Chasing Amy

Remembered as the film in which Ben Affleck is so irresistible that he turns a lesbian straight (and hailing from a time period in which distributor Harvey Weinstein was behaving like a rabid animal in hotels all over the world), Chasing Amy is probably best understood now as writer-director Kevin Smith trying to make sense of why a beautiful woman with much more life experience than him might then find his comparative naivety appealing. Joey Lauren Adams is the subject both in front and behind the camera: the actress luminous onscreen as Alyssa and, presumably, at least a little bit bewildered offscreen as the real-life girlfriend who had prompted Smith to so fully excavate his personal inadequacies. Of course, a handsome actor on the verge of superstardom being cast as Smith's avatar likely took a little of the sting out of this public splaying. If nothing else Affleck, who incidentally sounds uncannily like Smith when the pair share audio commentary tracks, is able to wring an endearing lovesickness out of his writer-director's overwritten dialogue. Affleck's performance here flatters Smith and the writer-director knows it. 

Similarly, in terms of aspirational tweaking, it's difficult not to wonder now if the framing of Alyssa as being much more fluid in her affections than the popular memory suggests is actually a misguided attempt at chivalry? If the character had instead only slept with a great many men, would Smith then be expecting his viewers (particularly a mainstream American audience back in 1997) to value her perspective even less? To side with the jealous and venomously bigoted Banky, as played by Jason Lee? Perhaps such a move might even generate disquiet for Adams the actress, since Smith was never shy about sharing his film's autobiographical underpinning? Gayness in this specific context, and this is discussed within the piece itself, is exciting rather than intimidating for Holden, Alyssa's prospective partner. He, foolheartedly, believes that his maleness confers on him some heteronormative advantage that the world's women lack. Sexuality then, especially in terms of promiscuity, is a recurring hang-up in Smith's work. An earlier embodiment of the writer-director, Brian O'Halloran's Dante Hicks from Clerks, blanched at the idea that his current girlfriend had been intimate with dozens of men before he entered the picture. Chasing Amy then reworks this comical overreaction, perhaps attempting to reassure Smith's now growing audience that, actually and under very specific circumstances, it doesn't matter to him if a potential life partner has slept with more people than he has. 

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

Two-thirds of the way through writer-director Kevin Smith's self-stimulated Jay and Silent Bob Reboot the stagnant pair catch up with Ben Affleck's Holden and Joey Lauren Adams' Alyssa from Chasing Amy, the former lovers now co-parenting (along with Alyssa's wife) a child played by Jason Mewes' real life daughter. As expected, Holden looks older. His once buoyant hair has been trimmed short and his goatee is gone. He talks about his failed relationships, specifically an inability to make any lasting romantic connections. Also mentioned is the pain he's suffered in making himself the sole focus of his life and how that level of expectation has crushed him. Then Holden talks about fatherhood: the reassurance that comes with the certainty that somebody really and truly does love him. Smith's dense, motormouth dialogue - genuinely insurmountable for many of his actors - spills out of Affleck with a drilled ease. This extremely brief (but touching) interlude aside, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is an agonising, two-hour pummelling that is premised entirely on the implied goodwill that the filmmakers believe they inherit from a thirty-year deluge of Quick Stop material. As incurious as ever behind the camera, Smith boldly places himself out in front of house for several different roles. His performance as himself, a role lousy with cringing asides about how useless he is as a director, is irritating enough but his Silent Bob, classically portrayed as the taciturn alternative to his jackrabbit partner, has mouldered into an intolerable mime act with Smith's grimacing face twisted up into a series of painful-looking gurns. 

Mallrats - Extended Cut

Perhaps test audiences aren't always the unthinking, dim-witted blob they're made out to be? At least in terms of writer-director Kevin Smith's original submission of Mallrats, the terminal impatience of these viewers, who have very likely been tricked into submitting feedback for a movie they don't necessarily even want to see, did yield workable results. In its longer form Smith's second feature opens with Jeremy London's tongue twisted TS accidentally firing a prop musket at New Jersey's sozzled governor, an event that sounds hilarious when you're reading about it on a fan site in the early 2000s but, in practice, has all the vim and vigour of a similar interlude in a latter-day Police Academy sequel. Hazard a listen to this film's cast-and-crew commentary and you'll hear Smith relay the note that his film is dead in the water until TS and Jason Lee's delightfully abrasive Brodie make it to their prized galleria and, a few glimpses of the autumnal American suburbs aside, whichever frustrated audience member made that call is exactly right. 

