Post positive reviews

[johnnygobbs]

I know I've been pretty down on this film, based on what I've read and heard, much of which has confirmed some of my pre-release fears, but I do want to like this film (and hopefully will when I finally decide to see it).  Thus, I think it's time to look for and post positive or mostly positive reviews and articles from across the web on the movie.  Here's one I found, which I discovered due to its (positive references) to Batman Returns:

http://www.mtv.com/news/2858788/at-least-zack-snyder-knows-batman-is-deranged/

Why the B v S director's interpretation best captures the deranged spirit of the Dark Knight

by Ira Madison III

Batman is a violent psychopath. He's shot villains in their sleep and starved someone to death. The idea that he doesn't kill his opponents is a fairy tale cooked up by Cold War–era pitchfork wielders. In 1954, the Comics Code Authority was formed to censor depictions of sex, gore, and violence in comic books. While horror titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror bore the brunt of censorship, Gotham City fell under the chilly hand of the CCA as well...

March 1955's Batman #90 marked the first issue to be affixed with an "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" stamp. Prior to that, Batman was a murderous son of a bitch. He was a gun-toting maniac auditioning for the lead role in Death Wish. He even lynched a mental patient in his 1940 debut issue. So, sure, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is one of the most critically reviled films to come out in a while. But that reception is unwarranted. The characterization of Batman in this film might have been the best since Batman Returns. Ben Affleck beautifully plays Bruce Wayne as equal parts cocky playboy and a man haunted — a man who refuses to give up his obsession with justice. This isn't the Christopher Nolan Batman who implausibly retired between films because he lost a lover. This is a man who can never stop putting on that mask because he has yet to extinguish his demons. Zack Snyder can be an aggrandizing director who has produced multiple films deserved of detestation, but if there's one thing Snyder understands, it's that Batman is a f***ing nut job.

There's a reason the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne are ingrained in the memories of anyone who's ever experienced a drop of pop culture, right alongside Darth Vader being Luke Skywalker's father and Spider-Man learning that with great power comes great responsibility. It's because we can't ever get a Batman movie without a flashback to their goddamn murders, but it's also because Bruce Wayne himself can't stop thinking about it. It's an event in Wayne's life that is so traumatic, so haunting that it turns him into the kind of man who dresses up as a bat and prowls the streets. You know who else has this kind of origin story? Supervillains. Every villain in every comic book since the dawn of time experiences a significant and traumatic moment in their life that eventually manifests itself in a murderous rampage. The last director to truly understand Batman was Tim Burton. In his masterpiece Batman Returns, Burton depicts damaged — and deranged — characters who unravel from personal trauma and target their tormenters. The Penguin targets the rich people who turned away a monstrous, deformed child and left him to die in a sewer. Catwoman's modus operandi is besting misogynists at their own game. And Batman sits in his high castle, sealed off from most of the world, except when it comes to picking off criminals one by one. Just like the villains he fights, it was a triggering event that led to his masked exploits. He's not an alien sent to protect Earth like Superman. He's not an Amazonian warrior like Wonder Woman. He wasn't already wearing a mask and using his powers irresponsibly until taught the error of his ways like Spider-Man. Batman suffered a breakdown after his parents' death, got cozy with a bunch of winged rodents, and decided to get like them in order to avenge his parents.

The opening sequence of Batman v Superman is Snyder's thesis on Batman. The brutality of depicting Martha Wayne being shot in the throat by a criminal and young Bruce fleeing his parents' funeral only to be lifted to the sky by a horde of bats is fantastic, twisted, and right out of Burton's playbook. There were complaints about Batman's carelessness for human life in Snyder's film, but why would we expect otherwise? He's a vigilante. He wears a mask to conceal his identity and answers to no one. For all of Batman's beef with Superman for having the ability to wipe out the planet on a whim, Batman brutalizes his own victims and brands them. The brand itself is a brutal act, but we're also told that the mark is considered a "death sentence" in prison.

Imagine for a moment that superheroes are real. Imagine that they dole out their own brand of street justice and protect us from psychotic and sociopathic criminals. Now remember that whenever a superhero accidentally kills someone or isn't able to save a life, we see scenes of them shedding tears over their mistakes, like when Spider-Man can't save Gwen Stacy or the Hulk levels an entire African village. But in reality, this is a man wearing an insane mask and costume operating outside of the law and allowing someone to die. In his book I Wear the Black Hat, Chuck Klosterman compares Batman to Bernhard Goetz, the man who shot four muggers on a New York subway in 1984. Taking that a step further, we live in an age where police are routinely in the news for murdering unarmed black men. If men who are charged to serve and protect can become overzealous and lose control, why can't a playboy with a savior complex dress in a cape?

