Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Hans Zimmer & Junkie XL)

A nice enough piece, but I don't hear anything that any other reasonably competent composer couldn't have produced. Some decent string writing but I hardly qualify that as "interesting textures". Also, most of my complaints were directed at JXL's action writing, which this isn't.

Trying to apply reason or logic to Thor's arguments is like trying to devide zero by infinity: it has no defined value.

I'm sorry, but you don't seem to know what an auteur stamp means (at least not in film theory). It doesn't matter what source material you use, or how established the characters are in other forms of fiction. What matters is how you conceptualize it visually, and how you add your own thematic strains to the story. That's what Snyder did on MAN OF STEEL, for example -- rather successfully, IMO. There are successful elements in this film as well, in the first two thirds, but then it's compromised in the last third, when it becomes more generic (due to studio interference or other things, I don't know).

I wouldn't want to live in a dreary world where a text -- no matter how established or iconic it is in popular culture -- only had a "set" number of possibilites for interpretation/adaptation. I say: ANYTHING GOES! As long as there's a clear vision behind it.

Your post is a bit confusing, but there are quite a few fans of both film and score, more than you think. Even here on Maintitles (Elin is one).

But I'll say that what you wrote here is a typical example of the 'slander' the score receives. It's rarely -- if ever -- judged fairly and rationally. For example, I suspect you haven't seen the film in years, but you can easily mouth off at it because it comes up so often in 'worst' threads. You take it "for granted" because the "posse" has already defined it for you. No need to go back and double-check what it ACTUALLY sounds like and how it ACTUALLY works. If film scores were rhetorics, it would be a fallacy akin to argumentum ad populum ("if many people say it is bad, it must be bad").

It's more or less the same thing happening now with this film and score. It's quite fascinating to witness -- albeit a bit irritating.

Not to put words in people's mouths, but I don't believe that's what Martijn is saying. He's not against radical re-interpretations per se. What he's saying is that such re-interpretations need to be clear that that's what they're doing. To take his example of West Side Story - yeah, it's basically Romeo and Juliet, everybody knows it's Romeo and Juliet, but the characters are not literally "Romeo" and "Juliet". We don't take what Tony and Maria say or do as part of Shakespeare's canon.

Batman v Superman, on the other hand, places itself within a pre-existing canon and is therefore subject to discussion of whether it falls in line with what is expected of that canon (an example of a non-canon take on Batman, and a fine one, can be seen in The Lego Movie). Even then, I don't think Martijn is suggesting that significant creative liberties are off-limits...merely that the filmmakers need to understand what makes these characters work, and then either follow suit or choose to reinvent (and have a good reason for doing so).

If Zack Snyder were really such an "auteur" then he wouldn't sign on to a major superhero project that would inevitably severely limit his "artistic vision". But, then again, I don't think he really is an auteur. There's a significant difference between having a personal style (which I agree Snyder does have at least the rudiments of, even if I don't much care for it) and being an auteur.

Well, I disagree here.

Nolan is today quite widely regarded as an auteur for, mostly, his thematic choices and, also partly, the way he handles parallel editing with his large sequences and all that. His Batman films are regarded as much as "his" films as they are regarded as part of the comic book canon. Same with Tim Burton, who, I think, quite often works with material that is not his own.

Terrence Malick and the case of The Thin Red Line, a novel which is far from his interests and yet, he adapted it.

Spielberg taking on something like Tintin, which you could argue is also a huge part of culture way beyond him... I think the examples of auteurs handling "mainstream" material in Hollywood is nothing particularly absent from that way of thinking. There are even auteurs in European cinema who never even wrote any original script and if they DID co-write the script, it was, actually, a novel adaptation. It's not that simple.

Making a general point. I saw only Man of Steel of Snyder's and hated it to the point I decided for a FREE screening of Batman v Superman only a few minutes before the deadline. If I didn't get on the list, however, I do NOT intend to see the film at all.

So far I had been under the impression that an auteur-film is defined by being written and directed by one and the same fellow and also by being independently produced. Which results in a maximum of artistic freedom and a minimum of marketing considerations.

Volker

It doesn't have to be written by the director, nor does it have to be produced independently. It's really a fairly innocent term that doesn't connote any level of quality -- it just insinuates that a filmmaker has a certain set of stylistic and thematic trademarks that he or she employs in most, if not all of their work, regardless of source material.

It depends, the bigger the budget, the bigger the studio, the less likely they are to bet their entire budget on the artistic vision of a single person. However, it also depends on that persons track record. When you got someone like, say, Christopher Nolan, who has proven himself on several occasions to be able to make profitable films and simply has made the studio a lot of profit previously, the studio will want to keep the director and keep him happy, resulting in more creative freedom.