That this shopping centre must be physically traversed is an immediate boon for Smith and cinematographer David Klein, it makes the agonisingly long, static mediums that the director defaults to a little less likely. Smith, who began his career maxing out credit cards to buy black-and-white Kodak stock for Clerks, clearly isn't then inclined to waste precious celluloid with pick-ups, reverse angles or inserts. For this follow-up Smith largely favours a style of coverage and storytelling that lends itself well to interlaced television or, a little more charitably, the panned-and-scanned home video market. There are a few stray notes of John Hughes in evidence, not least the casting of Renée Humphrey as a sexualised Molly Ringwald stand-in or Ben Affleck as a Buzz McCallister who has grown into a buttfucking bully, but Smith isn't interested in rallying against middle-class malaise or indulging the childlike flights of fancy that Hughes delighted in. Mallrats isn't reflective in that sense, it's a film about twentysomethings made by twentysomethings. Received as an affront on its original release, with American critics behaving as if the second coming of Jim Jarmusch had squandered his talents on a listless Animal House knock-off, and poorly served in this cut by an excruciating prologue, all the good sense and carefully considered criticism in the world melt away when confronted by the pure sunshine that is the late Shannen Doherty smiling and battering talk show drums while a Weezer B-side plays. 

The Flash

The most fascinating aspect of Andy Muschietti's The Flash is that Warner Bros. was convinced they had a smash hit on their hands. A picture so purely entertaining that it was capable of overshadowing the bizarre (not to mention well publicised) criminality of its lead actor and bid a fond farewell to an era of superhero filmmaking that has inspired a genuinely rabid level of affection. On the day, we are instead treated to a strangely fatalistic money pit that, at least initially, seeks to emulate the light comedic touch of Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future series before the studio edicts pile up then collapse in on themselves. Muschietti's film isn't always a boiling disaster though. Often it's even agreeable, usually thanks to one of the many Dark Knights skulking about. Ben Affleck briefly returns as Zack Snyder's Batman, this time behaving with the unhurried confidence of a Sprangian Scoutmaster. This burly grump is quickly overwritten, after Flash visits a temporal treadmill, allowing Michael Keaton's heavily merchandised take on the vengeful billionaire to spring back into action. 

Every moment spent in Keaton's company is a delight. The actor steering his untouchable take on Bill Finger and Bob Kane's crimefighter towards a kind of gravelly stoicism, one typically associated with Clint Eastwood - incidentally, another Warners mainstay. The Flash keeps on churning though, eventually sinking itself into a computer generated sludge thick with totemic marionettes choking on their own arrested adventures. These plastic depictions of a reality sinkhole are sort of stunning in their ugliness: Ezra Miller's twin speedsters the subject in an enormous colosseum stacked with conveyer belts that teem with hijacked imagery. Rather than tell an engaging story about a buffoon who treats his life like a series of video game checkpoints, we have a piece that literalises streaming services as a stinking cauldron of thwarted ambition. These century-spanning properties, and how they are expressed, are not special to the people cutting the cheques. It's all just content. Fit only to be piled on top of each other in an pulverising attempt to silence the bleating subscriber. No wonder the Discovery regime was so delighted: this Flash is a two hundred million dollar juggernaut premised on the idea that people should, in fact, just shut up and accept the slop that is served to them. 

Air

The longer Air goes on, the further the scales are tipped from a pleasant enough period puff piece to a full-on, Nike valorising advertisement. Director Ben Affleck's film about a sort of struggling sportswear company (and even then, we are told, only really within a very specific division) betting big on an up-and-coming Michael Jordan is so consumed with depicting the particulars of a high top sneaker pitch that it forgoes any perspectives or situations where the audience feels like they're being taken into a somebody's confidence. For instance, we're given an inkling that Matt Damon's Sonny Vaccaro has a gambling problem but the fragments of chronic ill fortune we witness are simply data rationed out early as a way to then contrast with the bigger bet Vaccaro makes with his department's budget in pursuit of Jordan. That's it. 

Tacitly, we are told that Vaccaro, the man, isn't particularly interesting - it's the deal that he makes for Nike Inc that truly means something. Hobbled by this incuriosity, Air proceeds like a first act set-up for a second act that exists only in the audience's local shopping centre. This sense of arrested mechanical development is all over the film. The dramatic language of Air is trapped in its zippy groundwork laying phase, deploying dopamine hit singles from the 1980s with such careless frequency that the effect eventually grows aggravating. We never get to luxuriate in this music; not prompted to consider what the latest track might mean for the scene playing underneath it either. All selections are obvious and, largely, incidental. Air is deliberately light and superficially then, a film centred around grasping ad men that apportions negligible space to its most interesting subjects: Viola Davis, who invests a quiet dimension in a Deloris Jordan written to be an inscrutable obstacle, and Michael himself, who is treated with the same shrinking reverence afforded to Jesus Christ in Ben-Hur. 

