Zack Snyder Loves Superman, And 'Batman V Superman' Proves It
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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.
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.
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).
Thus if Man of Steel was very much mindful of Superman’s roots in Jewish religious history and the story of Moses (and the parallels are pretty clear, as they were in Superman’s actual comic book origins and history), Batman v Superman brings the character into the more common modern representation as a messianic Christ-figure. (This is, by the way, one of many examples of how Snyder’s Superman movies provide an overarching representation of Superman’s history and changes in comics over the decades, a point I touch on in my article about why Superman killing in Man of Steel was not unfaithful to the character.)
Batman v Superman isn’t mocking Superman’s idealism, it depends on it and uses it as the thematic basis for redeeming Batman and the entire world, and for leading us to the creation of the Justice League. The cynicism is intentionally framed as the world’s rejection of Superman, representing the modern real-life arguments about whether Superman is relevant and relatable to our real world, and the claims by a lot of people that Superman can’t be interesting because of his goodness and idealism. Batman v Superman argues that in a world with so few good guys who remain good, with so many reasons to give up and stop having faith, Superman’s idealism is more important than ever, more relevant than ever.
Batman doesn’t brand Lex Luthor in the end, notice. It’s a small thing, but it’s a hint that he is trying to change, trying to get back to being the man he used to be. He’s not there yet, granted, and he’s struggling with it, but he sees what must be done and his cynical distrust of superhumans is giving way to a willingness to reach out to them and ask them to help defend humanity by working together for the greater good Superman represented.
That Batman kills while saving Martha, and that perhaps these sequence would’ve resonated more as an example of Batman re-embracing faith and hope (due to Superman) if he’d saved her without killing anybody, is a valid viewpoint expressed by my friend Sean Gerber of Modern Myth Media. If anyone feels that way and would’ve been happier with the sequence, I won’t argue that their view is wrong, and I think it is in fact a very solid alternative point. But this is actually worth taking a few moments to address as an aside, since it relates to the point about Batman changing his behavior again after years of getting more cruel and violent due to the world changing him.
It’s important to note Batman is fighting a ticking clock to save Martha, and that this is frankly a world where there may not be any absolute “no kill” rule for Batman. After all, only ONE previous modern Batman film had a strict “no kill” rule — of the seven previous films starting with Batman in 1989 and continuing through The Dark Knight Rises, Batman killed directly or indirectly in ALL of them except Batman & Robin. In this new film, Batman v Superman, he only actually directly kills one person, the guy in the pickup truck firing the machine gun at the Bat-plane.
I’d note Batman shoots up the ground for several seconds, fair warning he’s going to shoot that truck, and the guy has a chance to clear out of the way and save himself but refuses. It’s notable that, if you watch the scene via the trailer and pause it right when the Bat-plane’s bullets strike the truck, the guy is in fact GONE. The truck is hit, blows up and flips in the air, and we never see the outcome, so the film sort of leaves it up to the viewer to interpret it as either “Batman just blew that guy up,” or — for those who are willing to suspend disbelief much farther to have mild plausible deniability — “Batman blew up that truck and the guys were all burned and critically injured but might not be dead since we didn’t see for sure, and maybe they were wearing body armor since Batman’s seeming skin-tight suit is armored.”
Anyway, I think we are supposed to assume those guys are likely dead, even if Batman never bothers to check. The point is, every other instance of someone dying is as a secondary outcome, a consequence caused by their own actions, not Batman directly killing them. Batman brands criminals, and other criminals sometimes kill those people in prison. Batman sees a thug about to toss a grenade, so Batman shoves another thug into the first guy and causes him to drop the grenade — the thug then tries to grab the grenade instead of running or rolling around the corner, and Batman can’t be said to have psychic ability to predict the future and how people will respond, so all he did was knock a guy backward who was about to toss a grenade. If that’s “murder,” then so was Batman setting fire to a room full of explosives at Ra’s house and leaving all those ninjas inside when it blew up.
Notice, by the way, this is about actions in service of good — saving Martha — and the consequences of actions arising from other factors. That’s a recurring theme in the film, and here Batman is taking actions to save Martha, that’s his intention, and to act on behalf of saving her within the few minutes of time he has left he is willing to accept consequences of his actions that might not be what he fully intends.
