DYNAMIC DUEL. Two superheroes square off in the latest DC Comics saga. Warner Bros.

 

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, from Man of Steel director Zack Snyder, is so lovingly crafted, so grandly operatic and mythological in spirit and scope, that at times I felt a Stockholm syndrome-like impulse to relax my grip on my misgivings and just go with the flow. Granted, this movie is not for me, but at times it seems like it could be a movie for someone.

Yes, it’s the bleakest, most violent, most joyless mainstream superhero movie to date, with an R rating in spirit, if not in fact (a concession to be rectified on home video, where there will be an R-rated version).

Yes, Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel is glum, hopeless, passive and directionless. And yes, Ben Affleck’s new Dark Knight is brutal and even murderous. In some ways, the thing evokes Snyder’s own adaptation of that other influential 1980s graphic novel, Watchmen: a nihilistic story set in a world with room for supers, but not heroes.

Well, isn’t that a valid interpretation, or critique, of the superhero genre? Is there some rule that Superman has to be inspiring? Some reason iconic heroes shouldn’t be reimagined as jackbooted fascists riding roughshod over basic rights?

An absolute reason, no. A relative reason, yes.

Yes, if you’re going to have Batman himself ultimately concluding that “men are still good” as you ramp up to the coming of the Justice League like it’s a good thing.

Yes, if you’re going to double down on Man of Steel’s aspirational language about Superman “giving the people of Earth an ideal to strive for.” “Be their hero, Clark,” Diane Lane’s Martha Kent tells her son. “Be their angel; be their monument; be anything they need you to be.”

And yes, if you’re going to double down on Man of Steel’s God talk and religious imagery. Batman v Superman is even more charged with theological language and iconography than Avengers: Age of Ultron.

A lot of this comes from Jesse Eisenberg’s manic, voluble Lex Luthor Jr., who, like both titular heroes, is an orphan with daddy issues. Luthor was abused by his father, an experience that apparently left him an atheist: “If God is all-powerful, he cannot be all-good; if God is all-good, then he cannot be all-powerful,” he proclaims, as if this classic theological problem were a new insight of his.

In another sequence, a man maimed during Man of Steel’s climatic battle defaces a Superman monument with a graffito indicting him as a “false god.” The problem with all this is that in two films there has been precious little sign of anyone honoring him in any remotely godlike or even heroic way in the first place, apart from an evocative but isolated sequence set in Mexico in which throngs of adoring Mexicanos surround the Man of Steel after he rescues a woman from a fire, all trying to touch him as if he were a living saint.

Strikingly, this sequence happens to be set on Mexico’s Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, so several of Superman’s adorers are wearing skull masks or makeup. The symbolic suggestion is that if Superman is a saint, he is a kind of Santa Muerte or “Saint Death” — a macabre, cultic figure whose coming heralds the opposite of the hope we were told in Man of Steel the emblem on his chest symbolized on Krypton.

“Superman was never real,” he confesses to Lois. Trying to buck him up, Lois touches the emblem on his chest, reminding him that it means something. But Clark’s not having any: “It meant something on my world,” he shrugs, “and that doesn’t exist anymore.” Just like the Superman of my youth, apparently. Snyder’s films are so eager to establish that “Superman was never real” that they never permit even the illusion that he ever was.

From the outset, Batman v Superman faced the nearly insuperable challenge of trying to lay the foundations for an incipient shared cinematic DC universe (the curiously branded DC Extended Universe), with the deeply flawed Man of Steel as the cornerstone.

Now we get a Batman who is hell on bad guys, literally branding them with a white-hot bat iron (which we’re told is a death sentence in prison), yet who is easily manipulated by Luthor, rather than being the brilliant mastermind he’s supposed to be. What about Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman? Too early to say; Gadot has a nice sense of presence, but she isn’t much more than a female action figure here.

Of course the film needs Batman and Superman to fight. It’s artificial and kind of pointless, although the film does have one promising idea: From the outset it roots Batman’s hostility toward Superman in one of the most heavily criticized elements of Man of Steel, the epic destruction and loss of life of the climactic battle, not to mention the fact that both Superman and the threat he faced had the same origin.

The opening of Batman v Superman revisits this pivotal event from the point of view of Bruce Wayne, who owned one of the many skyscrapers leveled in that battle and employed the people who worked there. (Later there’s an urban action scene in which the film makes a point of having a reporter note that it’s in the financial district, which is pretty empty at that time of night.)

Not to spoil the big spoiler, here is a not-terribly-difficult riddle.

Among the film’s many echoes of Christian faith and culture is a well-known English hymn, played on a distinctive instrument, that will remind many viewers of a comparable moment from the denouement of a classic 1980s franchise film.

As it happens, this denouement was recently echoed in a reboot that everyone agrees had much less power than the original. One reason is what happened in the 1980s film involved well-established characters who had known and loved each other for decades, and in the reboot the recast characters are still finding their feet and getting to know each other.

Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe has its flaws, but they did one thing right: They built their universe slowly, establishing the characters one at a time, before bringing them together in The Avengers. Batman v Superman is a case study in the perils of trying to do too much too quickly.

Steven D. Greydanus is the

Register’s film critic and

creator of Decent Films.