Zack Snyder's Justice League

Upfront, Zack Snyder's Justice League offers a very clear demonstration of what the slighted director brings to this material, beyond a towering aspect ratio and a colour palette attuned to unyielding metals. In Snyder and screenwriters Chris Terrio and Will Beall's undiluted version, Batman's first meeting with Aquaman in a remote Icelandic outpost is presented as an incredible effort in of itself. Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne has surmounted cracking glaciers and a storm that grounded all manner of aircraft just be in the same room as the rightful King of Atlantis. Their meeting concluded, Jason Momoa's regal roadie strides off to be in the ocean. Bruce and an awed village follow. Joss Whedon's Justice League presented this sequence as a bickering back-and-forth that concluded with a hero shot of Momoa smashing into the water then zipping away. Punctuation, essentially. 

Here, we instead focus on Affleck's despondent expression, his glance off this would be ally as it starts to snow and a group of women begin singing the kind of mournful, lilting, prayer you'd expect to hear at a monarch's funeral. Bruce worries that his words - his warning - has fallen on deaf ears. When he remembers to look back, Arthur has gone and gentle ripples are fading on the water. Whedon's reconfiguration of Justice League was arranged to access chummy sniping and casual success; earth-shattering powers portrayed as something easy or natural for a select few. Snyder and this project's editors, David Brenner and Dody Dorn, want you to feel the effort, to sink into these moments and experience them as enormous and transformative rather than simply exciting. It's a mode of communication that is rambling, episodic and, often, portentous, but it's also frequently magical. 

Four hours long and broken up into eight distinct movements, Snyder's League occupies a space outside of whichever continuity WarnerMedia are currently hurtling forward with. Affleck's stocky take on Batman has long since been replaced - Matt Reeves and men's magazine troll (not to mention generational acting talent) Robert Pattinson wrapped shooting on The Batman less than a week ago - while the story told here seems at least partially at odds with Aquaman's first solo foray and completely incompatible with Wonder Woman's 1980s set sequel. Zack Snyder's Justice League is already a document, a relic from a recent past that, despite an Epilogue prickling with several different flavours of promise, seems unlikely to be followed up on. In a way, this is the strength of DC's disparate platter, their continuity is so obviously broken that it allows each character to be the star of their own, ever-changing, micro-continuity.

Trapped in Snyder's pocket realm, these heroes are put to the test in ways that require genuine strain, one that is consistently amplified throughout by the piece's downcast tone and an editing style that rejects hurry. Although cities are not atomised the film establishes a genuine, and consistent, sense of danger. We are not watching a film that seeks to glibly reassure its audience that good will, inherently, triumph. Every action has a consequence. So whenever Ciarán Hinds' gigantic Steppenwolf - reimagined here as prehistoric musculature, resplendent in a chainmail armour that hums with machine life - bursts into the frame, slaughter quickly follows. The invader's assault on Themyscira, already a stand out sequence in the theatrical cut, is significantly extended here - trading quick, geographical, fixes and action movie editing for an assembly that submerges us in Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen)'s fraying emotional state. 

We sit with the rage felt when a holy place is defiled; the despair as an enormous temple crumbles into the sea, ending umpteen lives. All this pain and confusion is expressed via image, space and sound rather than the crude, sex slavery invoking dialogue that Whedon brought to the table. Over and over we are forced to process the weight of these events and the effect they have on these characters. We are rarely thrown cold into an aftermath. This distended, atypical delivery works beautifully for a great deal of the film's other action sequences, especially those that felt perfunctory in their superheroics back in 2017. Gal Gadot's Diana / Wonder Woman foiling a London terror attack is elevated from a throw away scuffle to an act of Herculean expertise as Diana - in slow motion - struggles to place her bullet proof bracelets between Michael McElhatton's gun-wielding terrorist and several dozen innocent lives.  

