (or lack thereof) but merely serve as an excuse to have Superman again refuse to smile for a whole movie while he broods in listless, existential exile.”

“Similarly, whereas the ideological war between Batman and the Joker could be one of words in The Dark Knight, Snyder and Affleck’s Batman flies through the film like a computer-generated wrecking ball, murdering seemingly dozens of enemy combatants with machine guns mounted on his Batmobile and Batwing. Any sort of philosophical distinction between Batman and Superman in this form is nearly impossible to articulate since their methods are identical. Jesse Eisenberg espouses, they are “day vs. night,” but they both soar through dark clouds and slaughter their enemies without feeling, compunction, or any sense of awareness; Superman can just get to his meat sack target faster when he isn’t sulking.”

“I didn’t kill those people if that’s what they think!” 

Not, “I didn’t kill those people, well, except for that one guy…it looked like I’d been Jell-O wrestling, hee hee hee.” Even if he did kill that one man; the guy was holding Lois as a human shield and threatening to kill her. Whatever happened to him, he deserved. There’s still a big difference between taking one terrorist leader through a wall in a life-or-death situation, and branding guys so they can get shanked in prison. A glaringly huge difference. A stark difference between taking an armed hostage-taker though a wall and blazing a trail of destruction across the waterfront in Gotham. It shows that Clark values innocent life over bad guys if it comes to having to choose. One can make the case that Superman should be above that, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but the statement in question is that there’s no difference between Superman and Batman’s methods, and that is simply untrue.

If you are opposed to any form of killing under any circumstances, I suppose this would be a distinction without a difference, but the fact is that the law of this country, and most if not all other countries, DOES distinguish between different forms of killing and different circumstances. Self-defense, for instance, is an excusable circumstance for killing. Police officers are allowed to kill people who are threatening the life of citizens, the officers themselves, or other officers. Even when someone is convicted of killing, there’s a distinction between murder and manslaughter, and several levels for each, with different sentences attached. In other words, in the real world, killing a guy who has a gun to the head of a reporter is generally not frowned upon by society, while killing people who are not an immediate threat, is certainly wrong.

As for the claim that the incident in the desert and the Capitol bombing don’t serve the story, well, they do, for a couple of reasons. Getting Superman to the desert was orchestrated by Lex in order to be able to blame him for the deaths of all those people (Lex’s private security guys, led by KGBeast, did the actual killings). We soon see why Lex would want this, as he tries to convince Senator Finch to give him an import license for the kryptonite his people got out of the Indian Ocean. If the government believes Superman is dangerous, they’ll want Lex’s deterrent. This will give Lex more success, and more power, as well as giving him the means to destroy Superman. As we will see later, Lex has reasons for wanting Superman gone.

Finch, however, denies the import license, telling Lex:

“Take a bucket of piss and call it Granny’s peach tea. Take a weapon of assassination and call it deterrence. You won’t fool a fly or me. I’m not gonna drink it.” 

So Lex kills her. He does it via Scoot McNairy, which has a few benefits for him. The first is to make sure he isn’t directly implicated; but it also winds up Bruce Wayne, and makes Superman look bad publicly. People would blame Superman either for the explosion, or for not saving anybody. Either would have the effect of helping to turn public opinion against Superman so that Lex can work up his “deterrent” without opposition. At any rate, both moments clearly serve the plot, as I have just described.

While we’re on the subject, let’s talk Lex’s motivations. Why would Lex want Superman gone? The answer to that is stated by Lex on the helipad talking to Superman:

“The problem of you on top of everything else. You above all. Ah — 'cause that's what God is. Horus. Apollo. Jehovah. Kal-El... Clark. Joseph.  Kent.  See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Joe. Because God is tribal. God takes sides. No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy's fists and abominations! I figured it out way back: if God is all-powerful, he cannot be all good. And if he's all good, then he cannot be all-powerful. And neither can you be. They need to see the fraud you are. With their eyes. The blood on your hands.”

This shows that Lex not only has daddy issues, but that he has transferred them onto God, and has further transferred his God issues, onto Superman. Incidentally in this particular instance it doesn’t matter if the viewer wants to see Superman as a God / Jesus-figure, or not; it only matters that Lex sees him that way, and that this is the source of his hatred for Superman.

This fixation on power that overshadows his own genius is also spoken to when Lex says, during the library benefit:

“Books are knowledge and knowledge is power, and I am... no. Um, no. What am I? What was I saying? The bittersweet pain among men is having knowledge with no power because... because that is *paradoxical* and, um... thank you for coming.” 

On one level this may refer to his need to get his hands on the Indian kryptonite, because without it he has the knowledge and not the power. But on another level it speaks to Lex on the whole. He has always been a genius, but his dad had violent, abusive power over him; he was a victim, helpless, so he distrusts power. At the Capitol he tells Senator Finch that power can’t be innocent. He is repeatedly shown to have a pathological need to be in control, again probably due to what his father did to him as a child. It is common knowledge that abuse is something that is passed on (you can read all about that at http://www.crisiscenter.org/pdfs/ge… ).

Jesse Eisenberg sums up the character’s core fairly succinctly in discussing his performance with The Daily Beast:

“Even playing a villain in a superhero movie I’m trying to use my own feelings of powerlessness, of injustice, righteousness, dogmatism—all these feelings I have, I impose them on this character who obviously looks very different and behaves very different but is in some way connected to my personal experience.”

Incidentally this is also why the bit with the Jolly Rancher. Lex was purposefully disrespecting someone he needed something from. It’s a way of dominating the guy, of showing him who the “real” boss is. An old rule in screenwriting is that you show who has power by having people to come to see the person in power, rather than the person in power going to see them. That’s why people come into Don Corleone’s office in “The Godfather,” rather than him coming to see them. It’s also why, when the film takes Vito out of his house, it’s so he can get shot. Likewise here, people are constantly coming to see Lex, either at his home or his office. The one time he comes to see Senator Finch, he never formally enters her domain, both a sign that he will not concede power to her and, of course, because he’s about to have her blown up. Lex leaves his own turf a second time, when he goes into the crashed Kryptonian ship. Presumably this is because he expects to find knowledge there that he can use. We later learn (given his talk about Darkseid and finally the released deleted scene) he also finds that even if he causes Superman to be destroyed, there is someone terrifyingly powerful who is on his way.

What else does Lex do in the Kryptonian ship? Creates Doomsday. I’m going to transplant one of Crow’s points again, so that I can handle all of the Lex stuff together.

“Like all the other characters without capes in BvS, Wonder Woman and Doomsday are so busily shoehorned into the movie that Spider-Man 3 is a naturalist indie drama by comparison.”

It’s a funny turn of phrase, but here’s the thing about Doomsday: Yes, his appearance seems rather sudden, which I admit I am hoping is at least partially an artifact of the half-hour cut from the film. Doomsday himself, though, fits the themes of Lex’s part of the story. Remember Lex’s pile of issues, daddy issues to God issues, God issues to Superman. Lex creating Doomsday looks like a ritual, doesn’t it? He’s got a sacrifice, he uses blood. And he says the line, “if man won’t kill God, the devil will do it.” We can therefore infer that Luthor has, symbolically, sold his soul. He’s made a metaphorical deal with the devil. And what happens when you make a deal with the devil? You lose.

The thing we tend to forget in this conversation is that Lex was interested in the other “meta-humans” as well. He asked specifically for access to the crashed ship. Assuming, as is logical, that he had no idea at that point about Doomsday, or Darkseid, why did Lex want access to the ship? My guess is that he was hoping he would find some knowledge or technology that he could exploit, perhaps in his further war on the meta-humans. What he found instead was the knowledge that there is power out there in the universe that is beyond comprehension, and given what we know of his issues, it’s not hard to imagine that such a realization would break him.