The notion that he can't plays into the fantasy of the superhero who has to save the day and somehow manages to do so without any effort. In the campier versions of the Batman films, Joel Schumacher shows Batman knocking out villains with one punch while saying awful puns like "I'm putting you on ice" to Mr. Freeze. That works for Spider-Man, because he has super strength. But Batman is just a man. We see that even more in Batman v Superman when he pushes himself to the brink while training for his Superman fight. Bruce Wayne the man knows he can be broken. In fact, one of his opponents, Bane, did exactly that in The Dark Knight Rises. The Nolan films, however, had Batman in humongous, bulky gear that made it seem like he was indestructible. Snyder returns him to a sleeker costume (save for the Superman fight), because no one can run around the city with all the extra weight and not collapse from exhaustion. And when you're in hand-to-hand combat with criminals who possess the same strength as you, you're not going to knock them out with a single punch. You're going to have to keep going until you stop them, even if that means taking a life — and several city blocks — with you.

Take, for instance, James Bond: a man licensed to kill by his government. He stops murderers, terrorists, and assassins with a bullet if necessary. But we demand that our American hero be above that, even if he's as self-possessed as the monsters he fights. It's a fantasy that works for Superman. With his massive abilities, there's no reason for him to have leveled a city and killed innocent bystanders the way he did in Man of Steel. But for Batman, sometimes, we need to let him be a monster in a world where "zap" and "pow" won't appear over a criminal's head when he punches them.

[The Laughing Fish]

Here is one positive review by film critic Armond White. Though apparently, this guy isn't very well liked because he tends to hold contrarian opinions to the majority, and delivers them in an inflammatory manner. I don't have time for critics, and I don't like this guy either because he once heckled several directors during an awards ceremony. Not cool.

Batman v Superman Returns Soul to Superheroes

Zack Snyder dares to infuse the comic-book genre with moral and political substance.

Fanboys do not own the franchises of Batman and Superman movies, so director Zack Snyder went against the mob and dared to raise the genre to a level of adult sophistication in 2013's Man of Steel, the most emotionally powerful superhero movie ever made. (Fanboys hated it.) Snyder's sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice adds politics, bringing to the fantasy some contemporary, real-world concerns. This is not conventional comic-book allegory; rather, Snyder uses the figures of Batman (Ben Affleck) and Superman (Henry Cavill) walloping each other to give visible substance to social and moral issues, much as Greek tragedy does. He takes the wildest, Bizarro World fiction — of two superheroes turned super foes — and uses the premise to explicate our current dilemmas concerning power, principles, and divinity.

It helps that Snyder is also visionary, inclined to extravagant spectacle and gifted with a signature erotic touch. An early montage equates violence, wealth, loss, and grief through symbolic images of bullets, pearls, blood, and tears. It is witnessed by the young Bruce Wayne, a paranoid orphaned millionaire who misconstrues Superman's involvement in the previous film's battle that devastated Metropolis (and traumatized nearby Gotham City), and so he vows a vigilante's revenge. With its legal-brief title, Batman v Superman reflects the confusion that pits secularists against believers, and the partisanship that inhibits national alliance. This tension is so visually amped up that the opposition of Batman to Superman feels revelatory: Man versus the god in Man.

Snyder's opening sequences interweave the origin stories of these mythic heroes and their alter egos. What has become overly familiar through years of repetition acquires new dynamism — and new understanding — that particularizes and personalizes each wounded man's suffering. Not only are these time-shifts audacious (movie marquees announce the 1940 The Mark of Zorro and the 1981 Excalibur — implying the evolution of history), but so is Snyder's proposition about the nature of heroism and vengeance: Both stem from the way individuals react to and comprehend their experiences. Snyder's thrillingly intelligent use of interior conflict and political antagonism vastly outclasses Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises — all noxious — which were bellwethers of our culture's decline.

Fanboys prefer the Nolan films for their "darkness," which emphasized the sophomoric, pseudo-tragic elements of the Batman graphic novels. But Snyder's more adult treatment finds the material's emotional core. This displeases the fanboy/hipster whose adolescent embarrassment about feelings was exploited through Nolan's emotionless violence and post–9/11 nihilism. Snyder counters that cultural crisis and (through the script by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer) visualizes the millennial moral struggle as pop myth. His essential subject is mankind's struggle to discover compassion as well as common obligation — or dare I use the non-political term: brotherhood?

