BvS

Let's make a movie where Lex Luthor manipulates events where Batman fights Superman, but let's also make it convoluted as all hell.

The title is literally clickbait

>first justice league movie
>young boy lex
>old man batman
>2nd movie superman
>doomsday fight
>death of superman
>wonder woman
>rest of league on laptop
>lul

> convoluted

That is a four-syllable word for any plot too big for little minds.

>plot too big for little minds
There's your problem. Movies are for little minds by definition.
Great minds feed on books, not film, and never on capeshit.

>Africa happens
>people think Superman killed people with guns
>Batman gets upset
>Superman gets butt-hurt and depressed
Lois goes on some detective subplot (even though the audience already knows Lex is behind it
>Lois finds out about Lex
>this information is conveyed to Holly Hunters character from the black immigrant woman (making Lois's whole subplot unnecessary)
>Batman fins out it was one of his employees that blew up the capital building
>for some reason he gets mad at Superman about it instead of his shitty employee.
>Batman trains
>Superman gets sad
Lex spouts shit from a philosophy for kids book
>Lex kidnaps Martha
>Batman prepares to fight Superman
>Lex tries to kill Lois
>Superman comes back
>Lex tells Superman that he has to kill Batman or else his mother dies
>Superman needs Batman's help (for some reason Superman can't help his mom on his own)
>Superman shows up to get Batmans help
>Batman starts fighting with him
>Superman fights back because instead of worrying about his mom (which is incredibly out of character) he decides to punch batman a lot
>Superman gets surprised by kryptonite
>Batman almost wins the fight
>MARTHA!!!!

And I haven't even mentioned all the dream sequences or the JL videos or WW or any of the other convoluted horseshit from this film.

Lex Luthor ruined that movie. I mean, other factors might've ruined it on a smaller scale, but that was the worst possible Lex Luthor anyone could ever cast or write for even if you were actively trying to sabotage your own movie Producers-style. I think more than anything they failed to give him a real motivation, which is something you really need to do when it's the primary antagonist of your entire film. His attempted "motivation" in this film was something along the lines of "I'm going to make repeated references to a God metaphor." And even though that's not a motivation and pretty obnoxious to write into your film, they even could've done a lot better with that same idea by actually showing some indication that their Lex character had legitimate reason to resent gods instead of what they did which is just have Lex tell the viewers he doesn't like God because God didn't stop his dad from beating him, something he says as a two second aside out of nowhere without any sort of emotional impact delivered.
The entire movie is premised on him hating Superman so much that he schemes to get him killed by forcing him into a fight with Batman using his mom as a hostage, so it's completely unforgivable that his motivation is bouncing back and forth between non-existent and retarded.

>non-existent and retarded.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This. DC ruined their shot at portraying both Lex Luthor and the Joker, probably the two most iconic comic book villains of all time.
Their universe is already fucked.

It wasn't even that hard of a part to do right. Joker getting screwed up with Leto was more understandable for example because it's easy to go overboard with edginess like he ended up doing, but I wouldn't have believed anyone even could mess up Lex Luthor until I saw BvS. All you need to do is give him a money based incentive for being a villain or if you really want to do the "I hate Superman because he's better than humans" bit then you can do a scene or two with Superman drawing attention away from some PR stunt for Lex Corps so you show and don't tell how he's resenting Superman. Most children's cartoons and comics involving Lex Luthor are able to pull this sort of thing off without trouble, they could've tried checking out one of those versions of him for ideas.

t. brainlet

Nobody thinks Superman killed people with guns, Lois investigation served to prove Lex was backed by the military, and so on.

The problem isn't the movie, it is you.

...

You literally payed no attention to the movie.

Lex hates Superman out of envy. It's that simple and the movie goes out of its way to show you that many times.

I'm just going to quote all the awful God lines Lex had word for word so you can't use that shit "you just didn't understand it" argument.

>These exceptional beings live among us.
>The bases of our myths.
>Gods among men upon our...
>our little blue planet here.
>You don't have to use
>the silver bullet,
>but, if you forge one...
Well, then...
>We don't have to depend
>upon the kindness of monsters.

>'Cause that's what God is.
>Horus. Apollo.
>Jehovah. Kal-El.
>Clark Joseph Kent.
>See. What we call God depends
>upon our tribe, Clark Jo.
>Because God is tribal.
>God takes sides.
>No man in the sky intervened
>when I was a boy
>to deliver me from Daddy's fist
>and abominations. Mm mm.
>I've figured it out way back,
.if God is all powerful,
>he cannot be all good.
>And if he's all good
>then he cannot be all powerful.
>And neither can you be.

>God vs man.
>Day vs night.
>Son of Krypton vs Bat of Gotham.

>There we go.
>There we go.
>And now God, bends to my will.

>To save Martha,
>bring me the head of the Bat.
>Mother of God,
>would you look at the time.

>So, If man won't kill God,
>The Devil will do it!

He doesn't show any sort of believable envy during the entire movie. His character is just smug "look at how smart I am as I say quirky things and bring up the God metaphor some more" the whole way through.

So? He's using the way people see Superman to make a point about the nature power and human behavior.

Seriously? The library opening scene, the creation of Doomsday, the confrontation with Superman at the rooftop, and so on?