But to Crow’s point, yes, for sure we don’t know why Lex would want to create Doomsday. Doomsday in the comics has his origins on Krypton, and what little explanation there is in the movie pays tribute to that (The Ultimate, anyone?). Which indicates clearly that this Doomsday isn’t the first of his kind. Doomsday also has a connection to Darkseid in the comics, having wrought havoc on Apokolips for a time. In one of the animated films, Darkseid deploys an army of Doomsday clones that Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman end up fighting. In more recent comics, the Kryptonians are said to have fought a war against Doomsday. In some stories even Lex has been connected to Doomsday, as when he brought him back to life in the comics using Superman’s DNA. In other words, Doomsday’s appearance in this film is sudden, but the way he is used isn’t really as off-model as it may seem. Which really only begs the question why did Lex do this?

Was Doomsday in this film a ploy to bring the other meta-humans out to play? Was it something Lex did to set the stage for Darkseid’s arrival? Or was he just a scorched-earth policy? Without knowing what happened on that ship, we don’t really know the answer. I do hope that either the extended cut, or the Justice League movies, get into this more. For the purposes of this film, though, it doesn’t really matter if Luthor has no plan to stop Doomsday once Superman is dead. Luthor made a deal with the devil. He finally gave away his power, out of spite for God (and Superman the god-figure). A desperate move, and a dangerous one. Like the ancient proverb, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The idea that it’s all gotten away from Lex is made clear enough in the final confrontation between him and Batman, where Batman shows that he is once again in control of himself, while Lex is in no way in control at all. He is both a prisoner, and a crazy person, ranting about the coming of Darkseid. He has succeeded only in breaking himself.

Crow again, on Batman and Superman’s methods:

“They are essentially fascists inflicting their viewpoint onto the world. But any such pseudo-intellectual underpinnings are as buried in sound and fury as Batman’s supposed arc about trusting Chris O’Donnell to drive his car in Batman & Robin. It’s just rhetorical lip-service for a half-baked plot that strings together a series of mindless set-pieces, whether they be of dancing gorillas or Batman sounding like an ape as he wails on Superman’s face.”

This is the full definition of Fascism, from Merriam-Webster:

1. often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>

In other words, David Crow has no idea what a fascist is, and that entire paragraph is nonsense. Evidently he thinks that vigilantism equals fascism, when it’s really closer to the opposite extreme. Fascism is absolute rule of government, all power taken away from the people, and no opposition allowed. Vigilantism is almost anarchical, it’s a rejection of the justice of the State, the notion that the government won’t see justice done so private individuals will, without the government’s consent or support. In the real world we tend to frown on vigilantism because it is dangerous to let people do whatever they want to.

On paper, though, superheroes are almost exclusively vigilantes, so we know that in certain contexts, we would allow it… as when a private citizen sees a crime happening and intervenes on behalf of the victim, something that The Dark Knight talked about a little. That film also talked about the fact that the Balebat’s motivations couldn’t be personal, that he had to rise above his own desires and be truly altruistic in order to be more than a vigilante. It’s a questionable distinction, though, and BvS doesn’t put as fine a point upon it. In this film, Bruce reminds Alfred that they have always been criminals, as they are operating outside the law. Clark says as much about him on a few occasions, including at Lex’s fundraiser. Bruce immediately rebuts that point by saying the same is true of Superman, which is also strictly true.

“In the first climax of Batman v Superman—a film so bloated that it needs two finales to justify its destruction porn—Batman and Superman finally commence the war promised in the title. Granted, it makes both of them look like rubes since they were easily manipulated by an outside force. (Seriously, why does Batman never investigate who sent him those letters, and why does Superman not use his super-hearing to find his kidnapped mother, instead of doing the bidding of Lex Luthor?) But when the eponymous donnybrook is finally commenced, Batman becomes the more damnable monster since he won’t stop to listen to Superman or have a conversation about someone being kidnapped. He instead clobbers the hell out of the other guy in a cape.”

It’s only two climaxes if you try to force this film to fit into a three-act dramatic structure, but that isn’t its intent. As I mentioned earlier, Chris Terrio specifically referenced the revenge tragedy, which in Elizabethan terms is generally a five-act play. It doesn’t make sense to fault the film for not having a three-act structure, as there is more than one dramatic structure that a story can have. It’s basically a straw man argument since you first have to take it as a given that all films are meant to have a three-act structure before you can bitch that this one doesn’t. Again, I’ll get into the five-act structure towards the end of this piece.

Moving on, why would Batman investigate who sent the letters to him? They’re written on the checks he sent to Wallace Keefe, why wouldn’t he assume it was Keefe who sent them back? And then Keefe blows himself up pretty much immediately after that, which would seem a clear indicator that there’s nothing left to investigate. Keefe may have willingly gone to his death, but whether he did or not, he is Lex’s patsy. Lex is responsible but nobody will connect him to it since Keefe’s checks came to Bruce with insane scrawling on them, and Keefe smuggled an explosive into the hearing and blew everybody up. It’s a neat little package. What impetus would there be for Batman to investigate any further? When one investigates, it’s typically because one has reason to suspect that there’s anything to discover.

Further, as evidenced by the film, and by what I described in the Batman section of this writing…Batman was probably going to end up fighting Superman no matter what. That was written all over his face when he watched Clark and Zod streaming across the sky at the beginning. Crow even acknowledged that, remember? All Lex did was dictate the timetable.

Regarding Superman, I’ll agree that he could probably have found another solution other than fighting Batman, but what was it Lex said?

“If you kill me, Martha dies. And if you fly away — Martha also dies. But if you kill the Bat... Martha lives.”

I suppose there’s room there for interpretation, but I think “if you fly away” means basically what it sounds like, if Clark doesn’t go to fight Batman, if they think he’s looking for her…they’ll kill her. I admit it’s thin; we think of Superman as being able to do anything. We’ve explored Bruce, we’ve explored Lex; let’s look at Superman’s arc in the film.

In the beginning, Superman acts unilaterally, saving Lois, and walking into a frameup. Senator Finch and her committee are questioning if he did the right thing. This reminds me of Batman in “Batman Begins” saving Rachel Dawes when, as Michael Caine’s Alfred reminded him, “what you’re doing has to be beyond that.” Like Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy, Superman wants to inspire people to his dramatic example. He has to be more than the guy who saves his girlfriend.

That would be what Lois meant by, “I don’t know if it’s possible for you to love me, and be you.” We then see Clark starting his crusade to stop the Batman’s “one man reign of terror.” When he shows up to congress to face the accusations against him and speak up for himself, Wallace Keefe’s chair blows up and everybody dies in an instant, leaving Clark suddenly surrounded by death and destruction. Failure. He’s been purely reactive, attentive to the person he loves, and has failed to live up to the symbol he’s supposed to be. He’s caught between his nature as a man with desires and dreams, and his responsibility as a man who can be so much more, a hero, a savior, the embodiment of hope.

He speaks at various times to his mother, Martha, and, by way of a memory, to his father Jonathan as well. His mom tells him:

“Be their hero, Clark. Be their angel, be their monument, be whatever they need you to be. Or be none of it. You don’t owe this world a thing. You never did.” 

A loving mother telling her son that he’s got the freedom to choose his destiny – incidentally the freedom that Lara and Jor-El always wanted him to have. For Jonathan’s part:

“I remember one season the water came bad. I couldn't have been twelve. Dad had out the shovels and we went at it all night. We worked 'til I think I fainted, but we managed to stop the water. We saved the farm. Your grandma baked me a cake, said I was a hero. Later that day we found out we blocked the water alright - we sent it upstream. The whole Lang farm washed away. While I ate my hero cake, their horses were drowning. I used to hear them wailing in my sleep.”
“Did the nightmares ever stop?”
 
“Yeah. When I met your mother. She gave me faith that there's good in this world. She was my world.” 