Gadot's agog face fills the 1.33:1 frame, the first bullet traveling much faster than she can react. Through sheer will she gets her arm where it needs to be, interceding just in the nick of time. That's one bullet though. When the madman switches his rifle to fully-automatic then takes aim at a class of schoolgirls, Wonder Woman follows his line of fire, crouched and exerting; zipping inhumanly fast to put her gauntlets and, in one instance, her body between this outrage and these children. The film no longer rushes through these movements - perhaps previously unsure of how these staccato, obviously artificial, lunges would be received by an audience - we linger and examine now, cutting back and forth between the hammering gun and a dashing Diana. The effect is explosive, delirious even, precisely because the scene is unselfconsciously structured to cater to this idea of a body in the midst of a prolonged physical struggle. 

This Justice League is not summery or obviously celebratory then. Tonally speaking, we're not hanging out with our superpowered pals as they quarrel and pinball between disasters. Snyder's take is closer to a war film, one with a fantastical scope that reaches into our world's distant, unrecorded, past to tell of the day when a barbaric New God touched down on Earth and battled a who's who of human myth. Zeus and the Greek pantheon fought alongside an alien Green Lantern, Atlanteans, an Amazonian cavalry, and man's armies - including bearded Hun - against the being who would be master of the universe. The attempt, although unsuccessful, left both a mark on our planet and three living machines that can be combined to trigger an instantaneous apocalypse. Steppenwolf, the demonic agent gathering these devices, exudes the anxious presence of a toady. Although indescribably powerful when compared to mere mortals, he is, at heart, a needy middle-manager hoping to curry favour with his boss by wrapping up a noted loose end. 

Thanks to Marvel's trendsetting credit teasers this ruler, Jack Kirby's Darkseid, was beaten to the cinematic punch by Jim Starlin's deliberately similar cosmic bruiser Thanos. Elevated to chief threat in his universe, Josh Brolin's take on the Mad Titan even got to headline his own film, Avengers: Infinity War as well as a feature role in its sequel, Avengers: Endgame. That intergalactic plunderer, although brusque and all-powerful, was afforded a human dimension - a daughter he loved; a bizarre pursuit he, on some level, believed to be altruistic. Comparatively, Darkseid is portrayed with the kind of awe usually reserved for religious revelation. His introduction is that of an unholy visitation, a rippling God of militarised industry first seen silhouetted like John Wayne at the close of The Searchers before Snyder and cinematographer Fabian Wagner begin appraising this menace vertically. His figure is massive and granite; a hammer about to fall. 

This nascent form - identified in pre-release press as Uxas, the identity the God wore before taking command of the Omega Effect in John Byrne's Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics - is a ravenous, youthful, behemoth in search of an outlet. The Darkseid we see later in the film, primed for a starring role in a sequel that will likely never come, is this same being matured; skewing closest to the character's taciturn portrayal in Superman: The Animated Series and the subsequent Justice League and Justice League Unlimited television series. Voiced by Michael Ironside, that interpretation is, fundamentally, Satan ruling from his Church in Hell. Actor Ray Porter imbues this computer generated tyrant with similar gravelly malice; his voice a grim-dark growl that issues from a pit then carries through halls filled with conquered, mutated, subjects. 

Darkseid's screentime may be slight, especially when weighed against a 242 minute running time but every interlude counts - we see him batter through armies, felled only by the combined efforts of a Green Lantern, a legendary king and three Olympians; we watch the almighty Steppenwolf cower in fear when his master's image exerts itself on a slab of fissile ore. Darkseid's technology, the three Mother Boxes he abandons to Earth - depicted as desiccated hags in the apocalyptic visions of Ray Fisher's Cyborg - are a profane take on the act of creation itself. This God's Genesis is a wave of destruction that picks the flesh from Kryptonian bones and sets the world ablaze. Kirby's character, wholly new to this version of the film, makes such an obvious and immediate impact that the other sequel teases embedded in this film's Epilogue - Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor and Joe Manganiello's Slade Wilson laying the foundations for The Legion of Doom and an abandoned Batman film - seem positively tiny by comparison. 

Darkseid isn't the only character to receive reappraisal. Whereas this version of the film delves much deeper with the newer members of this Justice League, Whedon's theatrical cut seemed more of a feature length attempt to resuscitate Superman as a future tentpole prospect. Scenes were added and subtracted around Snyder's ticking time bomb - an effort undermined by computer assisted reshoot footage that, often, looked confrontationally bad - until Henry Cavill was behaving with the tranquil assurance of a Christopher Reeve. Snyder's assembly is a completely different story, doggedly sticking to Batman's Knightmare visions from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as an eventual destination for the hero. The disorientated Superman who violently reacts to his resurrection doesn't instantly fade as soon as an action sequence has been ticked off here either. 

