The good:
- Great, highly enjoyable action sequences. Ever since Superman Returns I've been wary of superhero movies skimping on action, and I'm glad this one didn't (even though the first half is kind of slow).
- They acknowledged the destruction caused in Man of Steel (the entire opening where you see Metropolis being destroyed from Bruce Wayne's perspective was one of the highlights of the movie, IMO.)
- Good performances all around. I didn't even mind the psycho Lex Luthor, and to some extent I would disagree that he is a Joker clone. Joker was the one who dictated how all his social interactions unfolded; he was confident and had a commanding presence. This Luthor was incredibly awkward and came off as a try-hard, which I thought actually worked for his character.
- Loved the design of both the Batmobile and the Batwing. I actually really liked that instead of driving through a series of near-misses and close scrapes, the Batmobile was bumping into shit and literally smashing through obstacles. It looked very much like what a video game version of those scenes would play like. So did most of Batman's battles, for that matter. I dug that.
- This time Supes made an effort to take the immediate threat as far away from civilians as possible.
The bad:
- What the fuck was up with that dream sequence? It had no connection to anything that happened in the rest of the movie, it was incredibly confusing (my dad actually suspected at the time that they were projecting film reels out of order) and it contributed nothing. An army wearing Superman armbands? Flying wasp people? A "kryptonite is actually green light bulbs" fakeout? WHAT THE FUCK is this shit? And to top it off, just when you think it's over they pull the "dream within a dream" bit for no reason. That whole sequence should have been cut.
- Holy fuck, were the Justice League character intros forced. Entire sequences of watching main characters click on videos just to see snippets of familiar characters doing a few seconds of random shit was super-weird. Had they just left the superhero logos visible on the other files we would have gotten the message without having to have been sidetracked with pointless garbage.
- Minor nitpick, but after having seen Luthor's Asian henchgirl in several scenes, it was kind of jarring that he just allowed her to be blown up as part of his plan. I mean, I get it, he's psycho, but why go through the effort of featuring her in so many scenes just to have her killed off with no acknowledgment? Rubbed me the wrong way.
- The whole thing with Luthor's blood mixing with Zod's corpse in a Kryptonian pool to produce Doomsday was not very well explained. At all.
- So Batman (with the help of Kryptonite, natch) gets the upper hand on Superman, and is about to deliver the killing blow when Supes asks him to "Save Martha", sending Batman into a momma's boy frenzy that turns him into BFFs with Superman. That seemed a bit far-fetched to me. What if their moms hadn't shared the same first name? "Save... Shiela..." "Save who?" (Plunges Kryptonite spear into Superman's heart)
- Jesus Christ, how about alittle bitof levity? Somebody crack a fucking joke already!
Also, maybe I'm just a perv but it occurred to me during Lois' bath scene that somebody must have been in charge of CGing her nipples out of the shots. I mean, those puppies werereallyclose to the surface... Heck, whose bathtub is directly in front of the front door anyway?