That seems to amount to the idea that doing good is always an uphill battle; that bad things will always happen somewhere. That you do the good you can, because there is good in the world, and people need to see it. And therefore you have to find the thing that gives you a reason to keep going, and hold on to it. In other words, Clark shouldn’t have to choose between the two sides of his nature. He is who he is. If Lois shows him the good in the world, if she inspires him, and if he inspires others, then she’s worth protecting. Maybe there is no distinction at all.

Then Lex calls him by throwing Lois off the roof and when Clark confronts him, his willingness to believe that there is good out there is immediately shaken by Luthor having taken Martha. He hits Superman with the puzzle of having to choose between being all-powerful and being all-good.

Clark tells Lois:

“I have to go to Gotham to convince him to help me. Or he has to die. No one stays good in this world.” 

This is another thing I hope the extended cut clarifies for us all just a little, but the thing I take away from this is that Superman is still struggling to reconcile the two sides of his nature. If he tries to save his mom and she dies, Luthor wins. If he has to kill Batman to save his mom, Luthor wins. But if he can get Batman to help him…if he can find one single ally in this world who can stand beside him…then he doesn’t have to BE all-powerful. He can settle for all-good. That’s how you break the trap. So despite being shaken, Superman acts in good faith: he tries to talk to Batman instead of pummeling him, believing that he’s more than just a monster.

“Bruce, you have to listen to me. I was wrong. It’s Lex, he wants to – “

But Bruce only wants to fight. Crow goes on a rant at this point, one that is as unfocused and muddy as he accuses Snyder’s film of being.

“With all the self-righteous nastiness of a 2016 presidential frontrunner, Batman rants, “My parents taught me a different lesson dying in the gutter. This world doesn’t make sense unless you force it to!” All but exclaiming he thinks we need to build a wall, Batman in essence announces that “might makes right,” and his strongman authority allows him the ability to judge other men (and superheroes) worthy of being executed with extreme prejudice.”

It seems to me that Crow is ranting about some other stuff that pisses him off, and not the movie at all. Crow is imputing his own baggage into the film. It seems like he continues to miss the fact that Batman is intended to be the bad guy here, that he has “fallen,” and is on a misguided quest for vengeance.

At last, though, Superman does break through. Because he chose to believe that there’s good in people, even somebody as messed up as Batman was at that point. They don’t instantly become best friends as some suggest, but they understand each other at last, and that’s the important thing. Clark continues with his “faith that there’s good in the world” trajectory and decides to trust Batman with his mother’s life. That’s a big move, but Superman knows it’s the only choice he’s got, he’s got to get to the scout ship.­­ Now he doesn’t have to be all-powerful. And yes I know Bruce tells Martha, “I’m a friend of your son’s.” That’s the best way to calm her, isn’t it? He didn’t say they were brothers or besties or anything. They’re on the same side now. Allies. Another word for that is “friends.”

A little later, Superman leaves the Doomsday fight to save Lois’s life yet again, and here he recovers Batman’s spear. Before he flies off, kryptonite spear in hand, to end Doomsday’s rampage, Superman tells Lois:

“This is my world. You are my world.” 

This is obviously a callback to his conversation with Jonathan on the mountain, but what does that mean? Throughout the film, he’s been forced to choose between saving one person, and saving the world. One could argue that the biggest failure in the Capitol bombing is that he didn’t do either one. That condundrum, in fact, mirrors his choice at the end of “Man of Steel,” killing Zod to save the world, accepting a partial defeat for the sake of the greater victory. A world without Lois isn’t worth fighting for. A world with her in it, is worth dying for. His faith in goodness is fully restored. There is good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for, even if there are consequences. Even if that consequence is his own death. He doesn’t have to be all-powerful to be a symbol. He just has to be all good. In effect, where Lex gave up his power to bring destruction, Superman gives up his power, so to speak, to end that destruction.

The rant continues:

“Personally, I suspect that Snyder is trying to achieve the accolades he saw Christopher Nolan receive for making his superhero an allegory about the use of American power in the 21st century by now retreading in 2016 the points that Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel made also about superheroes 30 years ago. However, in The Dark Knight films, Batman’s philosophy is constantly challenged by the likes of both villains and his allies, and he is perpetually grappling with his own ethical self-doubts. Snyder, on the other hand, does not seem to understand that Watchmen is diametrically opposed to such positive nuance about centralized authority since that book views superheroes (and American myths about rugged individualism in general) to be naïve, dangerous, and potentially dictatorial.”

Superman’s arc in this film mirrors several aspects of Batman’s from The Dark Knight, suggesting that one man can indeed have too much power, but what do you do when he’s literally born with that power and can’t turn it off? What I don’t understand is how Crow keeps getting on the subject of Watchmen. This film has nothing to do with that one. The argument seems to say, “this film makes the same points as Watchmen, but also doesn’t make those points at all.”

I can’t tell you what Crow’s point is, but I would remind him that Zack Snyder did not write this movie. Chris Terrio did. I also would say that this isn’t another adaptation of Watchmen or a remake of The Dark Knight, and I see no reason to assume it wanted to be. I think it’s clear by now that this film has its own point of view. In Chris Terrio’s own words this was a revenge tragedy. He also referenced “ideas about American power,” so, okay, Crow uses that exact phrase. Let’s ask ourselves, then, what does this film say about power?

It says that people like Lex who seek power are often driven by dark, personal purposes and not altruistic ones. It says that fear is a terrible reason to act out, because it is irrational and destructive, as is the case with Batman. It contrasts all of that with a Superman who has all sorts of power and hesitates to use it because he worries that it may do more harm than good. An insanely powerful being who wants to inspire hope, not fear, surrounded by power-hungry players who make him out a bogeyman to justify their bad behavior. While I wouldn’t call that a particularly deep line of thinking on Terrio’s part, I also wouldn’t call it wrong as it relates to the real world.

It looks to me like Superman is the one representing the purest idea of American power. He’s an idea, perhaps an ideal; he wants to make the world better, he wants to help people. But people worry that when he acts, he’s overstepping his authority. When you take sides, you make enemies as well as friends. Look at the US’s history in foreign relations. How many times in the 20th century have we gotten into fights that didn’t really involve us? Korea? Vietnam? Those were driven by fear – the fear of the spread of communism. People used to worry about stuff like that. The war in Iraq? The fear of terrorist attacks, the fear of a repeat of September 11th. Acting out of fear is tempting, because fear is powerful. Politicians control us through fear all the time, whether it’s used as an excuse to build a stupid wall along a border, or to control what kind of lightbulbs you use. We know that fear should never dictate our lifestyle in any way, and it should never be used as an excuse to treat a single human being like trash.

Lex’s distrust for power drove him, essentially, to destruction. Bruce let his fear and anger be an excuse for him to dehumanize Superman, and only when Superman became human in his eyes did he feel compassion for the Man of Steel. Clark just wants to apply his power in a meaningful and inspirational way. If people, such as Lex, and Bruce, are afraid of him, and if that fear makes them do awful things (and boy did it ever) then how is he a force for good? That’s part of the puzzle. How do you inspire hope and not fear when you can melt the world by looking at it a little too intently? And though you care deeply about someone, can you be a force for good if you’re playing favorites? Or is that just being “tribal,” as Lex would say?

“All of the heroes for next year’s Justice League movie are also bizarrely introduced from security videos kept by Lex Luthor, which are no more satisfying or less hilarious than when Clooney and O’Donnell watched Arnold Schwarzenegger falling into an “icy” swimming pool in Batman & Robin’s CCTV origin for its main villain.”   

This was actually my main complaint about the film after my first viewing. The security videos of Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg, and Wonder Woman did feel awkward to me, but I think the bigger sin isn’t the clips themselves, but the baffling placement of them in the edit. I think if they were placed somewhere where they didn’t interrupt the run-up to the big fight, it would have made more sense. I am not sure, though, what the right place would be. I am only sure that the place where they are in the film, isn’t it.