Kent's pain lingers, expressed in his choice of suit - a funeral draft of his usual costume that recalls everything from Spider-Man's Secret Wars symbiote and Jon Bogdanove's Recovery Suit to the evil Kryptonians of the Reeve films and the rogue Superman seen in the cyberpunk future of the Batman Beyond animated series. This clouded, post-death perspective allows Superman to register as something other than a pat obstacle in a genre rehash. In Snyder's cut it's clear he carries real pain at having been unnaturally returned to life. Mothers and fathers, both living and dead, flock to him, talking this superbeing out of his fog by reminding him of his emotional and physical connections to this world - Amy Adams' seemingly pregnant Lois Lane and his patient, hardscrabble mother, Diane Lane's Martha Kent. Russell Crowe's Jor-El and Kevin Costner's Jonathan Kent join the chorus, recounting the spiritual quest they imparted to him in the language of Gods and men. 

In action, this Superman is different too. His understanding of stakes and pressure rendered off-kilter by his all-powerful nature. So while his teammates battle through a tumorous, irradiated, gauntlet, Kent remains in Kansas to get his head right. This pronounced contrast between an absent, healing, hero and a squad of allies flogging their hearts out against a terrifying extra-terrestrial threat - especially when played at this kind of length - is a fight blueprint straight out of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, a hugely successful multimedia series that plays with the myth of Moses and The Exodus in a similar way to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics. Toriyama's interpretation takes a more hysterical, comedic bent with a central character whose might is so massively out of whack with his contemporaries that all of the manga's plot contrivances are about placing successive hurdles between its hero, Son Goku, and any unfolding battles. 

As if to underline this structural note, Snyder's film tweaks Wonder Woman to be Superman's violent near-equal, an accomplice who isn't content to simply batter their enemies into submission. She's basically Superman's Vegeta - the displaced alien prince who works twice as hard to keep up with the savant Goku. Diana's similar insistence that Kal-El should only be referred to by the name given to him on his home planet is just the cherry on top. When Snyder's Superman does finally engage Steppenwolf, his hovering blows are unforgiving - the same brutal strikes he aimed at the Justice League seconds after they reawakened him - reminding us that this Superman remains at least slightly abstracted and perhaps not even the exact same man we saw in Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice. Death has altered the Kryptonian, there's a sense he isn't a complete person anymore, instead he's a wraith anchored to a previous life only by his Lois. 

That it requires such a massive intervention by his loved ones to even access his previous persona (his return to the life he had only possible because of their memories) tallies with Bruce Wayne's recurring fear that the Sun God who fell from the sky could become poisoned by dark rhetoric and take up the position of general in an army of annihilation. Finally, there's Fisher's Cyborg, a superhero instantly course-corrected in the theatrical cut to resemble the comedic, braggadocios, sidekick familiar to fans of Teen Titans Go!. Cyborg isn't simply re-evaluated here, his contribution to the overall shape of this film is seismic, far bigger than scene tweaks or costume corrections. In Snyder's version of Justice League Cyborg is a significant dramatic axis, one told with the anguish of a dead child forced back to life by a guilt-ridden father, Joe Morton's Silas Stone. Cyborg's story is one of halting reconciliation, not just with the parent who repeatedly chose work over his family, but with his own self-image. 

Cyborg's story is so thoroughly threaded into this king-sized Director's Cut that it's obvious why Fisher was protective of the role and then so bitterly disappointed when very little of it was released in 2017. Victor Stone is a multifaceted character that allows the actor to play two completely distinct personas - the confident, letter jacket wearing human half that keeps himself connected to the rest of mankind with bursts of online altruism and a mechanical aspect that Stone believes to be unnatural and damned. The latter gives Fisher the opportunity to play several different classic monsters - when he first meets Wonder Woman he's Quasimodo, hunched and evasive but taking a certain delight in his expertise; later he's Frankenstein's Monster, a resentful son committed to concealing or outright destroying his father's work. A metronome score carries us into an interior life where Stone is a God of human data, so powerful that he could end all life on Earth in an instant. 