In the case of Batman and Superman, there's two directorsinvolved that have proven successful in the past for Warners (Zack and Chris) which will give them on the one hand quite some freedom, on the other hand the finished product will likely have to stand the approval of DC Comics as well.

I reckon given the scope of the whole project it was developed under the watchful gaze of both Warner and DC, it all had to be studio approved (I know there was heavy input regarding the script, thus getting several revisions which delayed production), but also left enough room for artistic input from the director.

For me the auteurship can be boiled down to a single question:

- Can you recognize the director solely by watching the film?

In the case of Zack Snyder, the answer is Yes.

But it's not a very black/white thing. Would you say Batman v Superman is 100% the same film he would have delivered when there was no studio system but he did have the same budget? Hell no. Ultimately he is also a director for hire, and many conversations with friends studying film in New York and LA/Hollywood kept me clear of any naive thoughts. Yes, you recognize several of his traits, but the bigger the budget, the bigger the gamble, the more he is losing them (having seen Batman v Superman last night I was -pleasantly- surprised how much of his Snyderness he had lost in this film)

I read elsewhere of your hatred of Rand, but have you read The Fountainhead? I'm reading it as we speak (halfway through, currently on a small break to look around here) and I find myself very much in agreement on points being made regarding that auteurship/progress through originality/diluting progress by dependency on public opinion, and people walking around just as a vessel of collected opinions of others, instead of thinking by themselves and develop their own critical thought (drawn out in extremes to make a point, sure, but just one look at social media and I instantly recognize this).

I think there may be a massive misunderstanding on what an auteur/author actually IS.
It's not someone whise trademark style is recognisable, it is "someone who originated or gave existence". To define a director who simply (so to speak) executes someone else's story based on someone else's characters in a fully predefined universe as an "author" is simply insulting to proper authors.

You may creatively redefine the concept of 'author', but that doesn't make it any more or less true. You then just quite postmodernly equate anything to everything, making everything mean nothing.

Bats vs. Supes may carry some Snyder trademarks (apparently his style is recognisable. Fine. I find it completely generic and wouldn't be able to distinguish his stylistic elements from any MTV-generation director, but I am not a student of his, nor do I care enough. So I'm happy to simply accept that apparently he does have a proprietary style), but ut simply isn't in any way an author piece. He did not author anything. He imbued an existing blablabla with preexisting blablabla based on existing et cetera (you can fill in the blanks by now ) with some of his iwn trademarks (like, I guess, Spielberg would do with diffuse light and John Williams).
Not an author action.
A directing action.

Martijn, that's true and I recognize that tháts the main, original definition of authorship, but when translated to film you get in grey area's in which it's difficult to maintain that definition 100%. Of course, directors like Haneke and Paul Thomas Anderson, who usually write their own scripts, are more of an author when they create their original films, but when PTA, who I definitely recognize as an author director, makes There Will Be Blood, originating from Upton Sinclairs novel Oil! yet repurposed and completely transformed in a distinct PTA film, the line blurs. As such, I've come to, yes, postmodernistically, if you will, or want to call it that, modify the term to refer to characteristic traits of a director by which you can recognize his style of what he/she adds to pre-existing material. For example, Fight Club is a film that is both distinctly Chuck Palahniuk but also very much David Fincher, Chuck having said he thought Fincher improved his novel enormously, thus in the film both being co-authors. Ultimately, I just like to think of the term as not being too strictly black/white, also in appreciation of directors that dare to push their creative stamp onto a film and stand for their vision.

Also, according to authorship in the strictest sense, Stanley Kubrick could never have been called an autheuristic director, and I refuse this notion. If there's one director in the history of cinema who has built in his career a distinct vision and cinematic language...

Hehe, we're indeed more like quibbling over nuances, but I do get what you mean.

I brought in those examples to argue that there's a scale to authorship, and you're right, the more established original material is, especially as pop icons as huge as Supes and Bats, the more difficult it gets to remain an 'author'. And this is the main point where we disagree probably, since you argue that at this point there is no authorship and the term is misguided, while I'd say the creative vision laid on top of those icons (in cinematography, visual style, etc.) is what I'd still call authorship, despite it is indeed getting harder and harder to spot in a film like Supes v Bats, because you're getting so restricted in your own artistic sensibilities. I could go on here about what I think of Snyder and his tendency to always stick so close to imagery of the graphic novels, but that would probably be digressing, something that's more suited to wine/whiskey/beer infused talk .

In that same vein, I personally WOULD argue Luhrmann's Romes+Jules ís an authoristic film (or The Great Gatsby, for that matter) since it is also so clearly a Luhrmann film full (and I mean, FULL, in-your-face, extravagantly FULL) of his own creative traits.

In other words, I don't really take popular/mass stuff into account when defining the term. But this is just the point where we agree to disagree, I guess .

Oh, and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXfv25xJUw