The pain of post–9/11 as reflected in Nolan's Batman films was a paradigm shift. But fantasy cannot conscientiously be enjoyed Nolan's way, without any sense of social, historical, or moral consequence. Snyder manipulates this new paradigm so that mankind's sense of mortality is embodied by Batman, Superman, and their arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor. (All three characterization performances are, well, perfect.) When Superman's motives are questioned, the skepticism and vilification create an antagonism between him and Batman that Snyder lays out as an ideological conflict and that Luthor exacerbates. Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and thus personifies the craven millennium) cynically whines about "The oldest lie in America: that power can be innocent." He even threatens a senator (Holly Hunter) who heads an investigation into Superman's guilt. Luthor's obsession with Superman ("He answers to no one. Not even, I think, to God") reveals envy that is unmistakably demonic; a development that coheres with Snyder's spiritual-social vision of post–9/11 grief and desire for salvation. He creates the year's first great movie image by examining Superman's "divinity" when he is surrounded by Day of the Dead multitudes. The image echoes our current desperation regarding "populism" — and that's truly audacious.

Among today's outstanding American filmmakers, Snyder has an eccentric interest in the spiritual expression of his characters' conflicts. From the erotic antiquity saga 300 to the anthropomorphic fable Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, Snyder demonstrates a caricaturist's knack for elaborating Good vs. Evil. It takes just such dreamlike moral clarity to reprove the Nolan trilogy's chaos. Look at Snyder's second high point: Batman's nightmare of battling Superman plus his own enigmatic demons imagined as Stymphalian wasps. The scene spins agonizingly slowly (though not in slow motion), becoming ever more hallucinatory. It fuses comic-book imagery to the oldest Western myths.

In this age of petty Marvels, most comic-book movies merely perpetrate fantasies of power, but Snyder, enacting his personal aesthetic, braves a film that examines those fantasies. He boldly challenges popular culture's current decay. Man of Steel was a magnificent, hugely satisfying response to what's often missing in pop culture, and Batman v Superman raises more ideas without (yet) resolving them. An attempt to invoke other superheroes from the DC Comics stable, starting with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, accompanied by tribal drums that recall Snyder's overawed feminist fantasia, Sucker Punch), ultimately goes unfulfilled. And Snyder, obliged to placate the Marvel hordes, lets a couple of fight scenes devolve into Avengers-trite turmoil.

Still, the equation of moral myth and contemporary political catastrophe marks an important advance. Snyder intends to resolve the conflict between commerce and art, power and morality. "Knowledge with no power is paradoxical," one character says. "Man made a world where standing together is impossible," frets another. With Batman v Superman, the battle for the soul of American culture is on.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433246/batman-v-superman-culture-war-gets-mythic

[BatmAngelus]

Posted this in the Spoiler thread but thought this was worth adding since it made me see the parts I already liked in a new light and has a heartfelt message on applying the movie's themes to real life.

[The Laughing Fish]

I thought I'd share this ***SPOILER FILLED*** positive review from Forbes.com. Ignore the part where the writer said he already wrote a review, I've read it and it's nothing but box office estimates. This is his real review and analysis of the film.

Zack Snyder Loves Superman, And 'Batman V Superman' Proves It

by Mark Hughes

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has sparked a great deal of debate among fans, critics, and audiences. The film broke records with its massive $420 million worldwide opening weekend, the largest ever for a superhero film and fourth-largest global opening of any sort of film in history. Some audiences — notably, the under-18 crowd and parents, as well as most 25-and-under viewers — gave it very high scores and are recommending it to family and friends, while overall audience scores averaged out to a "B" at Cinemascore. The critical reviews at Rotten Tomatoes have been highly negative, with a 29% overall score. My own review is very positive, as I loved the film and feel the negative reviews are wildly off-base.

One of the loudest complaints from some critics and fans has been the claim that Zack Snyder hates Superman, and that Batman v Superman proves it. This assertion hinges on such a dramatic misreading of the film, I'm frankly stunned that even some otherwise typically smart and insightful writers have bought into this myth and perpetuated it. So now, I'm going to completely debunk the claim, and explain to you how Batman v Superman in fact makes Superman's goodness and idealism the centerpiece of the story, and how Zack Snyder clearly loves Superman's character and honors him in this film.