Cyborg is a Dr Manhattan who hasn't become bored with the people around him. On the contrary, he wants to use his incalculable powers to help but sees no possibility for integration into wider society. He's hung up on the manufactured organs and arteries that maintain what's left of his shattered body. The shame he feels for this mechanism traps him, creating a wider context of internalised monstrosity that sours his outlook. It's clear that he abhors his physical identity, retreating into vast digital head spaces where he can stride around in the broad flesh and bone body he's all but lost. Cyborg's story, unlike his Watchmen counterpart, tracks towards an acceptance though - one facilitated by the precious knowledge that he isn't alone in this universe, that there are other people who share similar burdens to his own. It feels conceptually significant that it is Diana who reaches out to this metal man - in certain versions of her origin story she is an artificial construct herself, moulded from clay then imbued with life by a loving parent. 

None of this is to say that Zack Snyder's Justice League doesn't have its flaws, there are more than a couple of computer generated effects that, quite apparently, haven't received the fullest of attention. When suited up, Affleck's Batman, particularly in the tunnels fight, looks stodgy rather than brawny. And - despite an introductory accident that finds absurd, Richard Lester style humour in a moment of blind panic - Ezra Miller's Flash, when babbling in repose, often works against the film's mood in a glaring rather than playful way. There are perplexing additions too, the worst of which is a heartfelt conversation between Martha Kent and Lois Lane that tours the crater that Clark's loss has left in their lives before suddenly terminating with a needless superhero cameo that thoroughly undermines the moment. At its best though, this version of Justice League stresses stakes in a way that consistently feels just out of our heroes' control. Instead of clattering through danger, the film gives its set-pieces enough space for logistical appraisal. Threat waxes and wanes, allowing a genuine sense of wonder to take hold then flourish. Again and again we are assured that these heroes will have to break their bodies and work in the moments between seconds to accomplish the impossible. 

Paycheck

John Woo's last American film (to date) raids a Philip K Dick short story for a hook and precious little else. Paycheck, like basically every other substandard Dick adaptation (and most of the really good ones), is only interested in the his knack for inciting incidents, refusing to press on into the author's realm of compromised people and how they make peace with their dystopias. Paycheck is, above all else, a holiday season action film. Anxiety exists to be conquered rather than accepted.

Ben Affleck plays Michael Jennings, a brilliant engineer who deconstructs bleeding edge gadgets for the purpose of industrial espionage. Since his work is legally suspect, Jennings is subject to futuristic non-disclosure agreements that involve his memories being zapped out of his brain upon completion of a job. Having finished his latest black out assignment, Jennings expects to be sitting on millions. Instead, during a chatty debrief, he discovers his pre-wipe self traded in his stock options for a manila envelope full of cheap knick-knacks and trinkets.

Paycheck's sci-fi stupor allows Woo to scratch his Hitchcock itch, in particular the bewildered chase central to North by Northwest. A well-dressed but low energy Affleck stands in for Cary Grant, the amnesia forced onto his Jennings simulating Roger Thornhill's essential cluelessness. Woo and screenwriter Dean Georgaris pursue a similar kind of uncompromised, inexpert heroism for their lead character too. Paycheck features precious little gunplay, Jennings preferring to scheme his way out of dangerous situations. It's a novel tact for such an accomplished action director but, in practice, it's a compromise too far. By this point Woo had been thoroughly ironed out by la-la land. The overt Christian imagery that characterised films like The Killer had been reduced to a tick involving a dove; likewise an editing style that found poignancy in chaos has here been transformed into a stuttering series of Avid burps.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - Ultimate Edition

The theatrical release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice didn't have scenes in the traditional sense. Information was rationed out in condensed, discordant blips that sat awkwardly in the assembly. Story didn't develop naturally, people and identities came and went as the action demanded, and no-one but Ben Affleck's Batman was allowed a distinct point-of-view. This had the cumulative effect of saddling the caped crusader with the role of the protagonist, a job that the character, as presented here, couldn't shoulder without seriously unbalancing the film.

Dawn of Justice's Batman is reactionary and paranoid, a man dealing with survivor's guilt by putting himself on a collision course with an alien who dwells in the sky. The cinema release did such a poor job of communicating the virtues of Henry Cavill's Superman that the film couldn't help but fall in line with Bruce Wayne's blinkered world view. There was no alternative. Worse still, his mission, the film's backbone, is founded on misinformation planted by Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor. Batman wasn't even the master of his own destiny.

Action films demand heroes that express individuality, it's their defining trait. They're going against the grain, betting everything they have on their ability to succeed. Action films, and the hero myths they are descended from, are a way in which human culture expresses the desire to be special, to be unique and lauded amongst your peers. By founding Batman's goal on a willingness to be manipulated so thoroughly, the filmmakers abdicated Wayne's prime positioning. They'd made him appear weak just to twist the knife. Power does not reside with this Batman. He's old and misguided, tragic even.

