If you are looking for a review of the DC Blockbuster film “Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice” that points out all of the flaws with the movie, this is not the review for you. According to RottenTomatoes as of the writing of this piece, seven out of ten reviews of this movie have been negative, and there are good reasons for that. The dramatic tension in the film becomes laughable at points; at the viewing that I attended (IMAX 3D, of course) a child in the first row began to laugh at multiple moments that were supposed to be extremely serious, and the entire audience laughed along with them. However, the largest and most implicit criticism of the film is that it is not a Marvel film.
Marvel, as an enterprise, has made a fortune and an empire that spans movies and television based off of making what is fundamentally the first “Iron Man” film over and over again. The success of this strategy was based, in part, on the market: with few superheroes being made in a competent manner, the simple copy-paste blockbuster white superhero style that goes back even farther than “The Matrix” with the new skin of famous comic book heroes was a recipe for success, even when the films were originally seen as a giant risk.
 And while the best films within Marvel have strived to break from that type of film (specifically, “Captain America 2”), the Avengers series has garnered critical acclaim while being generally mediocre or overstuffed piles of garbage. And while “Batman vs Superman” has a lot of issues, almost all of them were forgiven in previous iterations of Marvel films. The fight between the titular characters in the film makes much more sense than the in-fighting in “The Avengers,” and the plot device that ends the fight is no worse than the plot device that ends the fight in “Captain America 2.”
All of that said, this film is the first of the major superhero films to feel like a comic book. It may be a grim and gritty comic directed by Zack Snyder, but it is a comic book. As far as action and direction goes, it was done gorgeously and avoided the kind of nausea that can occur with that type of film with 3D. It is also a film that is much better when you’re not expecting a Marvel-style film. While this is an easy movie to hate for obvious reasons (Batman with guns!!!), much of the hatred of the movie stems from how it refuses to follow superhero conventions.