Why Superman vs. Batman is Going to Suck

First off, I know the movie's actual title is Batman vs. Superman. The reversal was intentional.
Second, this article isn't really about Batman vs. Superman--nay, cannot be about that film, for reasons soon to be revealed.

Over the Christmas break, I found myself, as many North Americans do, sitting in a theatre, watching the shitty pre-show, waiting for the lights to dim and the main attraction to begin. While I can usually tune the pedestrian trivia of the pre-show out, somehow an interviewer's inquiry punched through my Will Save against Ennui: "Which do you think is better? The Old Robocop, or the New Robocop?"
I hadn't been paying attention to the release date for this unnecessary remake of Verhoeven's ultra-violent satire from the '80s, but I didn't recall seeing the poster in the lobby, designating it as a film currently showing.

If the interviewer's question had been "Are you looking forward to seeing the New Robocop?", I couldn't have faulted her. But she asked a question her interviewees really aren't qualified to answer. Hell, short of the people who made the New Robocop, there wasn't a person on the planet qualified to answer that question. She was asking her interviewees to compare a film that hadn't been released to a film that is over 20 years old. So when she asked young people who can't be bothered to watch anything that wasn't made fourteen minutes ago, they answered that the New Robocop was obviously better, because it has better special effects. When she asked people my age and older, they clung to the belief that the original is always better, despite good odds that they haven't watched the original Robocop in a few years, or possibly can't remember which Robocop they watched.

This is why I will never be in the pre-show. I would have replied, "How can I know? It's nearly baseless speculation to conjecture an answer to that question. On the one hand, I love the original Robocop, but that's a feeling based more in nostalgia than any rigourous estimation of its cinematic value. I watched one of the trailers for the New Robocop once, and mostly thought it looked like the plot had been updated, but the satire left behind. But based on a trailer, who could know? Based on a trailer, 47 Ronin looked like it would be fun."  Based on a trailer, Burton's Sweeney Todd wasn't a musical.

If they hadn't turned the camera away from me, I'd have gone on to decry the question as typical of where movie media and criticism seem to have gone. We're not talking about a film's worth based on the film itself anymore. Instead, we assess a film's worth based on a single criterion: our expectations. This is exacerbated by anywhere from a month to a year of anticipating the film by speculating on how good or bad it will be. When we see the film, it is our expectations which drive our enjoyment. The film is as doomed as every first date with a person with impossibly high expectations in a partner. The criteria we should be setting for a film have been abandoned for utter subjectivity. Everything either sucks, or it's the BEST EVAR. And our assessment is almost always based in whether the film lived up to our expectations, not whether the work succeeded on its own terms.

Cursory surfing of fan sites or twitter-feeds has resulted in me seeing multiple posts on "Why Batman vs. Superman is going to suck." From Affleck's ostensible lack of talent (this, despite Argo and a number of other successes to the contrary) to Snyder's ruining of Superman in Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve killed Zod in Superman II back in the '80s, and was decidedly less shook-up about it - get over it), to Gal Gadot not being Amazonian enough to play Wonder Woman (really? if someone had shown you a photo of Hugh Jackman pre-X-men, what would we have predicted?), everyone has an opinion about why this film is going to blow.

And at this point, it's largely baseless speculation, just like asking which Robocop is better before anyone has seen the new one. I know, it's the thing the Internet does. But it's not what the Internet needs to do. There are countless classic SF works we could be looking at in anticipation of these films. But for every website helping neophytes to the DC universe by recommending they check out the Superman/Batman showdown in something like Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, there are countless more regurgitating what Seth Green said, when Seth Green isn't an expert, just a fanboy with a bigger platform.
Consider Godzilla, one of the movies I'm most anticipating this year: when the ComicCon version of the first trailer was leaked, most sites just asked the question, "Do you think it's going to be any good?" while only a handful dug into Oppenheimer's famous quoting (or mis-quoting, depending on who you talk to) of the Bhagavad-Gita, which linked the trailer to the Trinity test, nuclear weapons, and therefore, the reason we have Godzilla in the first place.

I hope Triple Bladed Sword never becomes a place where we reduce our reading of film, comics, books, and video games through pointless speculation about films that haven't been released. The Internet is so addicted to the New that it is no longer even speaking about the present, and it sure as hell doesn't have time to talk about the past. In my perfect world, here's what Cineplex should have done: had a special screening for both Robocop films. Then ask the people what they thought. And in my perfect world, when we're asked to comment on the quality of something we haven't seen, or worse yet, cannot have seen (because it hasn't been made), let's have the good grace to STFU, and reply, "I guess we'll see."

In the meantime, for anyone wanting to read about the best showdowns between Superman and Batman, check out this link to get some homework for assessing previous teamups and showdowns between these two heroes. Then, instead of taking the Internet's word for it, go read those issues, so you might have something useful to contribute to the discussion when Batman vs. Superman is finally released.