The Knightmare sequence was also weird. Snyder evidently talked in an interview about having created that himself, it wasn’t part of Terrio’s script, and you can feel that because it’s not like the other dream sequences, and doesn’t follow their vibe. It breaks the pattern of the other dreams. Although, yes, the first was a vision of the past, the second a vision of the present, and the third, maybe a vision of the future. It also was about him trying to steal Lex’s kryptonite and getting killed by an evil Superman, so it’s a parallel to what he was working on. I would also note that it is certainly a look at what could happen if Superman chose being all-powerful, over being all-good. Perhaps that’s the point.

The problem with this sequence is that it’s unclear how Bruce could dream about Darkseid, whom he does not know exists, or if it really is at dream at all; and then the Flash’s appearance on top of that, creates a lot of confusion. That makes it seem like it should be a vision, but Bruce is shown waking up. Twice. Was it a dream or a vision? Or was one a dream and the other a vision? Will we ever find out? Do we really want to? Snyder implied during that junket interview with Stefan Pape of HeyUGuys, that we will find out. Regardless, to me this is the film’s most serious misstep, and the only one that I think does real harm to the story, especially because for anyone who hasn’t read a bunch of comics, it’s even more confusing than it is for us, and it’s confusing enough already.

I have to skip Crow’s next two paragraphs, as they are again full of nothing but blustering rhetoric that makes no particular meaningful observations except that angry man is angry and not as smart as he thinks he is.

“Just as Batman & Robin was the nadir of everything wrong with superhero movies of its era, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a Doomsday-shaped monster that represents all the worst tendencies of modern superhero movies. It has the “darkness” and violence of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films with none of their cleverness, and it is a hapless, formless, and hideous mess that gropes after the shared universe formula of Marvel Studios—but with the opposite effect since it makes us not desire to see more of these characters.”

I should think that everything I’ve just written above shows that the film is not so devoid of cleverness, and that with the exceptions of the ill-conceived Knight­mare sequence, and the strange Justice League setup scenes, it’s certainly not hapless. There are a few definite weak points, most of which could prove to be a result of the studio-mandated runtime than either the script or the material that was shot. Only time will answer that.

To address the “formless” accusations, I’m going to have to finally get into the five act structure. Revenge tragedies, as a form, were invented by the ancient Greeks, but were adapted into new forms over time, most famously in the Elizabethan era, for example many of the plays of William Shakespeare. Elizabethan plays take place across five acts, which seems to be the structure Terrio went for. The five-act structure, as laid out by Gustav Freytag in his book “Technique of the Drama,” published in 1895, is as follows:

ACT I: EXPOSITION ACT II: RISING ACTION ACT III: CLIMAX ACT IV: FALLING ACTION ACT V: DENOUEMENT (In tragedies the denouement is always a catastrophe)

A friend of mine linked me to a great write-up of this movie with regard to its five-act Shakespearean-style structure, and that author re-stated these into Shakesperean terms as follows:

ACT I: Exposition – the Call for Vengeance ACT II: Anticipation – Detailed Planning of RevengeACT III: Confrontation Between Hero and Intended Victim ACT IV: Delay Because Hero Decides to Perform the Killing ACT V: Completion of the Hero

In either case, the breakdown is clear. From the Beautiful Lie, through the Black Zero event, through Lois in Nairomi and the hearings about the Nairomi incident, are all part of act one. This is the setup for the conflict.

Act two is where Bruce is looking for the White Portuguese, trying to get his hands on the Kryptonite, while Lex is trying to get it into the country himself and Clark decides to investigate Batman. The fundraiser. Everyone is at odds.

Act three is the kryptonite chase and the confrontation between Batman and Superman, Bruce getting the kryptonite after all.

Act four has the Capitol bombing, the letters, the training, the kidnap, the helipad and the fight, culminating in the infamous Martha scene.

Act Five, then – the catastrophe – would be the Doomsday fight and the death of Superman, his funeral, etc.

In any case, the film has a very specific structure and Chris Terrio did exactly what he said he was doing, he wrote a revenge tragedy. Formless, then, it is not. For a whole metric ton more information on Revenge Tragedies, and how they are structured, including the different character archetypes used and how this film definitely uses them, you can check out the extremely detailed writeup at: http://pulpklatura.tumblr.com/post/…

That author explained it with far more aplomb than I could hope to here. And now to Crow, one last time:

“It is a movie that thinks having Batman battling a giant CGI bat in his dreams is artful, and seeing him later throw a grenade at an unconscious man is heroic.” 

Neither of those things happened in this movie. He did not battle the giant bat, and he did not throw that grenade. That kind of drastic misunderstanding or misrepresentation of events, which runs rampant through the article, is a perfect indicator that David Crow did not, and does not, understand Batman v Superman, or is misrepresenting it for some reason. In either case, if his opinion on the film is based on that sort of disingenuous thought, then that opinion has no evaluative usefulness.

All of this may not change anyone’s mind, but I hope some of you at least now understand why I and so many others do like the film, having read here a detailed account of what we see in it.

I loved Man of Steel. I’m going to get out of the way up front. It wasn’t a perfect movie, but I thought it was very well done and I had a great time with it. To be fair I am not a Superman fanboy. I like Supes, I know his basic mythology, and the little kid inside of me gets kind of excited anytime I see him flying around doing super-stuff. But I enjoy stories that ask some harder questions, or that deal with the idea that part of what heroes do is make difficult choices. Man of Steel works for me precisely because it forces Superman to make difficult choices, where there is no particularly satisfying answer.

In a world where people seem to have totally unrealistic expectations of what other people, especially the government, can or ought to do for them, I have less use for escapism than I did even a decade ago. I like a movie that has the guts to say, “Superman can fly in space but do you know what he can’t do? He can’t use his powers against an equally powerful foe without incurring collateral damage.” Because if Superman were real, that would absolutely be the case. Paramedics, firefighters and police officers would love to save everybody, to not have to make difficult choices, but they all make difficult choices every single day. You can’t do all of the good, you can only do the most good that you possibly can. If a man were super-powered, he could save everybody out of a burning building, but if he had to fight a super-powered foe, the playing field is leveled. And so is everything else, because the collateral goes up exponentially the more power is in play.

So when I heard Zack Snyder was making a sequel to Man of Steel, and that it would have Batman in it, I was at first apprehensive that they were going too far too fast, and then I was curious, and finally pretty excited. The trailers got me pumped. Looked like a comic book come to life, in the way that the Marvel movies do.

Having seen it, I can only describe myself as conflicted. I enjoyed whole swaths of it. I think Ben Affleck was fantastic. Gal Gadot did very well with the small amount of material she had, and Henry Cavill remains a great Superman. Laurence Fishburne is fantastic in his limited role as Perry White. Jesse Eisenberg, Holly Hunter, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, everybody does solid work in this. The performances were maybe my most favorite aspect of the movie.

The issues I have are, basically, three. The first is that the pacing is kind of strange. The middle of the film starts to drag as we wind up stuck in the middle of sort of a thriller that has pushed our caped heroes more or less to the sidelines. I enjoyed what the film was doing, but I missed having some action beats in the middle that would drive the pace a bit more.

The second was that the way Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg are introduced feels completely gratuitous. It doesn’t service the film at all, or the pacing of it, it only serves to make sure you are aware that the earlier mention of “metahumans” is relevant to the big picture moving forward, and it has no real place in this film, certainly not at the moment where it is inserted.

The third is more difficult to pin down. The film has a strong story, as far as what happens and the reasoning behind it, but because we haven’t any prior history with this version of Lex Luthor, and only one film’s worth of history with the Cavill of Steel, there’s a sense that the legwork they’re doing to establish the DCEU, is actually taking away from this film.

By way of example, the two Avengers films don’t leave a lot of room for character development on the part of anybody but Banner, however most of the other heroes have solo films and those films focus very strongly on them, even when other MCU characters show up to party, so the Avengers movies can play fast and loose with things like character arcs because each Avengers picture is the climax to that particular MCU Phase.

