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  • I'm putting together a team, but with special abilities, you see, I believe enemies are coming, stop right there.

  • I'm in, you are now that the Justice League trailer is out and it has jokes, there's a lot of talk about DCs course correction as if the overly grim tone of batman V.

  • Superman was the key to why it wasn't that good of a movie.

  • But from my point of view, Zack Snyder could make Justice League an out and out comedy and it still wouldn't fix.

  • What I see is a more fundamental problem in his film making.

  • Something that's really apparent in batman versus Superman, his preoccupation, his obsession with moments, the expense of scenes.

  • What do I mean by this?

  • Well, let me start by saying this movie moments are awesome.

  • A really great moment can be transcendent.

  • They can leave deep, lifelong visual impressions on a filmgoer.

  • They can come to represent a whole new category of feeling.

  • That's why film geeks like me referenced them so much in conversation with friends when you're a film student, at least when I was a film student, that's what makes things exciting.

  • Most of the student films I directed revolved around a few moments that I thought were going to blow people away.

  • If I could just navigate the story there, that would be enough.

  • The moment would do all the work, then I just navigate to the next one.

  • For this reason my student films weren't that good Batman V.

  • Superman, Dawn of Justice I think suffers from a similar problem.

  • Zack Snyder is obviously obsessed with moments.

  • The movie is chock full of the moments when time is slowed down and the composition is just right.

  • Moments when the score swells in the film tries to broadcast a single message be off.

  • A lot of people talk about Snyder as a great visual stylist.

  • Well, of course he is.

  • That's where all the focus goes toward crafting moments.

  • They say his characters lack motivation.

  • Of course they do, because all character motivations are subservient to the film's own motivation to reach the next moment.

  • It makes sense then that Snyder puts extraordinary care into montages Twice in this film, the opening credits featuring Batman's origin story and at the 44 minute mark, spotlighting Superman's more impressive heroics.

  • We have slow motion moment montages.

  • There's something like 40 shots in these montages together and they all came to be iconic.

  • I think if Snyder could make a whole movie like this, he would, oh wait, he already did.

  • It's also why he favors dream sequences and flashbacks.

  • More excuses to show more moments.

  • What Batman V.

  • Superman really lacks is Sean's actual scenes not just filler between moments.

  • The scenes are hard to define, since they're so malleable.

  • It's hard to say what one is, but what a good scene does is dissolved.

  • The actors in the soundstage and the costumes and makeup and camera angle into a living and breathing reality, there should be a strong sense of place, a feeling of possibility that the characters who inhabit the space could go anywhere within it.

  • Even if they don't, even if you know that the technicalities of lighting and blocking wouldn't let them.

  • In other words, the discrete elements that make up a good scene should not feel like they're in service to something else even though they are too often in batman V.

  • Superman, the characters feel awkwardly placed in their scenes.

  • I mean, does anyone get the sense that Clark, Kent, Lois Lane or Perry White actually spend time as the daily planet.

  • We visit the daily planet eight times in the movie, but the longest scene there is only a minute and 11 seconds.

  • The rest are under a minute and half are under 30 seconds.

  • This doesn't feel like a place.

  • It feels like a fraction of a location where people say things like this.

  • When the planet was founded, it stood for something.

  • Perry the bat cave, Lewis and Clark's apartment, lex luthor's office, the Kryptonian ship all have the same issue.

  • And that's just about the extent of the settings that we visit more than once in the film.

  • What's more these scenes are filmed largely in medium shots, close ups or extreme close ups, which makes it even harder to ground the scenes or for the audience to ground itself within them.

  • And in all these places we spend an awful lot of time looking at screens, there's also very little distinction between metropolis and Gotham the two cities that sculpted their respective heroes.

  • If you're looking for a metaphor for the whole film.

  • Note the fact that one of the longest scenes takes place on an abandoned island between the two cities that the heroes completely destroyed.

  • Building a good scene isn't only about location, it's about fitting the dialogue, the tone and the characters into that location and endowing it with a sense of duration Avengers, age of Ultron from last year, it isn't a perfect movie, but there's a great story about how josh Sweden fought to keep the hawkeye farmhouse scene in the film That slow paced confidence seen runs for a full 16 minutes, right in the middle of the action when you're there, you're not waiting to go somewhere else.

  • You're they're learning about the characters and when those characters have their moments later in the film, they land with poignancy.

  • Of course.

  • Almost all films, especially superhero blockbusters are going to have exposition al scenes and scenes that set up future action and in great movies, all the scenes often work together to participate in an overarching tone or a complex message.

  • But great scenes function as their own little universes within a film.

  • And good movies should have plenty of them.

  • Batman V Superman runs for 2.5 hours with a heaping helping of big moments and yet I don't quite feel like I've been anywhere.

  • The scene is where aw is loaded into the chamber firing the gun without loading can only result in empty noise, a bang, but no impact.

  • I'm always hopeful about new superman movies because superman is so important to me, but I won't let some batman jokes and upbeat rock music fool me.

  • Lightheartedness isn't the basic problem that needs to be fixed here.

  • The overused and unearned moment is DCs greatest foe.

  • Hey guys, you know, I couldn't resist doing a video on Superman.

  • I just can't resist.

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I'm putting together a team, but with special abilities, you see, I believe enemies are coming, stop right there.

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