Lex Luthor then is crowbarred into an authority role that the film doesn't account for. Lex is a cipher, a colourful Google era recontextualisation of Superman's stock, big business bad guy. He isn't supposed to drive the film, he's an irritant. In the theatrical cut of Batman v Superman, Luthor gloating is the most powerful moment in the whole piece, it up-ends assumptions and throws everything into chaos. In this Ultimate Edition it's nothing. The weight of the revelation matters less because we already have another character bearing narrative weight - Superman.

The seismic shift in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - Ultimate Edition is that it embraces a perspective other than Batman's. The snipped, unforgiving progression of the theatrical cut framed everything through the prism of Bruce Wayne. His ideas and opinions stood unopposed. The Ultimate Edition corrects this mania by apportioning credible dramatic space to Clark Kent. We watch Kent running down inconclusive leads in the rain, we see him ringing his mother at some ungodly hour just to hear the voice of another person who loved his father.

Theatrical Superman plays solely into his omnipotent powers - he was everywhere he needed to be, armed with an opinion. He wasn't a person, he was an obstacle. Ultimate Superman we discover isn't really Superman at all, he's a different expression of Clark Kent. Ultimate's biggest addition is the clarification that the Kent persona isn't just a disguise or a hobby for this stranded God (think Hellenic, rather than just Judeo-Christian), it's the true expression of the man. He wants to be good, to make his Dad proud. He also cares about journalism as something beyond access and the opportunity to hang out with his girlfriend.

This new context works two-fold, it reveals Clark Kent's character and clarifies the abject horror of the news media he navigates. Clark is presented as a man out of time, a reporter chasing a genuine scoop in era of cut-and-paste copy. He's also a Superman coping with a 24 hour news cycle that is happy to skew spiteful when it finds itself starving for content. Toxic talking heads were all over the big screen release, but it's the contrast that Kent's scenes now provide that makes plain their presence beyond a glib The Dark Knight Returns callback.

In Zack Snyder's longer cut Superman is pitted relentlessly against apathy and outright bigotry. Mankind is portrayed as teetering on the edge of damnation, a people motivated by small, petty emotions that appeal to their inherent hate. Personal prejudice rules; facts and data a distant consideration. In this milieu, Affleck's Batman is finally allowed to assume the position he was always designed for - he's the antagonist, the ultimate, mechanised expression of reactionary political posturing. Removed from the responsibilities of the leading man, it's fun to watch a Batman so damaged that he's happy to move on convenient truths and outright lies. Simply, he's scared.

Although the theatrical cut's laser focus on Batman hobbled the film, you can understand the intention - Affleck and Jeremy Irons both give magnetic performances, not to mention The Dark Knight's proven, recent, track record on film - but it's Superman's story that has a satisfying, evolving arc. We discover the person behind the divine image. Comparatively, Batman is stationary, simmering in his juices. The cinema release masked David S Goyer and Chris Terrio's rehabilitation of a character that, in Man of Steel, registered as acutely selfish. This Ultimate Edition leaves us in no doubt that Clark Kent is this being's core identity. He wants to hold down a job and spend his life loving and looking after Amy Adams' Lois Lane.

The Superman persona then is something truly distinct, and perhaps even unwanted. It's a role that Kent assumes not out of joy or even necessity, but out of guilt. He knows he can help. The confrontation with Batman isn't motivated by the hypocritical urge to tidy away the human vigilante, the greater detail here points to a Superman that is alarmed by a man who doesn't even try to understand the consequences of his actions. In that respect, Batman becomes a personification of all this film's oozing, capricious humanity. Bruce Wayne is oblivious and indulgent, filled with certainty and acting without any thought or consideration for what Superman brings to the world.

When Lex cajoles Superman into confronting Batman, the Man of Steel is being given the opportunity to pummel an avatar for a society that wilfully misunderstands and rejects him. Clark has been given every reason in the world to cut loose and obliterate this fallen Batman, his decision not to is critical. In this moment we understand the two distinct headspaces that have tracked naturally to this crisis point. Goyer and Terrio have worked hard to place these two American icons in a situation that demands they try to murder each other. Thanks to the Ultimate Edition's additions though, the context has changed completely.