Batman v Superman, however, hasn’t earned that luxury. And as great as Batfleck is, and as much as I am a Batman fanboy in the extreme, I feel as though Superman got boned. Batman not only has the most memorable scenes in the film, but because we have seen so many Batman stories on film, and because the most recent three have done the character such wonderful justice, I think you can get a sense of who Batfleck is and where he is in his career without needing a lot of explanation. My friend Darek’s son, Ean, nailed it on the ride home when he said, simply, “he’s old and he doesn’t care.”

Superman’s story is built on the foundation of Man of Steel, but the guy has very little to say or do for most of the movie. The ending did do a nice job of earning Superman the love and respect of the people of Earth, in a way that the end of Man of Steel didn’t, and I hope Justice League acknowledges that and lets Superman be Superman in earnest.

Zack Snyder has said that there is an R-rated Ultimate Cut of the film coming to Blu-Ray. Whether or not that is a good thing will depend on what the material is that he’ll be adding back in. Because anything that fleshes out Lex Luthor, and the Superman-Lois story, will be most welcome. Almost anything else is likely to do more harm than good. Entire characters (such as the one played by Jena Malone) were cut from the theatrical version, so I’m going to be watching for details about that release with great interest. Henry Cavill is a great Superman and he deserves a Superman film that lets him own the character the way “The Dark Knight” let Christian Bale own Batman.

Would I watch this movie again? Yes. I would, and I will. Do I love it? No. Not in its current form, at least. But Batfleck alone is well worth the price of admission. There is a lot of talk about the brutality of this Batman. As a lifelong fan, I’m here to tell you, it isn’t a problem. First of all, Keaton’s Batman killed people, a lot, and Batfleck is no worse a killer than him. Secondly, Batfleck has a character arc, and it’s the most successful arc of the film, without question. In the hands of the right director it would have been powerful enough to destroy people in their seats, but in Synder’s hands it’s merely a good story passably told. In short, to pick up where Ean left off in his assessment; Batman is old and he doesn’t care; but this is the story of how he learned to care again.

I hope the Ultimate Cut will make me care about the rest of the story as much. For now, I give the film a 7.5 out of 10. It’s got problems, but if you love Batman, you need to see it. It is without question the best live-action representation of that character in his entire 77 year history. The world needs more Batfleck.

[Note: Having now seen the BvS Ultimate Cut, most of my misgivings regarding the film are swept away.  I’d give it a 9/10.]

I admit it, I’m one of the few who likes the Star Wars prequels more than The Force Awakens. To be clear, I firmly recognize that The Force Awakens is a better film in terms of general storytelling, dialogue, pacing, etc. But it just hasn’t ever felt like a Star Wars movie to me. Since December I’ve been struggling to put my finger on just why that is. After a while I started hating it kind of irrationally, mostly as a reaction to all the love it was receiving. Why I reacted so negatively to that, I couldn’t have told you, but it should have been a clue. I recently saw it a second time in the theater, with my Dad, and I found that it was better than I remembered, but even so, the experience didn’t leave me feeling anything in particular when the lights came up.

I have listened to others’ complaints, including Max Landis, whose arguments stoked me up but ultimately weren’t sustainable. I keep trying to explain my feelings regarding the film and keep coming up empty, which is a bitter pill for someone like me considering that I love movies, I love to write, and I love to write about movies. It’s usually not hard for me to sort out my feelings about a given film, and The Force Awakens isn’t particularly complex, so it shouldn’t be hard for me to decide what it is that puts me off about it, but the struggle has been very real. Finally I think I understand. Because if all Star Wars was to me is a fun movie, I’d probably like Episode VII quite a bit. But that’s not how I watch Star Wars, and that’s the root of my reactions not only to TFA, but to the prequels as well. In 1996, I was a student at Longwood College in Farmville, VA. I had grown up with the original Star Wars trilogy, like a lot of people, but after Return of the Jedi, Star Wars kind of went away. I never forgot it but I didn’t really revisit it, either; moving on to other things. Star Wars had become a fond memory. By the time I got to Longwood I hadn’t seen the original trilogy in more than a decade. I didn’t remember them too well but I knew the characters and the basic storyline, and I remembered how it had fired up my imagination as a kid.

“That’s good. You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”

Through various circumstances I rediscovered the trilogy at Longwood, and fell in love with the movies all over again: just in time for the 20th anniversary and the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions. I had been devouring Star Wars video games and novels, collecting the new line of action figures they’d begun issuing in 1995, and generally becoming a full-blown fanboy. My friend Wayne Rankin and I watched the trilogy almost religiously during our time at Longwood. I learned to quote every line.

But it was 1996 that changed it all. I took a class called “World Religions.” Listed as a philosophy class by the college, it was taught by a lady professor who was also an ordained Episcopalian Priest and a one-time Buddhist monk who had studied at a temple in Tibet. While it was just a single course, and while I remain a confirmed United Methodist, I found my thinking and spirituality broadened by this wonderful professor’s class. I read the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, learned about Mohammed, and Buddha, and gained a fresh understanding of my own Christian faith.

I also studied the History of Western Civilization, and Art History, which go nicely hand-in-hand as a study of the western world and the culture that drove it. Through all of these courses, I began to understand Star Wars in a whole new way. I was sitting in Western Civ, listening to the professor lecture about the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire, when I realized that what I was hearing was also the backstory behind the Star Wars trilogy. Not that Emperor Palpatine (a not-so-surprisingly Roman-sounding name) is meant to directly correspond with Julius Caesar, but much of what he is, and much of what he does, comes directly from Caesar. He even gets (metaphorically) backstabbed by his right-hand man. Et tu, Vader?

There’s also the matter of the greatest army in the (known to them) world, and the Caesar having a secretive, elite group of soldiers as his personal bodyguard, known as the Praetorian Guard. So I understood even before George Lucas announced the Prequel Trilogy, that should he ever make them, it would be a literal Fall of Rome story, a sweeping epic about a “perfect” society crumbling with age, facing a grave threat and giving more and more emergency power to one man until he reveals his true nature. Knowing that Palpatine was a Sith Lord and that Vader was his apprentice, formerly a Jedi Knight trained by a young, headstrong Obi-Wan Kenobi (which is all information the Original Trilogy gives us), it wasn’t hard to piece together the basic framework of the story. Specific characters and situations were impossible to guess, but that was the fun of waiting for the movies.

As for the spiritual side, Lucas didn’t go into it in much depth in the original Star Wars. It wasn’t until The Empire Strikes Back where that side of the equation really deepened, and the director of that picture, Irvin Kirshner, was a Buddhist. Yoda, in the original script, was more spritely and serious, a weird little blue elf who was a difficult master and whose mood was somewhat mercurial. I suspect it was Kirshner who directed Frank Oz to take the character in a somewhat different direction, and it’s why Yoda is never again quite the same as he was in Empire. Because Irvin Kirshner’s Yoda is the Dalai Lama. He’s playful and curious, wise beyond words, in love with nature, and gravely serious about the nature of good and evil.

“Yes. A Jedi’s strength flows from the force. But beware the Dark Side. Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.”

And that’s where The Force lives. Christians often see in it a reflection of our faith, and that element is present, but the Force is intentionally something that is pretty relatable to members of any religion. The concept of the Force itself is drawn mostly from Eastern mysticism. The Qi (pronounced Chee) literally means Life Force, and is the major underlying principle in Chinese medicine and martial arts. It is defined as the vital part of any living thing. Many eastern cultures have a version of the idea, from India all the way to Pacific Islanders. Even certain western philosophies have a similar concept. What Lucas did is take that and make it a kind of superpower that is drawn from channeling the energy of all life. Many of the words Yoda speaks to Luke on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back, especially those regarding the nature of good and evil, the surrender of your own will, and the power of faith over doubt, would be recognized by both Buddha and Christ as words of wisdom.