Be warned, I'm going to discuss a lot of spoilers in this article, out of necessity. So if you've not seen Batman v Superman yet, read no further — but go see the film, and then come right back and finish reading!

The gist of the "Zack hates Superman" claim is, Superman is disliked and distrusted by society, is shown to be reckless and ineffective, is too brooding, and is widely mocked throughout the film. Perry White tells Clark Kent, "It's not 1938, apples don't cost a nickel," Batman beats Superman into submission, sneering that Superman's parents probably told him he was sent here for a reason. Superman tells Lois the "S" on his chest was a symbol of hope on his world, but that his world doesn't exist anymore. These, then, are the examples of supposed proof Snyder hates Superman — the Perry White speech gets the most play when this argument is put forth, because it seems the clearest literal example of the film disparaging Superman's idealism.

And of course, that's precisely what it is, as is Batman's violent attack against the Man of Steel and his little speech to him; as is the world's skepticism in the film, and the anger so many characters feel toward Superman. Yes, those things are all meant to criticize Superman and what he stands for. The trick is, you're supposed to realize they're all wrong, because that's the actual point of the movie — everyone mocking and criticizing Superman is wrong.

The world is cynical, skeptical, and jaded. War, poverty, violence, hatred — these are the daily realities for so many people, and even those in positions of so-called power realize how helpless they are to stop most of it. Lex Luthor's remark about a person with knowledge being smart enough to realize they are powerless in the world is a crucial hint into his own psyche and how the scars of this lesson were beaten into him from a young age, for example. He articulates a truth, a knowledge about the powerlessness of mankind in the face of our own destructive impulses, and that we pretend toward power and knowledge to shield ourselves from those realities.

Bruce Wayne knows this as well. His entire arc is that of a man whose life is defined by feeling powerless, beginning as a child watching his parents murdered in the street for no reason at all and growing up to dedicate his life to fighting crime as Batman. He became a gardner, pulling up weeds in a garden already overrun by them, and now as an aging man he faces the harsh truth of his ineffectiveness, of the terrible losses despite his best intentions and best efforts. He has the knowledge to understand now that he's always been powerless, that he never escaped that alley where he watched helplessly as his parents died. That's why he's become cruel, more violent, crossing lines he didn't cross before. The world didn't become better and safer, it just fought back twice as hard to remain corrupt, and so Batman keeps fighting harder in return, even as he feels his battle is hopeless in the end.

And now comes a man from the sky to put a fine point on all of it, a man who can stop suffering and injustice, a man of near limitless power. Superman holds up a mirror to Bruce, to Lex, and to the world, showing us what real power is, and showing us how the application of real power can be in service to absolute good if only we will allow it. But there was no Superman, no absolute good power, to rescue Lex from the abuse and perversions of his father, so why should the world now have a Superman? A good power that failed him, that left him to suffer, and that tries to represent hope in a world Lex sees as hopeless, is not a power he can trust or accept. It makes him all the more aware of his own powerlessness, and to overcome that feeling he will raise himself up like a God and drag the God down to the dirt, destroying the absolute good that Lex believes never existed in the first place.

Bruce meanwhile sees Superman in much the same way as Lex. There was no Superman to save Thomas and Martha Wayne, no Superman to help Batman pull up the weeds overrunning Gotham. Every "good" Bruce saw over the years, every person who supposedly fought for hope and justice, either died or became corrupted, or just gave up. He doesn't believe in absolute good anymore, and so all he can see in Superman is absolute power that cannot be trusted because it exists in a world too cynical and damaged to allow such power to be good. Superman is a symbol of all of Batman's failures, of his greatest fears come to life, and if all good has become corrupted eventually, then this absolute symbol of Batman's helplessness and failure cannot be allowed to exist anymore. Superman will be destroyed, because Batman has become another of the "good" people who couldn't remain good in a world this bad, even if he doesn't (yet) realize he is one of those people he was talking about.

Lex and Bruce represent the world itself, a flawed and distrustful place that feels unworthy of absolute good and so cannot let itself dare to hope such good really exists. Idealism has been replaced with cold disillusionment even among the youth who are far too inexperienced and immature to truly feel as faux-jaded and cynical-chic as they pretend to be. Power always, inevitably becomes corrupted and used to perpetuate inequality, violence, oppression, exploitation, and other ills in our world, we say. So we reject hope, we reject the idea of a common good, because it's not 1938 and apples don't cost a nickel and the "good ol' days" were never good for everybody after all.

