Darkfrog24

This movie had some very neat visuals, a few of them ripped right from the pages of some of Batman's most memorable comics, and the dynamic between Superman and Lois was great to watch. However, I kept waiting for the story to start. For all its explosions, this movie had me checking my watch.

For a movie that is explicitly about Superman and Batman fighting, it skimps on foundation for why they would fight. The source material has plenty.

While this is an improvement over Man of Steel (no weird birth scenes) I found myself comparing it to Superman Returns, which, for all its flaws, really felt like a Superman movie. The question of what gives Superman the right to interfere in human affairs, which is a major issue in Batman vs Superman, is there answered very simply--because people keep asking him to.

Although Wonder Woman held her own, I would have liked to have seen more of her character and less sexy posing in skimpy costumes.

If you have more than two dream sequences, you need a rewrite.

I was not expecting that movie to be that good as art. It helps that Dane DeHaan looks like a young Mark Hamill with Alex Russel as his guy-in-the-rough Han Solo. We see an on-screen transformation of both characters, Andrew into a supervillain and Matt into a human being.

This was how three teenagers would act if they suddenly had superpowers. It's full of joking and wonderfully knuckleheaded guy stuff. Visually, the flight effects can be awkward, but that did help contribute to the sense of acrophobia during the cloud scenes that we don't experience in most superhero movies. With Superman, we feel safe. With Andrew, Steve and Matt, we're waiting for the inevitable shoe to drop.

This movie is daring. It leaves out information and expository scenes that most filmmakers would assume was required. As we see at the end: It's not about the answers; it's that the characters have grown to the point where they're finally asking the right questions.

This isn't only a wonderful deconstruction of superpowers; it's also a commentary on the psychology of friendship and group dynamics. What the character Steve keeps trying to say is that Andrew just needed to find one thing that he was good at, and it DID NOT MATTER what it was. When Andrew stops thinking that he's a loser, so does everyone else--as we see in the wonderful scene when Andrew's mother asks him to say, "I'm stronger than all of this," on camera. We see that it's the first time he believes it.

So I saw Green Hornet today. I was really looking forward to it and it only disappointed a little. The main problem is that they made GH into too much of a manboy. He doesn't really contribute anything. He's not the brains of this outfit; Kato and Lenore do all the real work. They could've played him as the unwitting impetus to two people who then unlock their potential, but they didn't. They could have played him as Maxwell Smart--a screwup but actually good at his job--but they didn't. They could have worked more with the idea of the Hornet as a counterfeit criminal, but they didn't.

My favorite scene is probably the second one. I'm not so familiar with the original Hornet series that I remembered who the main villain was. The upshot is that an older, shabby-looking criminal boss walks into the well-appointed, well-guarded office of the new upstart who's been moving in on his turf. As these guys talk, we can't tell which one of them will kill the other and be the real bad guy of the movie.