Batman v Superman is no longer a pro wrestling dream match, it's a misanthropic suicide pact between two broken idols, disgusted by the world that surrounds them (see also - Optimus Prime in Transformers: Age of Extinction). This viewing, when Batman intones "You were never a God, you were never even a man." he might as well be talking to himself. He knows he's gone too far, he's working against his mission, betraying his vow to Gotham and his dead parents to appease his bruised ego. By apportioning equal time and motivation to Superman we get a fresh perspective on a Batman desperate to be swept up and saved.

The film now naturally acquires the despairing emotional sweep that the theatrical edition merely assumed. The much derided Martha moment plays less like a grinding gear change and more like a moment of divine inspiration striking at the core of Bruce. We've just watched Superman pull his punches. He didn't burn Batman down or twist his head off, Clark instead fought to halt. These actions clearly demonstrate Superman's capacity for selflessness and decency, any lingering doubts about Man of Steel's man-child are erased. We absolutely do not want to see this Superman killed by a Batman so lost that he has convinced himself that pulling the sun out of the sky is the right thing to do.

The deletion of Superman's path to this fight robbed Batman v Superman of its sense of tragedy. Martha Kent's rescue is not only the film's emotional climax now, it's the moment a bitter enemy redeems himself, finding purpose working alongside an altruistic superhuman whose last thoughts were of his mother. The chivalrous, Arthurian imagery present in the superfluous CG crescendo that closes the film has been given purchase in something other than an Excalibur poster outside the Wayne family's death cinema. They're the model for future films - Knights without countries finding common cause fighting for the ideals of a God that died for his adopted planet. Batman's promised Justice League seems less like an economic imperative and more like a logical progression from the moment an alien made Bruce Wayne feel small then ashamed.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice proposes confrontation. Given the title you might expect an extended, ideological clash between a God that has fallen to Earth and a man who has transformed himself into a monster. The tension between the two is crystal clear. One combatant has spent decades honing his mind and body, burning down every connection and relationship that didn't track into his all-consuming mission. The other is all-powerful simply because of a yellow battery that hangs above him.

Frank Miller, Lynn Varley and Klaus Janson's The Dark Knight Returns should be the key text here. It's alluded to incessantly. Panels are reproduced, lines from the comic and its sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again are quoted verbatim, but it's all lip-service. Screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S Goyer ignore either comics' nihilistic principles, arriving at a scenario about two corporate properties that have stumbled into each other's realms leaden with excuses. Neither Batman nor Superman is allowed to be truly insane, their passions are incessantly explained and organised until there is no room for a real conceptual leap.

This obsessive micro-management unbalances any sense of dramatic drive and weakens both characters. They aren't allowed to conceive their own motors, both of the superheroes are explicitly being manipulated. Ben Affleck's seething Batman does at least play with the aesthetics of damage, he looms silently like the Alien and sears his mark into sex criminals. We're given a taste of Frank Miller and Darren Aronofsky's abandoned Batman: Year One film project - a psychotic Bruce Wayne completely lost in his misery, lashing out - before everybody gets cold feet and we're treated to successive instances of the fantastical reaching out to Batman, condoning his holy crusade against the sky.

It's too much. Zack Snyder's film is choked with this kind of exposition, the same points reiterated over and over until we're all assured that everybody is acting in a way that will do no permanent harm to the brand. Dawn of Justice is a roadshow length hand wave, it reeks of compromise. It's clear Snyder wants to wring maximum violence out of his toys, the director using an Avengers moment to hurl DC's Trinity into their very own apocalypse. Snyder is reaching for sturm und drang - Batman armed with M60 machine-guns, exterminating lawbreakers - but ends up with something that isn't even as venomous as either Tim Burton's Batman or Batman Returns.

Dawn of Justice mishandles its own central conceit to such a degree that all the accumulated animosity is instantly washed away once the two sad little boys learn their mothers share common ground. It's like they were never even at odds. The film can't wait to race away from the truly wonderful idea of a puny human sealing himself inside a metal coffin to collide with a bullet proof deity just so it can segue into another impersonal animatic featuring a pug-faced troll.

Zack Snyder's film wants so very badly to be the vulgar, all-consuming nightmare at the end of the superhero trend, the third Miracleman trade plucked apart and reassembled alongside stray pages from Walter Simonson's contribution to Batman Black and White; Frank Miller in tow, punching up the dialogue. Unfortunately, it's stuck being the launch platform for all of Warner Bros' future summers. Dawn of Justice then is an uneven product perched upon shaky architecture that thinks it can wash itself in a hundred million dollars worth of pulverised concrete and come up smelling important.