Superman stands in stark contrast to that cynical world. He wants to be a symbol of hope, he wants to use his powers for good, he wants to inspire us to overcome our skepticism and learn to have faith again, to believe there will be good ol' days in our future after all. So he gets up every day and goes out to save us, to redeem us all by himself, even when we tell him to stop and to go home. Superman is idealistic, and Batman v Superman demonstrates this time and again.

Clark Kent/Superman notices Batman's vigilantism is mostly confined to the poorer neighborhoods, and that police mostly ignore Batman's actions precisely because his targets are primarily in those poorer areas. Clark wants to raise awareness, to give voice to those people, because he feels it is the responsibility of society to stand up for those who need mercy and whose voices are ignored. He's not just fighting for idealism and absolute good as Superman, he takes his lessons seriously and is trying to fight for the same idealism in his everyday life, and to inspire others to do so both as Superman and as Clark Kent.

When the world keeps questioning him, he says he will not stop fighting for what's right. Are there unintended side effects of his actions? Yes, but we know the real truth — those side effects are caused by humanity, either as a conspiracy precisely determined to undermine the world's trust in Superman, or as actual human reactions to Superman. When Superman intervenes around the world to help people, we all have a choice about how we can react. When countries choose to react with anger and violence against their own people, that is not because Superman's good actions were at fault, it is because he didn't fully appreciate how rotten humanity can be. He has faith in us, which is why he assumes we will eventually learn to have faith in him. He holds us in much higher regarded than we deserve, convinced in our basic goodness deep down in our hearts. The question is, will we be inspired to try to live up to his faith in us?

During the U.S. Capitol sequence, a crazed bomber destroys Congress to punish Superman and send the message that hatred and cynicism will always strike as long as Superman continues trying to inspire us. This is the moment where Superman's true doubt about his role on Earth begins. His doubts arise because he has thus far insisted he won't stop helping people and fighting for good, just because people blame him for side-effects caused by bad people. He cannot, he felt, predict such things and he cannot plan his actions based on assuming the worst in humanity — that's contrary to his entire purpose, obviously.

Now, however, he realizes that the bombing is just a symbol of a bigger problem. He didn't see the bomb that was right in front of him, he says, because he wasn't looking. He didn't assume the worst, he didn't believe the world when the world tried to tell him repeatedly that it was cynical and rejected hope. He didn't want to believe it, because he believed in his ideals. And he still does, but he no longer has the same level of faith that humanity can come to embrace his idealism too. He hasn't entirely lost faith, but he's struggling with it, and with the decision about how to respond. When Lois says the "S" is a symbol of hope to people, Superman replies, "It was on my world... but my world doesn't exist anymore," and he's not simply talking about Krypton. He's talking about the world he knew right here, the world as he saw it, the world he chose to have faith in during the film Man of Steel (a significant recurring theme in that film).

The question is simple: will the cynical world change him, or will he change the cynical world (the way Batman was changed by it, remember)?

Clark leaves, to think and explore his own heart and worldview. A Superman forced to confront his idealism amid a cynical world is not an abandonment of the traditional characterization, it is a reinforcement of it. It shows that yes, Superman can have his beliefs and idealism challenged, and in the end even in the face of a world that doesn't want to change Superman will refuse to give up on us. In Batman v Superman, he wonders about the consequences of his actions and whether it is possible to stand for absolute good when the outcomes can often inevitably created complicated side effects.

When Clark sees his human father, Jonathan Kent, we get a story about how faced with a rising flood threatening to wipe out the family, Jonathan helped dig a trench and block the floodwater's path. He was a hero for those actions, he saved the family farm, but the digging redirected the floodwater to another farm and destroyed it. Remember that this is in Clark's mind and memory, so when he asks his father if he ever got over the bad dreams about the unintended consequences, Clark already knows the answer, because this conversation is all about Clark talking to himself. His father says yes, he was able to live with the consequences of his actions because he found faith again when he met Martha.

What is this about? It's pretty straightforward, really — Jonathan couldn't refuse to act, to save his family, and he did so without any expectation that saving his family would create a flood of action elsewhere that harmed other people. The flood did that damage, not Jonathan, and all he could do – all any of us can do — is act to do good and save people when we see it. If we know possible consequences, then we must think through our actions and make sure to consider those consequences and how to either divert them or live with them and continue having faith. Love, and having a life to live that shows us why we must act to do good, helps us have faith in ourselves and in the world. Because however dark the world becomes, however hard it can be to accept consequences of our actions when we know we're doing the right thing but the world will blame us for it, we can have someone who makes it all worthwhile, someone who represents the good we know exists in this world. And that good is always, always worth fighting for.

