I rewatched the Ultimate Cut last night and really enjoyed it. I didn't vote 'love it' because it does have some flaws, but I definitely like it.
Visually, it's really gorgeous in places, the music is amazing throughout and the first two acts are really solid. I think where it all falls apart a little is where they actually fight - and the battle that then ensues with Doomsday... it goes from really pretty and thoughtfully shot, to visually messy, subpar LOTR cave-troll stuff pretty quickly. Having said that, even for that battle, the crescendo moment where Supes takes up the spear and sacrifices himself is really really good.
I really like the use of the artwork hanging in Lex's office, the decay and overgrowth around Wayne manor, the batcave, the big containment centre built around Zod's ship... watching it again, I was kind of impressed by the scale of some of the sets, the compositing and artistry of some of it. People sometimes forget the planning and artistry that has to go in to making something like this, and maybe dismissively denigrate the work as a whole, but there are lots of nicely done things in this film.
It's got me quite excited for watching the Snyder Cut later tonight. The Knightmare sequence in particular got me excited - Batman being entrapped by the Injustice-style Superman-branded regime troops. Fucking brilliant. Seeing him fight while his allies are yanked in to the skies by parademons - it really makes me wonder how interesting and insane the DCEU could have gotten if WB had just stayed the course.
I actually really like Lois investigating the connections to Lex in this cut too. It seems a little bit clearer in the longer cut who works for who, who is aware of things and who isn't. That moment when Lois realises the guy in the wheelchair didn't know he was going to die at the capitol, that the chair was lined with lead - seemed much more effective to me in this cut. Just on account of her being a little bit more visible in the opening scenes, I was a bit more shocked at how ruthlessly Lex took out his own assistant Mercy too. A terrorism attack at the capitol also seemed a little bit more shocking, plausible and real given recent events. It kind of all comes to a head just as Lex's henchmen are cleaning up all traces that might link him to the crime(s) - including killing that poor girl in the subway. All of the stuff with the Russian guy (Anatoli Knyazev, played by Callan Mulvey) just loitering around, snatching people up or killing them kind of reminded me of the way gangster films are sometimes shot - just before someone gets 'whacked'. I think a bit more of that might have really helped emphasise what an insidious corporate gangster Lex is behind that weird angsty southern drawl and charm.
It's generally a little bit clearer what Lex is trying to do - it's easier to draw lines between the killings in the desert (designed to frame superman), the killing in the prison (designed to convince Kal-el Batman might need to be stopped), the returned cheques from the Wayne employee, the serendipitous invites to the library fundraiser, etc. I feel like it built up a little better to the payoff where Lex is flinging polaroids of Superman's mother at him, and proclaims something along the lines of "and now God bends to my will!". At the end of the day, this is a Lex that is frightened of the new status-quo, and the danger it represents to his criminal enterprise, to his obsession with power and control and his unwillingness to cede any of it, or to lose. By the end of the film he's been driven mad by it. I don't think any of that was a bad idea at all, it probably just needed more time to breathe. I think the film would have benefitted from more time exploring motivations like that, rather than having a big CGI battle and trying to shoe-horn Wonder Woman in there and set up JL - but it is what it is - and I enjoyed the film all the same.
I know this incarnation of Lex is hated by a lot of the fans, but I kind of liked the new take. Lex seems to have changed a lot in the comics over time... so I didn't find anything egregiously offensive about him. In fact, I think I kind of get what they were going for. Industrialists of their day were older men, but today, in this world of venture capital, CEOs can be much younger: Lex in this film is more like a Zuckerberg, Dorsey or Musk - it's no coincidence they picked the Social Network guy for the role. The hints towards an abusive upbringing are a suitable foil for a villain who stands opposite a God-like being who had near perfect, loving parents - and they've done that before in the comics, so that's not entirely new either. And however you feel about him, he does have some of the best dialogue in the film. I really like the paraphrasing of Epicurus' trilemma: if God is all powerful, he cannot be all good. If God is all good, he cannot be all powerful. Yknow, it obviously doesn't go any deeper than it has to, I'm not trying to claim it's doing anything superbly clever - but outside of maybe WandaVision and one or two of the better MCU movies, I can't think of another comic flick that actually attempts to pose some philosophical questions about what we are and how we would react to the spectacular phenomenon of super-beings, the physical and emotional collateral damage that they can do.
Superman - again, I know some people thought he was done dirty in MoS and BvS - but I liked him in these films. People say these films are dark and dour, polarisingly opposite to how they see Superman - but in these films I see a world that is like our own, dark and cynical, and a Superman who is rooted in defiant hope and in those ideals we know and love. I think it would have been really great to see this Superman - resurrected and leading his team in feats of heroism that give added meaning to that S on his chest. Winning over that cynical world. People suggest that Snyder must hate Superman or something, but I've no doubt they were leading to something. "They will join you in the sun".
The characters in this film are telling him "your parents probably told you you were special, you're not" - "you could stand for something if this were 1938, but this isn't 1938, WPA aren't hiring no more, apples don't cost a nickel" - they are questioning him and his motives constantly. The characters wring their hands over the ideas that making choices means not making others: when Perry runs a headline, he's choosing what matters and what doesn't. When Superman saves some people at the expense of others, he's choosing who lives and who dies. "In this world, every act is a political act". It haunts him. When he has a vision of speaking with his father and his father tells him about saving the farm but accidentally killing the neighbours horses - they have a shared experience in that even the God-man from Krypton can't save everybody - does that mean he shouldn't try? Ultimately, when he chooses not to kill Batman, when he protects Lex from the beast Lex-himself created, - when he chooses to go to his 'death' to save everybody else, he's made the same self-sacrificial choice Jonathan Kent made in the admittedly clumsy Hurricane scene from MoS. Ultimately, he IS special. He DOES have the power to save everyone. He knows he was right to save the kids on that bus in MoS - any every other person he saved - because that's how he was brought up and that that's just who he is. And he does it because he loves Lois too. I don't have a problem with any of that. I liked it.
Looking forward to watching JL later.
So yeah. I voted 'liked it'. I feel like it really stood up on a re-watch.