10 Reasons Why Batman V Superman Can’t Top The Dark Knight Trilogy

There are a lot of problems with Zack Snyder's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. A lot a lot. That doesn't mean it's completely without its merits, however: Ben Affleck's new Batman - the Batfleck, if you will - is a far cry from Christian Bale's wounded street fighter, and while this version of the character might hardly be faithful to the comics, the Batfleck is still one of the few aces that Batman V Superman has up its sleeve. As our own Isaac Feldberg put it, "Affleck, whose casting provoked a hitherto-unprecedented backlash from fans, is actually great." The Superman side of the movie may be lacking (and then some), but the ingredients for a solid Batman movie are there. The question is, though, how those elements stack up against the Caped Crusader's previous cinematic outing, and arguably his best yet - Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. Obviously, it was always going to hard for Snyder and Affleck to top what Nolan and Bale did with Batman. And try as they might, Nolan's trilogy still comes out on top. On that note, join us as we take a look at ten reasons why Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice doesn't quite top the Dark Knight saga. 10) Snyder Doesn't Know When To Limit His CGI You get the impression that Zack Snyder is very much a "we'll fix it in post" kind of guy. Ever since 300, which used copious green-screen to stylish effect, Snyder's live-action films have looked sterile at best, and like overly-slick, quasi-cartoons at worst. His latest, Batman V Superman, is lousy with CGI, its backgrounds so awash with pixels that it's rare you actually feel like the characters are living in a physical place. Where Snyder paints his movies with CGI in broad strokes, Christopher Nolan prefers to keep his films grounded - i.e. shot in real locations or on physical sets - where possible. The Dark Knight trilogy features giant props and model 'bigatures' in the place of CGI, lending a weight to his films that's sorely lacking in BvS. If Nolan's trilogy did use computer imagery, it was used sparingly. And there's a sense that "sparingly" isn't in Zack Snyder's vocabulary. 9) World-Building Partly thanks to Snyder's insistence on crafting his movie in post-production, there is a real lack of competent world-building in the director's work. Without physical structures for Snyder and his cast to work off of, there's an absence of personality in the environment they're playing in. In Batman V Superman, we don't really know what the make-up of Gotham and Metropolis is, other than that they're dark, grey and dense with skyscrapers. The Dark Knight trilogy doesn't have this problem. Christopher Nolan's Gotham has a recognizable, coherent aesthetic, because Nolan and his team chose to shoot in real cities like Chicago, London and Pittsburgh, lending Gotham an urban industrial vibe in-camera before embellishing in post. BvS's locations lack a sense of character in comparison, with Snyder seemingly never settling on what his world looks like. 8) Villains Snyder may have gotten his Batman right (though even that is up for debate; purists would argue Snyder's Batman isn't really right at all), but he certainly bungled the villains in BvS. Superman is dull and inconsistent (he's a pacifist that openly admits to thinking people deserve to be hurt), Lex Luthor is irritating and one-dimensionally evil, while the less said about Doomsday is the better. Compare these to the iconic figures Nolan presented us with in his Dark Knight trilogy. Cillian Murphy's alternately smarmy and deranged Scarecrow; Tom Hardy's rasping, brutish fundamentalist Bane; and, of course, Heath Ledger's nightmarish Joker. These are terrifying, immensely entertaining and superbly-developed villains, the kind of bad guys that could have injected some sorely-missed threat into BvS. 7) Nolan Handles Action Better There are action sequences in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice that do impress. Take, for example, Bruce Wayne's raid on Luthor's security team in pursuit of the chunk of Kryptonite, or the Superman savior montage, in which we see the Man of Steel coming to the rescue at locations all around the globe. These are the exception rather than the rule, however, as some lesser action scenes and the film's final, god-awful overblown battle prove. There are far fewer dud action sequences in the Dark Knight trilogy, for the simple fact that Christopher Nolan just knows how to do action better than Snyder. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises' opening raids are perfectly composed pieces of cinema, while The Dark Knight's mid-movie chase, culminating with that truck flip, is simply one of the great action scenes of last decade. 