Which brings us to Batman shooting the flamethrower’s gas tank. Batman does NOT blow that guy up. Instead, Batman has a machine gun and could shoot the guy, but instead he sees the man will use the flame on Martha and so Batman choose to shoot the tank powering the flamethrower. This prevents the flamethrower from working, and the guy can shut off the flame and give up. But what happens? The guy turns the flame toward Martha, trying to fire it, and so the gas ignites in the air and blows up the tank. Batman dives atop Martha and protects her. This is no different from Batman diving at Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight and knocking Dent off the ledge. Batman in that scene was trying to act to save the boy’s life rather than leave it to chance, and he knows his action could cause Harvey’s injury or death — this is a major theme of that film, Batman and whether the Joker can force Batman to compromise his “one rule.” And the spirit of that rule is indeed broken at the end, a bittersweet and tainted victory for Batman.
My point is this: Batman does not in fact murder a bunch of people in Batman v Superman. Several people die as a side-effect of Batman’s actions, when those people making choices leading to their own deaths. Only once, when he shoots that truck and it blows up, can it be said Batman literally, demonstrably, directly killed someone (even if it leaves mild room for the grasp-at-straws interpretation that it’s like the A- Team TISI +NaN% and those guys somehow survived). In that instance, I’d say Batman in this film doesn’t have a strict “no kill” rule clearly defined yet, he is still transitioning back to the hero who has faith and hope, that he gave the truck guy time to get out of the way instead of continuing to fight, and that Batman didn’t have time to risk fighting with those high-caliber machine guns when the clock was ticking down to Martha’s death.
That’s the main hope and faith Batman is demonstrating — he will save Martha, he will not fail Superman when Superman has put his own mother’s life in Batman’s hands based on that promise. Batman went from trying to kill Superman, to seeing Superman as a hero with a mom in danger and in need of rescue. Batman will over time become more of the hero he used to be, and avoid killing outright, I believe, with rare exceptions similar to in the comics (like when fighting some alien animal/monster threatening to mass murder people). That’s why he doesn’t brand Lex Luthor at the end of the film, that’s why he says he won’t fail Superman in death, and that’s why he wants to form the Justice League.
Zack Snyder honors Superman’s history and legacy in this film, by having the goodness and idealism of Superman dominant as an idea debated and argued throughout the story, until ultimately that idealism and goodness are what saves the world and becomes a great sacrifice to convince us all to have hope and faith again. Batman and the other heroes will be inspired by that goodness, that idealism, that sacrifice, and eventually Superman will of course return to life and join the other heroes.
Anyone arguing that these themes don’t exist, that Batman v Superman fails Superman, and that Zack Snyder “hates Superman” are simply not paying enough attention and are ignoring the most important and clearest narrative arc in the entire movie. It’s not coincidence that these scenes, this dialogue, and this overarching connectivity exists, nor that the characters’ arcs mirror one another, comparable and contrasting at different moments. I think a large part of the disconnect some reviewers and viewers feel toward this film arises directly from the fact the film presents interpretations and incarnations that don’t directly fit into any single purist preference for “the right way” to portray them. If you have only one Superman or one Batman you like, and/or if your conception of them lacks room for the other many interpretations over the decades, and/or if you are opposed to seeing a cinematic adaptation that actually attempts to reflect MANY eras and approaches to these characters, then that’s frankly going to affect your viewing experience and your opinion of this film.
Which is of course fine, since everyone is entitled to their opinion and to their preferences. No one preference is better than another, and we shouldn’t defend this film in a way that claims other people’s preferences and views are “wrong” or “not true fans” and so on. But what we can say, and what I think we in fact MUST say, is that this film’s interpretation and approach are likewise as valid as any other, are faithful to the comics, and do have deeper themes and characterization that give lie to any simplistic claim that it “hates” Superman or lacks substantive examination and representation of what Batman and Superman stand for.
These things exist in the film, they are important to understanding it, and Zack Snyder and the writers took pains to present this story and provide those themes. And any serious assessment of the film should recognize this, and address it, otherwise those reviews and assessments are quite frankly shallow in their examination and very mistaken in their conclusions.
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