Superman knows he cannot give up, knows he must always act and use his powers for good, and knows that Lois is the love of his life and represents all of the people who do look to him as a symbol of hope and goodness in the world. It is a simple message, but it resonates as clearly to me as anything in the film. So he comes back, and his return coincides with Lex putting his final evil scheme into motion. Lois is thrown off the building, but Superman is already back in town and saves her. He has come back, and immediately his choice to return presents him with a final challenge to his idealism — his mother will die unless he kills Batman.

It seems an impossible choice, and he remarks that no one stays good in this world, but this is clearly not literal since we see his true intention is to convince Batman to help him. He never tries to kill Batman, making it clear by literally saying it out-loud. In the end, he will die trying to convince Batman to help save Martha, rather than do Lex Luthor's bidding and murder a hero he (Superman) has finally come to understand as a good man being corrupted by a cynical world (something Superman has been struggling with himself, which is why he now understands Batman).

Batman's arc is that he finally is able to see Superman for who he is, as a man with a name and someone he loves and a mother he cares about. It's one thing to objectively know that a living being has parents and an identity they use day to day, but that doesn't mean we perceive them as a true person with whom we sympathize and empathize. Batman couldn't see Superman that way, because of all of the pain and fear and sense of helplessness obscuring his vision. That was stripped away in that moment when he had to cross the final line and kill Superman — standing over Superman, ready to deliver the fatal blow, Batman tells himself, "You were never even a man," a means of justifying the act. But instead, he stares down at a Superman rendered mortal and vulnerable, a man who's final words are a plea to save a mother, and the words, "Save Martha," resonate in Batman's brain for obvious reasons (it is his own mother's name).

That moment of confusion forces Batman to instantly relive his mother's death, to feel that helplessness again for the ten thousandth or millionth time, and then the confusion gives way to realization and understanding that Superman is indeed just a man with a life and a mother he is trying to protect, and Batman's world comes crashing down. He now knows that yes, he was the villain, he was another "good person" who didn't stay that way. He was standing astride a man who represented hope and goodness, blaming that man for all of humanity's failings and cynicism and hopelessness.

It's quite a thing to look into a mirror and see your greatest enemy staring back at you. That, it turns out, was Batman's true greatest fear, that instead of becoming a symbol to change the world, he had become another good person corrupted by that world instead. Now he knew it, without a doubt, and it almost drove him to murder a hero. Batman had to chose, in that moment, between continuing to be cynical and reject hope, or to have faith again and believe — having faith is something he hadn't done in a long time, obviously, but here now is a small bit of hope to cling to, a lifeline, and he grabs it.

Superman and Batman have come full circle now, two heroes embracing hope, having faith that good will triumph over evil, and committing to fight for that idealism. Superman gives his life for it, dying for this world because he had faith we were worth the sacrifice — a powerful absolute force of good dying for a flawed world, to try to save us from ourselves (which is what Luthor of course represents, the side of the coin where we cannot be redeemed, versus Batman as the side that can be redeemed).

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2016/03/29/zack-snyder-loves-superman-and-batman-v-superman-proves-it

[The Dark Knight]

Very good points well made in that analysis.

[Grissom]

Some positive review links:


http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice-20160322

Mostly positive, giving the film points for being bold and risk-taking in it's story:
http://kutv.com/news/entertainment/the-world-is-not-ready-for-batman-v-superman-dawn-of-justice

[The Laughing Fish]

Here is one analysis from somebody on Screen Rant who is praising Superman's arc in BvS, titled Batman V Superman: How Zack Snyder Told One of Superman's Greatest Stories.

Source: http://screenrant.com/batman-v-superman-best-story-movie/

The same author wrote another analysis on Batfleck, titled How Zack Snyder Finally Got Batman Right.

Source: http://screenrant.com/batman-v-superman-affleck-best-version/

[OutRiddled]

https://vipmovieclub.org/2016/06/04/why-batman-v-superman-is-the-greatest-superhero-movie-of-all-time/

[The Laughing Fish]

Some critics who were sorely disappointed by the theatrical cut were very impressed by the Ultimate Edition on this movie show called Collider. One of them said he felt really bad for Zack Snyder because his true vision for BvS had been "neutered" when it had to be condensed into two and a half hours, and claims he'll never watch the theatrical cut ever again.

[Dagenspear]

They weren't bought or biased like was implied by some.