6) The Balance Of Characters In its worst moments, no one can say the Dark Knight trilogy isn't bloated, swollen by an ever-expanding cast list. The Dark Knight Rises is packed with characters big and small vying for screen-time; as impressive as the film is in terms of spectacle, by that point Nolan was spreading what he had a bit thin. But even the Dark Knight trilogy at its most excessive is less unwieldy than Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. With Snyder taking on two iconic superheroes with their own separate cast of characters in one movie, of course BvS was destined to be somewhat cumbersome. But Snyder doesn't stop at Batman, Superman and their immediate companions and adversaries - rather, he keeps adding more until the film is groaning under the weight. Did we really also need Wonder Woman, and Doomsday, and The Flash, and Aquaman, and... (you see where this is going?). 5) Humor (Or Lack Thereof) Christopher Nolan isn't the funniest filmmaker in town, granted, but his Dark Knight trilogy at least had some jokes. Good ones at that - remember Batman's absurd "Nice coat" line in Batman Begins, or his deadpan, "So that's what that feels like..." in The Dark Knight Rises? And The Dark Knight, with Heath Ledger's sociopathic gagster The Joker, basically qualifies as a black comedy for much of its running time. Batman V Superman, on the other hand, is near completely humorless. Snyder casting comedy stalwart (though he does seem to be sticking almost exclusively to drama these days) Jesse Eisenberg as a Joker-like Lex Luthor suggested there might be at least some jokes to come, but no. While Nolan dropped some funnies to lighten the mood now and again in the Dark Knight trilogy, BvS lags thanks to its own humorlessness. 4) Tone The near-complete lack of humor in BvS contributes to its overall severe tone, but it isn't the only reason the film is so oppressively dour. Nolan's Batman trilogy was dark, at times punishingly so, but it leavened the bleaker stuff with flashes of hope. It featured smaller, human moments, like the prison ship defying The Joker at the end of The Dark Knight or Batman apparently sacrificing himself for the good of Gotham at the close of The Dark Knight Rises. BvS unfortunately doesn't seem to have much time for hope. It's a harsh world in this new DC Cinematic Universe, with Batman ruling with an iron fist and criminals and civilians alike dropping like flies. Even the character of Superman doesn't appear to have any faith left in humanity anymore - then, by the end, he's been killed just because Snyder wanted to insert some more drama into the plot. 3) Conclusions, Conclusions Christopher Nolan deals in powerful, enigmatic, and sometimes downright shocking conclusions. It's a specialty of his to leave a viewer thinking or wanting more long after they leave the cinema. Take the way he neatly wrapped up Batman Begins while tantalizingly teasing The Joker's appearance in the sequel, the way he left The Dark Knight on that cliffhanger, or how he offered catharsis in the form of his long-suffering character's first real taste of happiness at the end of The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan knows how to end a movie. Zack Snyder, based on the evidence of Batman V Superman, doesn't have a clue. The city-destroying final battle is overly-long and tedious (he clearly didn't learn his lesson from Man of Steel), while the tease of Superman coming back to life at the very end of the movie - something faux-enigmatic clearly inspired by Nolan - is a complete fumble. We know Superman's going to be back for more movies, so any intrigue is immediately dissipated. 2) Hans Zimmer Hans Zimmer announcing he was "officially retired from the superhero business" post-Batman V Superman wasn't a great surprise. You can hear the composer's comic book movie fatigue all over BvS. Far from his best work, Zimmer's score on the film often sounds like a sludgy retread - and, at its worst, a parody - of his contributions to the Dark Knight trilogy. BvS is the sound of Zimmer uncharacteristically phoning it in. Compared with Zimmer's influential work on Nolan's Batman trilogy, which has helped shape the way modern blockbusters sound, BvS is no contest. The Dark Knight trilogy features a Zimmer score by-turns bombastic, frightening and oddly experimental. It's the kind of music a composer makes when he's completely in sync with the filmmaker and his ideas. 1) Christian Bale Ben Affleck makes for a fine Bruce Wayne. Good enough in BvS to banish memories of his woeful turn in Daredevil and then some, watching Affleck's turn as a brutish, sadistic Batman soured by years (maybe even decades) of trying to clean up the streets of Gotham is one of the purest pleasures of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Is his the definitive portrayal, though? Not quite. Try as anyone might, it's never going to be easy for anyone to top what Christian Bale did in Nolan's the Dark Knight trilogy. Convincingly turning Bruce Wayne into a sensitive, troubled, Howard Hughes-esque playboy billionaire, Bale set the bar for what a superhero performance could look like. Quite simply, no actor has brought more dimensions to the superhero character than Bale, and not even Affleck is able to challenge that.