Once the dust from its cataclysmic finale had settled -- both on the screen and in the wider pop-culture conversation that followed -- everyone seemed to be wondering the same thing: would a sequel be able to make sense of the carnage and mayhem seen at the end of Man of Steel? Fans who witnessed the backlash assumed that the wreckage of Metropolis would serve as a staging ground for the next film's story and themes. Detractors guessed that damage control of a different kind would be made to happen on a script level. Every movie should be viewed in a vacuum, taken at face value as being beholden only to its own ambitions. All the same, thanks to the uproar caused by the seemingly wanton destruction meted out by its titular hero, people assumed that, in some form or fashion, whatever came next would show that lessons had been learned either onscreen or behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice seems to have made only the most feigned and cursory of steps forward in the action accountability department while taking a rather nasty spill backward in terms of story, cohesion (both visual and thematic), and tone. Minor lip service is given to the idea that heroes ought not to destroy the places and people they seem to want to protect, yet the movie as a whole still attempts to out-do the chaos, disorder, decimation, and ferocity of its predecessor at every turn. The result is a movie that has brazenly refused to learn from its own past, and yet insultingly, boldly pretends to have grown and matured all the same.