I’ve said it here before, but the original three Star Wars movies were always a conglomeration of genres and archetypes. The Empire is like Rome but is also in some ways like Nazi Germany. The Imperial officers look like Nazis. The word “stormtrooper” refers to a Nazi soldier. The story is part cowboy movie, part Kung Fu movie, part Arthurian legend, part swords-and-sandals epic. Why that works is because they’re all the same on a certain, deeper level. Lucas drew elements from all of them and put them together in an appealing way, and added spaceships and lasers.

Around this time, in college, I began slowly losing interest in the Star Wars books, and pretty soon the games lost their appeal, too. I was getting something out of the movies that just wasn’t present in this other stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I like lightsabers and blasters, and spaceships and wookiees. But none of that means anything. What Star Wars is to me, is thoughtful and compelling because of what’s under the hood. It’s something very, very smart, wrapped up in the trappings of something very, very dumb. That’s why big blockbusters that try to ape Star Wars always fail. They don’t see all the layers, and sure as hell don’t contain all those layers.

So when the prequels arrived, I enjoyed them. The storytelling in Episodes I-III wasn’t particularly good, but the movies did what I wanted them to do. They channeled classic cinema to tell a story about the end of the republic, and the rise to power of evil over good, because good got complacent and went to sleep at the switch. It’s political, the big bad uses economics and diversionary tactics to divide the power players and draw them right into his hands. The story may not be well-executed, but it’s well-considered. So I enjoy the films intellectually. They contain the spirituality, historical references, and layers of symbolism that I expect from Star Wars. I stumbled onto Lucas’s playbook in college and I got his vibe, even when a lot of others didn’t.

Somewhere around Episode II I quit the books altogether. All I wanted was the movies. Nothing else mattered. Then years after Episode III, Lucas sells his company to Disney and gives them outlines for episodes VII-IX. I was curious, hopeful that they’d be good, but Disney threw out Lucas’s outlines and did their own thing, and I can tell, because Lucas’s knowledge of history and his interests in art and world religions are completely absent.

Luke Skywalker, who should be the spiritual heart of the film, is entirely absent until the last moments of the film, and he doesn’t say anything or do anything. Rey is on a spiritual journey but doesn’t know it at all until late in the movie. She has no parents. Her family abandoned her on Jakku and the audience has no idea who raised her, or if she just taught herself everything. Which seems unlikely. I get that her origins are a mystery, but it feels very thin, it’s difficult to decide if this is oversight or intentional.

What spiritual journey Rey has is, like her childhood, apparently, largely unguided. She’s being led toward something, I suppose, by the Force, but the film puts Han Solo in the Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan role, a juxtaposition that is interesting but again leaves Rey without any real guidance on what the Force is or how it works. They add in Lupita Nyongo’s Maz Kanata as a wise and mysterious little figure who may remind you just a tiny bit of Yoda, but she’s little more than a barkeep who may or may not be something more. We don’t know about that, either, and Kanata seems only a little more able than Solo to speak to the true nature of the Force. Whatever Rey learns, she seems to learn instinctively. Which again, is fine except that with nobody to give voice to the lessons she’s learning, it all feels very glib.

Yes, Rey fits into the same basic Campbellian archetype as Luke or Anakin, but apart from her being good at stuff there’s not much there to make me latch onto her as a character. And don’t call me sexist, it has nothing to do with gender or I wouldn’t like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who in the book is much more like Rey than Judy Garland. The thing is, it’s Luke Skywalker who seems modeled very much on Dorothy. Farmer who is raised by his aunt and uncle, horrible thing happens and he flies away. Throw in some Garland Dorothy too because Luke dreams of getting away from the farm.

Luke is basically every kid who ever sat on the porch and looked at the stars and wondered what was out there. He’s every kid who got sick of doing chores and resented the structure of their home life, but was actually enriched by it, even if he, or she, didn’t notice. And it’s telling that Luke, who dreamed of adventure and great deeds, had to surrender his own will to the Force in order to meet his destiny. That is a true spiritual journey. Better still, Anakin’s journey mirrors this because Anakin is called to surrender his will to the Force, and he doesn’t do it. Anakin tries to follow his own will, to control everything in his life, and that leads him to ruin. That, my friends, is also the message of most major religions, and is absolutely the message of Jesus of Nazareth. Heck, Jesus didn’t just advise it, he lived and died by it.

“You can’t stop the change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting.”

And so part of what got me about The Force Awakens is that it undoes Luke’s victory at the end of Return of the Jedi. Not just because the Dark Side is alive and kicking, and the Empire still exists, now as The First Order (shouldn’t they be the second…order…?) but philosophically. Spoilers here, but Luke met his father head-on, willing to let his dad kill him, but knowing in his heart that Anakin wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Han meets Kylo Ren head-on and Ren just kills him. If the message of Return of the Jedi was that selfless love conquers all, the message of The Force Awakens seems to be, “LOL NOPE,” and that is where I check out, honestly. Not because I think it was dramatically wrong to kill Han Solo but because it felt meaningless. Some have tried to explain to me that he was, I dunno, helping Kylo do what he thought he had to do, but that’s just wrong, because Kylo is following the dark path, and no parent, no matter how loving, ought to be supporting that. You don’t buy your kid meth just because they ask, and you don’t help them kill you or anyone else. Star Wars is about morality as viewed through the lens of faith, it just wears the clothing of a science fiction adventure story.

The good news is that this trilogy can get on track, depending on how they handle the next episode. After all, as I just got through saying, even the original trilogy waited until the second film to get into specifics about The Force. That could happen here as well. The Force Awakens just isn’t a setup that interests me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie. It’s just not Star Wars. It’s like the books that I quit reading a decade and a half ago. It looks a lot like Star Wars. Musically it sounds like Star Wars, and narratively it borrows story elements from existing Star Wars films. But it just… isn’t Star Wars. Not in the way that matters to me. You can have guys in black cloaks with red lightsabers marauding around, and space Nazis blowing crap up, but without the philosophical and theological underpinnings, and no clear sense of morality, it’s all just misguided fan fiction. And I outgrew fan fiction a very long time ago.

Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters” reboot released a trailer today. Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start. When this project was announced, Feig, purveyor of such gems as “Spy,” “The Heat,” and “Bridesmaids,” was adamant that the film was going to be a reboot and not a sequel to the two classic films by Ivan Reitman. Feig went on to explain that he didn’t like the idea of these women characters being handed the equipment and taught how to use it, because it undermined what he was trying to do, which was apparently to make a statement.

I shouldn’t have to explain this to either Paul Feig or Kate Dippold, who are both credited as the writers on this thing, but the one doesn’t really necessitate the other. As the writer you get to decide what happens and how. So you could have set this film in the same continuity and just…not do the thing you didn’t want to do. As Clayton Spinney has maintained from the beginning, it would have been a simple matter, playing off of the line from the original about how “the franchise rights alone could make us rich beyond our wildest dreams!” to have the women waiting to meet somebody at a particular place and be irritated because he’s late, starting to wonder if he’s going to show since their check cleared, or if they’ve been ripped off… only to have Venkman show up, dump off a pile of dilapidated equipment and and drive away like the devil was on his heels.

This then would leave Kristen Wiig or Kate McKinnon to be like, “look, this equipment is thirty years old, it’s poorly made, the power cells are unstable… I bet if we switched this on we’d level half the city. Not only can I do this better, but I WILL. Give me a week.” And then have her build new, better, more efficient and more powerful equipment. And before you tell me that this in any way undermines her, allow me to remind you that every single scientist on the planet Earth stands on the shoulders of all who have come before them. That’s how science works.