So it's ham-fisted as fuck and makes you feel secondhand embarrassment that he's saying things like that in public. I don't understand how you could hear him read those lines and think it worked well. It was never a good choice as a dramatic metaphor and it got worse each time he revisited it. We get it, Superman is God, please stop saying quirky lines about this metaphor now, it's not making your character cool or interesting.
>Seriously?
Seriously. You don't get "wow, that guy's really envious of Superman" out of any of those scenes. You get "wow, that guy is trying really hard to come across as eccentric and clever." He couldn't ever convey an emotion like envy the way he acted in that film because he was too busy doing the "look how quirky I am" crap and his lines were written to never stop making him put on a show to everyone else around him either with witty one-liners and/or more God metaphors.

To explain it further and make things really digestible for you all here's the gist of Lex's motivations in the movie:

Lex grew up believing that everyone is selfish, there's just no escaping it, is human nature, and that power, any kind of power, is meant to be used as a tool and sorely for your own benefit, again because people are selfish, and that kindness is just a tool as well, like power, that people use to fool people for their own benefit.

The reason Lex hates Superman and other metas so much is because they share a kind of power that Lex can't just steal for himself or control for his own benefit, like everything else he does through the use of his company which is pretty much a version of Google, and that sets him off because he desperately wants it. Lex's all about amassing knowledge and thus far for Lex knowledge has been power. But shooting laser from the eyes? No book or web search history will teach you that.

The fact that Superman also try to play the role of a benevolent protector winning the worship of people also pisses him off. Because Superman, as a figure of immense power, can't act innocent or play the nice guy role, since again you can't be an innocent man when you hold power. You've something that others don't. Even if you choose to not use it you're just letting it go to waste by choice something that another person would benefit from it if they had it. So Superman can't be innocent, can't be good, and Lex will prove him and everyone that fact. Even when Superman's trying to use his power to help people he's making a choice to help some and not others. He's deciding who lives and who dies. He has power over them. It's all about him.

It's all about envy. Most of that kind of thinking comes from his father. A dipshit that played the role of a good father for investors using his own son as a marketing tool when in fact he was an abusive fuck behind closed doors.

Well, Lex in the movie is supposed to be unhinged. He's a guy that's trying to pass a friendly and hip image, but can't support to carry the act for long without showing his true nature.

That'd be great except it only exists as your after the fact rationalization of what Lex was motivated by and not as something the film's Lex actually pulled off. What he did in that movie didn't communicate envy or much of any other form of real motivation for that matter. You're going entirely off of plot points and inferring motivation from them when the problem is the character never conveys any of these inferred feelings / motivations in his actual performance. Yes, he mentions his father beating him and God not saving him, but that's all he does is tell you this is his motivation instead of showing you something that makes you believe he really feels something towards the whole Superman scheming situation. It sounds OK to talk about how he was motivated by resentment of God for not saving him from his abusive father, but only when you talk about it as an abstract idea and don't have the actual scene where he mentions this as a factor because his delivery of this fact is just more passing quirky cleverness and not anything that makes you feel like he really cares about what he's saying.
Heath Ledger Joker did unhinged in that way successfully. He shows this in scenes like with the hospital explosion where he plans out this elaborate scheme to get random citizens to assassinate on his behalf but then also apparently did a sloppy job in rigging the explosions and has to mess around a bit with the remote before getting it to go off. It's funny and lets the audience know he's capable of intelligent planning yet at the same time has an abnormal detachment from them to where he might accidentally fuck up a hospital bomb because it's all just a joke to him. We don't get that same good writing and good acting with BvS's Lex Luthor. What we get is more like him trying very hard to say lines that are meant to make you think he's like the Heath Ledger Joker, but there's a difference once again between showing vs. telling.

>That'd be great except it only exists as your after the fact rationalization of what Lex was motivated by and not as something the film's Lex actually pulled off. What he did in that movie didn't communicate envy or much of any other form of real motivation for that matter.

Dude, several scenes show you he was envious of Superman.

>You're going entirely off of plot points and inferring motivation from them when the problem is the character never conveys any of these inferred feelings / motivations in his actual performance

The character did convey pretty clearly, user. He just didn't give a huge exposition on it, although he came close many times.

>Yes, he mentions his father beating him and God not saving him, but that's all he does is tell you this is his motivation instead of showing you something that makes you believe he really feels something towards the whole Superman scheming situation.

He also tells about how his father used him as a marketing tool to the senator and directly confront Superman about why he hates him which is all about Superman's sin as a figure of power and his selfishness since he managed to baited thanks to Lois and Martha.

Seriously, user. I don't know what to tell you. The movie made it plenty clear for me.

>Heath Ledger Joker did unhinged in that way successfully. He shows this in scenes like with the hospital explosion where he plans out this elaborate scheme to get random citizens to assassinate on his behalf but then also apparently did a sloppy job in rigging the explosions and has to mess around a bit with the remote before getting it to go off. It's funny and lets the audience know he's capable of intelligent planning yet at the same time has an abnormal detachment from them to where he might accidentally fuck up a hospital bomb because it's all just a joke to him.

That's not unhinged. That's the Joker messing up the timing of the bomb, which did explode. I feel you only like that scene because of the humor in it.

If i had to choose a scene from that movie that show the Joker being unhinged it would be the scene where he burns all the piles of money.