WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Reviews for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice started landing online earlier this week - read ours here - and the vast majority of them have not been kind. One of the issues that many critics have cited is that Ben Affleck's Batman kills (A LOT), something which flies in the face of one of the characters' traditional principles.
There were lots of things I liked about Affleck's take on the Dark Knight, but Batman killing was a massive problem for me when I watched Batman v Superman. While there are a multitude of explanations I'd be willing to accept for him doing that, Snyder's justification is not one of them.
It's one thing to kill someone by not saving them, a la Ra's Al Ghul in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. It's quite another when Batman shoots at people with huge machine guns, and there are two instances in the film where he does exactly that. Make no mistake; Batman is absolutely directly responsible for murdering many criminals in Batman v Superman.
Snyder saying that Batman "would say that that's not really my problem" when "bad guys are associated with things that happen to blow up" does not make any sense to me. In fact, it actually paints the Caped Crusader in an even more unhinged, psychopathic light when he's supposed to be one of the most resourceful and smartest men in the DC universe. It's going to be really interesting to see how public audiences react to this new interpretation of Batman once the film is released next week.
Directed by Zack Snyder and starring Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Gal Gadot, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeremy Irons, Laurence Fishburne, and Amy Adams, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will arrive in UK and US cinemas on March 25, 2016.
Images: Warner Bros.
