Wow. What a strange and terrible movie.
The thing that hit me most was the way it had this weird, dream-like (but not in a good way) quality. It was like, I literally understand every word that the characters are saying. (The movie was in English after all.) But every time I tried to actually think "OK, what did that sentence just mean?" or "How does what's going on in this scene relate to something else that's happened in the movie?", I just had no idea. It was exactly that sense of untethered bafflement that you get in dreams: "Wait, I was on a boat earlier. How did I get on to this train? And why is my old high-school girlfriend here?", etc. etc. (Funnily enough, the last movie that I really remember coming away with that same feeling from was Batman and Robin.)
I think I concur with the general opinion that Ben Affleck is actually one of the better things about the movie, but in general a lot of the other creative decisions didn't work for me at all. I have no idea why they decided to play Lex Luthor the way they did. Now granted, I don't know much about him as a character beyond what's in Challenge of the Superfriends, but a kind of watered-down Joker mark 2 wasn't what I was expecting.
And then of course at the end
SPOILER
Showwhen Superman supposedly gives his life to destroy the Krypton monster, it just feels completely phony and hollow. For fuck's sake, we *know* he's not really dead because we've already seen the posters for Justice League. And then they milk it for several scenes, and this pointless melodrama just goes on and on. If you're gonna do that, you can't think the character's dead for more than like 10 seconds, like in The Avengers. And why didn't they just give the spear to Wonder Woman again?
Funnily enough, though it comes basically out of the blue (like everything else in this film), I did like the idea that the motivation for the Justice League comes out of Bruce Wayne's guilt over Superman's death.
And then there's all the weird God vs. Man stuff, which is clearly supposed to be an Important Theme in this movie, and which for me didn't come off at all. It's like the rest of the film actually, now that I think about it. It's amazingly somehow both heavy-handedly ostentatious and diffusely incoherent at the same time. People explicitly talk about it a lot. There's whole scenes about it. But I didn't get what point was being made. It's like they said "OK, God vs. Man is going to be a big theme in this film", but then never decided what, if anything, they actually wanted to say about this opposition.
So there's something about God, and absolute power, and absolute goodness. And maybe Superman can't be absolutely good until he's not absolutely powerful, which is where the kryptonite comes in. And then somehow this ties into courage, because Superman can't really do anything courageous, being invulnerable. But then Batman....and now my head hurts.
And then there's supposed to be something thematically relating to parents and children I think, but I understand that even less well than the God bullshit (as Howard Beale would say). Lucky both Superman and Batman's moms were named Martha though, right?
I do think though that they've maybe got something interesting to explore with Wonder Woman, even if I wasn't particularly excited about her scenes in the film. This idea that The Great War (aka The War To End War) caused her to give up on humanity could lend a *really* interesting perspective to that character. I would look forward to seeing that done well, though I have no confidence that it will be.
Anyway, at least the movie seems like it'll stick with me, even if it's in exactly the way that dream about talking hotdogs sticks with me. I guess that's something.