Sam Strange Remembers: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

I made this movie because you people will watch anything. Especially if there are superheroes involved. So here, sure, let’s improvise a movie!

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice begins with Batman sleeping in bed after a long day of drinking and a long night of possibly driving over possible criminals in his Batmobile. While asleep, he suffers the same dream he has nearly every time he closes his eyes. In it, his parents are robbed by a common criminal outside a movie theater just after the family enjoy a viewing of Heavy Metal. The poor thief is obviously poor and desperate, so when Batman’s dad, Thomas, reacts to the holdup violently, the thief panics and shoots him dead. Batman’s mom, Mothra (later changed to Martha), tries to take the thief’s gun, so the thief has to shoot her, too. Coming to his senses, the terrified thief leaves the kid alive.

But the kid, shocked by the death of his parents, passes out and has a dream that he’s at his mother and father’s funeral. He can’t take the sadness and he wanders off into the woods. Following dream logic, he finds that horizontally boarded-up cave entrance from Batman Begins and falls through, where he finds himself surrounded by bats. They don’t scare him, though, because only wimps get scared. Instead, they surround him and lift him to the sky, and he falls asleep upon their gentle wings.

While sleeping, the kid has a dream that he’s all grown up and the CEO of a major corporation in a magical city called Metropolis. But just as he’s checking on things at the office, an alien has a fight with another alien that knocks down several buildings, including his. He runs into the fray and saves a couple people, but thousands more die.

Eventually, all the 9/11 smoke in the air forces him to the ground, and he loses consciousness. While out, he dreams that he’s dressed like a bat in an apocalyptic wasteland filled with flying bugs. He shoots as many as he can, but they eventually capture him and put him in an underground bunker where the alien they worship kills him, which leads to a dream where he’s sitting in front of a really fancy computer. Just when he’s about to play Minesweeper, a stranger bursts through his computer screen and says a bunch of stuff in an alarmed voice he can’t understand.

This topples his chair, and he hits his head hard enough to get knocked out. He has a dream that he’s being eaten by a big, monster bat. He loses a lot of blood and falls asleep, where he has a dream that he’s an alien on top of a snowy mountain watching his adopted dad make a pile of rocks. The dad talks a lot about how he once tried to be a hero but accidentally killed a bunch of horses in the process, therefore only people who like to kill horses should try to be heroes. Then the horses show up as zombies and trample the adopted dad and the adopted dad’s remarkable rock pile. At this point, the cold air puts the alien in a coma.

The alien has a coma-dream where he’s a horse that always seems to be around when the alien is up to something. At one point, the alien goes to talk to congress about whether or not his heroic choices require government oversight since they could exacerbate already touchy international situations. That would be an interesting thing to hear, but probably something very difficult to write, so the entire building blows up instead, leaving only the alien and the horse alive. The horse gets thirsty but finds a handy mason jar filled with peach tea to drink.

Such events tire the horse out. Eventually it falls asleep and has a dream where it’s a handsome guy who works as a reporter for a very desperate news paper that lets him run off whenever and disobey direct story assignments. In the dream, the guy comes home from flower shopping at the flower-only store and finds his hot girlfriend in the bathtub. They have sex. Because sometimes you just have dreams like that.

After sex the reporter, of course, falls asleep and dreams that he’s his girlfriend. After masturbating, she tells the guy about these weird bullets she found while getting shot at in Africa. He looks at the bullets and doesn’t understand why they matter. She insists that they do and calls the Army. They also tell her the bullets don’t matter, but she keeps digging, ever plucky and tenacious. The bullet trail leads her to a failed rodeo clown name Lex Luthor who can’t remember why he invented them in them in the first place. She doesn’t buy it and presses further, but he insists: “Woo-Hoo! No, I do it all the time! Look at this wacky bone monster I made! Hyuck!” Then the wacky bone monster he made wakes up and stabs him with a bone. The lady becomes the wacky bone monster between scenes.

After destroying the world, the wacky bone monster falls asleep and dreams of what it would be like if anyone could offer him some sort of fun resistance. He figures it would take a smart human, an angry god, and some third, randomly powerful person.

They show up out of nowhere and get the job done, randomly moving in violent ways that don’t make it look easy but also don’t require him to think too hard. One of them even dies! The wacky bone monster feels satisfied. It was a very good dream.

But then the wacky bone monster wakes up, and there’s nothing going on. He’s just floating through space because the Earth and everyone on it is gone. It’s pretty boring. Eventually, he starts to think about how cool it would be if a guy dressed like a bat fought a super alien, and maybe there could be, like, a really fast guy and a robot and some underwater person. They could just stand around looking awesome all the time. It’s such an exciting idea that he falls back asleep ten minutes later.

Suddenly Batman wakes up, a little messy from the sex part, but otherwise okay. He starts to tell his butler Alfred about the crazy dream he just had, but Alfred ignores him. He’s already heard it a million times and doesn’t have 150 minutes to spare on stupid bullshit.

(three stars)