DC Comics is losing
out big time in front of Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe. The first mover
advantage that Marvel had is bearing its fruits, they developed their movie franchises
without any inhibitions; They had a surprise hit in the form of Iron Man with
Robert Downy Jr. who himself was a fading actor that time, not to mention the
fact that superhero movies were not a big craze at that time as they are now. Somehow
two negatives resulted in a positive, and now there is no bigger star as Robert
Downy Jr. and there is no better business than making a Superhero movie.
What clicked for
Marvel didn’t happen for DC. Marvel came out with Iron Man in 2008 which kicked
off their shared Superhero universe and they never looked back. The movies
followed the set path which any superhero movie follows, but the movie produces
made sure there was no shortage of lighter moments and people loved it.
In contrast DC came
out with Man of Steel in June 2013, by which time Marvel had already released 7
movies, their phase 1 was already complete with The Avengers and their phase
two has started with Iron Man – 3 in May 2013. Marvel was on a success chariot
and still has the traction in its favor, but DC kept on making error after
error.
Giving as much as 5
year to your competitor is no good strategy, not to mention the fact that till
today, Marvel has released 13 movies, competed 2 phases and already started phase
3 in the form of Captain America: Civil War. On the other hand DC has released
just 3 movies till date. Their first movie ‘Man of Steel’ never looked like an attempt
to establish a shared universe; it was a sole hero movie, the movie itself
suffered from the director’s fascination of replicating Christopher Nolan’s success
with ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy and made the unforgivable mistake making the brightest
of Superhero of all time, non-other than Super-Man into a dark character. No sir
we don’t want that, Super-Man stands for a bright sunny day, not a dark and
gloomy winter evening. And just to be different from Marvel the DC producer’s made
sure that you don’t laugh more than a couple times throughout the movie.
The funny thing is
during this movie I can’t remember a single time when I saw sunlight, add to
that the movie was in 3D, which resulted in headache by the time movie ended. I
may be mistaken but you don’t necessarily need dark background to make a dark
movie.
The movie had a lot
of characters so the chances of character development were non-existent, another
easy approach now a days is to have crazy characters so that you don’t need to
justify their actions, if anybody says what the character did doesn’t makes any
sense, you can easily reply, “well he was not supposed to”.
This movie feels like
a Bollywood movie more than a Hollywood one, as the plot is non-existent, the
screenplay had glitches, and the climax is as cheesy as it gets. The saving
grace for the movie were Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Deadshot (Will Smith)
and Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) in that order. If you are going to movie,
hoping to see Batman than you will be disappointed. But the music of the movie is good.
Overall if this is
the kind of movies DC is going to make, there is not much hope for them.
Overall an alright watch.
Rating **1/2