But even so, the film could have been good. Doesn’t look like that’s how it shook out, though. This looks like a film that can’t decide what it wants to be. The original drew most of its humor from the situations and the way the characters reacted. Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) were crackpot scientists on a research grant at New York State University. Their funding was pulled because nobody was sure what the hell they were doing but everybody agreed it was crap. Peter Venkman was their old college buddy who probably floated through and got in on their program the same way he probably got them to do all of his homework for them. By being a first class BS artist. Venkman has degrees in psychology and parapsychology, but all he seems interested in is hooking up with college girls. However this termination of their funding comes right after a major breakthrough in Stantz and Spengler’s research, brought about by an interaction with “The Grey Lady,” a free-floating, full-torsal vaporous apparition at the New York Public Library.

Aykroyd wrote the first draft of the 1984 original, then Ramis was brought in to help him get it into shape. The thing about Dan Aykroyd is, he believes in the paranormal, and not only that, but he believes in it almost exactly the way it’s portrayed in the Ghostbusters movies he wrote. So he’s kind of a nut. But he’s a great comedian and good writer, and Ramis was a truly exceptional talent. Ramis didn’t believe in this stuff at all so he could look at it objectively and make the film function in a way that Aykroyd alone could not. They wrote these characters for themselves, and Venkman was originally written for John Belushi, sort of a version of his character from Animal House. When he passed away, the role went to Bill Murray who brought his own unique style to it, but the slacker who lives on the hard work of his smarter, socially awkward friends is so obviously a Belushi character once you know the truth. At any rate, Aykroyd’s personal belief system informs the film’s internal logic, so that Ray and Egon have lots of technobabble, or paratechnobabble if you like, to spout during their scenes.

And that’s the key, right there: they played their scenes straight. The reason we love these characters is because they believe 100% in the world they inhabit, they are doing what they need to in order to pay their bills, and later in order to survive: they are odd guys who just discovered their life’s work. They’re totally ineffectual in any other setting, and it’s absurd that they end up saving the world. It’s that absurdity that is the film’s lifeblood. It’s a comedy film that isn’t jokey. There are gags and wonderful lines, to be sure, but the humor is situational.

So what does this have to do with the new one? Well, looking at the trailer, it begins with a nod to the original two films. Not that the film itself does, but the trailer does, which tells you how Sony feels about this thing. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re nervous. They can’t be oblivious to all the negative backlash that existed even before the trailer came out. They know the original is a classic and they feel that they have to tie this new one, even if only in the most peripheral of ways, to the original in order to sell it. Mark my words: they know they have a bomb on their hands.

The trailer then takes us to the library, to a version of the “Grey Lady” scene, where the big payoff is a ghost vomiting slime on Kristen Wiig. That’s right. The ghost vomits slime onto Kristen Wiig. It’s like some weird fetish porn that I clicked on by mistake. It goes on for what feels like five minutes. *BLOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRPPPPPpppppp* So we’re going for gross-out humor here. The worst thing is, she’s playing one of the scientists, and she’s being all intelligent and kind of sweetly nerdy, and then, SLIME VOMIT. That’s not a joke, it’s an insult. And then the next scene is her post-shower explaining in fairly explicit detail how the slime got everywhere. Am I the only one who thinks this is the opposite of honoring women? It’s childish and not funny at all.

And I know, Pete Venkman got slimed in the Sedgewick Hotel, but remember, it happened off-screen, it was played as though he was in grave danger, Ray hears him yelling, and comes running in to find him on his back in the hallway coated in slime. It’s a dramatic buildup to something silly. And also remember that Pete had been asked in the library to collect samples of the ectoplasm, and had been grossed out by it, showing in yet another way that he was no scientist. So when he gets slimed, it’s a sort of comeuppance. I would add that he’s also the character that Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) describes as being “like a used-car salesman.” Which is a way of saying “slimy.” Because that’s what Venkman is. He’s a slimeball. It’s a joke with many subtle layers. Now I’m not saying that the joke in the remake can’t have contextually dependent layers, but I am saying right now that I doubt it does. Because it’s such a sophomoric gag. It feels slimy because unlike Venkman, Kristen Wiig’s Erin Gilbert doesn’t appear to deserve it.

I could go on; because all of the jokes in the trailer are that dumb. Leslie Jones’s character appears to be nothing more than a racial stereotype. Kate McKinnon doesn’t appear to have played a single one of her scenes straight. It’s not her fault, it seems like her character, the “brilliant engineer” was written as a screwball. Melissa McCarthy is Melissa McCarthy.

Unfortunately.

So where does this leave us?

You could have taken what has come before and used that groundwork to build something new and unique on the foundation of something people love. Instead you threw the continuity away and re-made the same movie with dumb jokes and unlikable characters. How is this better? Are you really advancing gender equality when the movie around your leading ladies is pure rubbish? Are you really advancing gender equality when you make the women look totally undignified? The guys get to mostly play it straight and let the humor come from the absurdity of a blue-collar workforce dealing with the paranormal and the way it becomes mundane to them. They never had to embarrass themselves like this. So why do the women have to? Paul Feig talked about wanting to honor women.

It seems more like he hates them.

Spoilers ahead. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I had no idea what the The VVitch would be about, but the trailers were creepy and the cinematography was striking, the costumes and the language dead-on for the period. I had only that, and Drew McWeeny’s assertion that the movie feels like something we’re not supposed to be seeing. Having seen it, I couldn’t agree more. But after a lot of positive reviews, this movie seems to be dividing audiences pretty starkly. On the drive home last night, my friend Clayton and I were discussing why that may be. When the lights came on after the screening we attended, the theater was full of people complaining about how stupid they thought it was. And that was not at all my feeling. I don’t think it was Clayton’s either, though I got more out of it than he did.

I think that’s kind of the thing with horror movies. Horror, like comedy, is very subjective. What one person finds funny another finds offensive; one person’s comedic gem is another person’s mind-numbing social experiment. Horror works the same way: what scares one person may not scare another, and so when you make a horror movie you have to make sure that the film functions as a film first, and that whatever you find genuinely terrifying, you have to make sure your film services that. And then you have to accept that no matter what you do, it will not work for everyone.

One of the interesting things about The VVitch is that some of the complaints I’ve read were that it seemed like “some sort of religious movie.” I’ve also read that satanists approve of it. Which is pretty weird, I guess, except that if you believe in God you also believe in the devil, and vice-versa, so a film about a Puritan family in Massachusetts in 1630 being tormented by the devil, and a coven of evil witches, based on actual folk-tales of the era, is going to speak to both sides if it is seriously and artfully made. I wouldn’t call it a religious movie, though. It could be seen as sort of an indictment of religion, in fact, if you were inclined to do so. Personally I tend to view things through the lens of my faith, and this film is no exception. It was, at first, a challenge.

I came out of the movie feeling sort of tainted. I needed to sit up a while and read something entirely unrelated and then say some prayers and read some scripture before bed. And I was glad to be able to go to church this morning. Let me explain. I don’t get scared at horror movies, as a rule. I know how they’re made and most of them don’t touch any of my triggers. The reason I wanted to see The VVitch is because I knew going in that it wasn’t the usual, silly kind of horror movie. As one of the main purposes of any film, or indeed any form of storytelling, is to make you feel something; and since, as I said above, fear is a difficult one to get right… I am always looking for horror films that I will find effective.

But it’s not that I was scared. It’s not an actively scary film, and those never really work for me. I would classify this film as unsettling. This film does something that to me is much darker: you watch a family tear itself apart and feel the presence of evil in their midst growing stronger as the film plays out. It does this without feeling goofy or contrived, and it builds to a dark-as-hell climax. Indeed the ending is a loss; evil wins the day and that’s that. The devil collects. And that’s what got me. Because I’m a Christian: the movie is fiction but the devil is real, and he is my enemy, and a story where he wins is going to be a tough one to swallow. If you don’t believe in God or the devil, you may have a different experience, because while you may be capable of being entertained by a story that uses religious themes or iconography, you probably need the payoff not to hinge exclusively on your feelings on that subject. I guess satanists probably find it a delightful jaunt or something.

