but in the context of the DCU movies, superman's character is basically nothing (what does he stand for? what does he want to accomplish?) and batman is low key a villain. I'm sorry but that's just a terrible direction to take your two headliners that are about to start your multi billion dollar movie universe. Judging purely off the lex luthor we were presented with in this movie, he seemed like a mentally unstable psychopath that did things seemingly at random. if you take away the core of what these characters should be and only look at what we are presented in this movie then that's even more shallow.
were they actually attempting to make a super hero movie without any heroes?
I find them heroic, but flawed and imperfect ones. For Supes we saw how his upbringing and his battles in MoS may have led him to being more tentative. Then when he went to actually explain himself to the Senate panel on Caiptol Hill... BOOM. How many people were killed just because he decided to heed the call of Congress? I could imagine if he thinks "Damn, I just can't catch a break" at this point.
As for Bats, other than his parents' murders and the deaths of his friends and employees in the Zod fight, his background is more implied as of now. We presume Robin was killed by Joker (I honestly didn't even catch that was a Robin suit at the time), and he's seen some REAL **** in 20 years of fighting crime, but I think we're gonna see flashbacks in the solo Bats movie that'll show it's been even worse than we can imagine. And then when you add in the Knightmare prmonition of how bad it could all become, jeeez, Bats is looking at some literal hell on earth in his future when the Big Bad rolls into town.
These first two movies show the building of heroes. I dig it. It requires more trust and emotional investment than stand-alone 3-act good guy stories. Almost like a larger scale episodic story.
at building of heroes, they KILLED superman