I get Clayton’s misgivings about the climax, though the more I think about it the more I see a useful message in the film, as a Christian, as an American, and as a human person. Because I think, thematically, the film is about a lack of compassion. It’s about how a house divided, falls. As Americans we need to be talking about that right now. Christian Americans doubly so. One of the interesting things about the movie is that these Puritans, who spend so much time praying to God, completely fail to realize what’s happening around them. Even when they do begin to suspect witchcraft they all blame one another. Evil is all around them but as a family they do not stand united.

They are part of a society so rigid and repressed that every little human frailty becomes a dire transgression, and they are all so worried about these relatively minor (and wholly human) failings — the white lies, scaring the little sister, the twelve-ish year old boy noticing his teenage sister’s breasts — that they are all afraid to talk to each other about what they are thinking, or feeling. They aren’t a close family even though they are alone in the wilderness. They conceal, they feel shame and place blame. That lack of communication begets a lack of trust. Worse still, they don’t show Christ’s compassion to one another, and they are a family. It’s a catastrophic failure to love one another, with the end result being that they all die, except the teenage girl Thomasin, who only survives by killing her mother in self-defense. Finally when she’s alone in the wilderness with nobody and nothing left; with no real sense of love or of having been loved, the devil himself offers her the chance to “live deliciously.” It was jarring to me at first, but theologically it makes perfect sense.

So why do I think this is an important message right now? Because our nation is so polarized, so divided. We blame each other and shame each other, the right and the left, each side convinced that the other is either stupid or evil, and such a division can only harm us in the end. We’re supposed to be the United States. We’re supposed to celebrate and respect differences — even differences of opinion. We aren’t supposed to fear any group of people based on their religion, their race, the language they speak, or even who they love.

I have also noticed that a lot of atheists I have met are people who have been treated very poorly by people who claimed to be Christian. It may have begun after these folks started identifying as atheists, or it may have helped push them to become atheists in the first place. It pains me because that’s not what we, as Christians, are supposed to be like. We’re not supposed to be judgmental or hateful or fearful. And this is the exact reason why: because all it does is make people our enemies, and worse, sometimes makes them enemies of God, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of our mission. You don’t help people by berating them. You help them by being a friend. You don’t change their mind about Christians by arguing with them. You change it by showing them Christ’s compassion.

I do believe that the devil has agency in the world, and that when we fight amongst ourselves we only give him power. But no matter what you believe, I think we can all agree that fear and distrust are not helpful, and they are certainly not the answer to anything. Love is the answer. Understanding is the answer. Treating each other with kindness and respect, is the answer. Shaming and blaming are bogus. Always have been, no matter what your religion is (or isn’t). All that does is create strife, and invite evil in.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” So, I encourage you to go see The VVitch. And then afterwards, let it be a reminder to push out the jive, and bring in the love.

Let it be a reminder of what happens when we don’t.

The prequels are about a man who didn’t know when to let go. The original trilogy is about a man who knew when not to.

Leading up to the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I’ve had doubts about whether or not I would enjoy the film. For one thing, while I like some of JJ Abrams’ work, I don’t quite trust him as a filmmaker. Let me explain. Star Trek 2009 is a perfect place to start. I’ve grown up a fan of both Stars, Trek and Wars. I appreciate the philosophical musings and social commentary of Star Trek, and in my younger days at least, was a true believer in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. So when Trek got rebirthed in 2009 with a new young cast playing the familiar TOS crew, I was curious.

The film was a fun, action-packed thrill ride and I appreciated a lot of what it had to offer, but like many fans I noted with some dismay the lack of a big idea, the unwillingness on the part of the film to ask its audience to think, to weigh any important ideas about the social issues we were facing in 2009. Still, I reasoned, it’s a “getting the band back together,” movie, they’ll do the smart stuff in the sequel. Only they didn’t. Star Trek into Darkness was pure garbage, a rehash of the first Abrams Trek film with a darker tone, louder sounds, and a lot of dialogue lifted from “Wrath of Khan” used to no valuable effect. My goodwill was used up where NuTrek is concerned.

So here I am, fresh out from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I’m disappointed again. I had a number of things I was worried about with Episode VII, and all of them came true. To put this in context, let me talk about why I love Star Wars. Then I’ll be able to show why this one fell short.

When George Lucas created Star Wars, he did so only because he had failed to obtain the rights to Flash Gordon. He has a love for old b-movies and the Republic Pictures serials. He also has a love of classic cinema, from Akira Kurosawa films to John Ford westerns and classic epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur. So when he couldn’t do Flash Gordon, he made up his own version of it, and that was Star Wars. He threw everything into it that he liked. Its DNA contains flying saucers on strings, cowboys and Indians, The Wizard of Oz, Camelot, Robin Hood, high-seas swashbucklers, gunfighters, aerial dogfights, chariot races, the fall of Ancient Rome, Samurai warriors, wizards, and the bad guys are basically a bunch of Nazis in space. He took universal ideas, things from across various cultures and historical eras, and combined them into something that can, as a result, speak on some level to almost anybody around the world.

These are big-budget b-movies, Republic Pictures serials made as if they were Lawrence of Arabia. The visual style is grand and sweeping, very Old Hollywood. Lucas often includes shots that are direct references to other films. the “Ben-Hur” chariot race makes an appearance in “The Phantom Menace.” The raid on the Indian village to rescue Natalie Wood in “The Searchers” is revisited in “Attack of the Clones.” These are only two examples of a number that only George Lucas could count with any certainty. He approached Star Wars as if they were silent films – with the idea that if you dropped all the audio except John Williams’ score, you could still follow the film exactly. So all the designs in the films are carefully considered in order to help tell the story in big, easy visual cues. Hence the bad guys looking like Nazis in space, Darth Vader looking like a techno-samurai, Obi-Wan’s monk robes, Han Solo’s gunfighter outfit, the stormtroopers wearing identical armor and never showing their faces — they were clones from the start. That was always the idea.

And then to get another level into it, there’s the spiritual component. I have no idea if George Lucas is religous, or if so what religion, but I do know that he’s spiritual. He used to race hot rods when he was a teen and he had a bad car wreck that should have killed him, but he was able to walk away. And I know that moment changed him. So amidst the rest of these divergent-yet-weirdly-convergent ideas, Lucas brings The Force, and meditations on love and loss, the power in knowing when to let go. The prequels are about a man who didn’t know when to let go. The original trilogy is about a man who knew when not to.

“The Force Awakens” hits the ground running, and so many of the things you want to see are there. Space Nazis, Han and Chewie, lightsabers, at least one triangular capital ship. It’s a nice-looking movie, but cinematographically it’s not at all a Star Wars movie. It doesn’t use the same visual language. Ships, weapons, and characters come and go, often without us ever getting a really good look at them. There’s very little soul to the film. The spiritual underpinnings feeling notably absent, any connection to real world history or classic cinema missing right along with it. There are emotional moments, to be sure, many of them very effective. There is humor, but it often seems improvised and is clearly rooted in 2015 language and culture, and much of the dialogue is going to feel dated in five years.

“The Force Awakens” also tells us that 30 years after the end of “Return of the Jedi,” many of that film’s earned happy endings came undone. This is not an encouraging thought, and combined with the film’s near-total lack of spirituality, it’s not an easy film to think of as “fun.” It’s a strange juxtaposition to go from ROTJ, the sunniest film in the saga, to this dour, flippant, loveless voyage of glossy emptiness. Star Wars may have created the modern blockbuster, but it’s always been beyond that, the big-budget b-movie made like it was Lawrence of Arabia. “The Force Awakens” is just a modern blockbuster with lightsabers. Deep as a puddle.

Conclusions? Like the First Order’s new superweapon, it appears JJ Abrams sucks the life out of a “Star” every time he fires.