Counter-argument is that Batman would make a great Bond Villain-type figure, or just a video game villain generally. Master planner vs. plucky team of talented individuals kinda deal.

That might be the modern, Snyderverse-based version of the two, but traditionally that's rather inaccurate, which is my point.

Exactly.

Having not played it, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and imagine it's supposed to be a deliberate inversion of that, but really it just feels like this is what happens after years of the "Superman's lame and boring, Batman's cool and edgy" thing.

Is it weird to anyone else that Superman is the fascist dictator and not Batman? Like, if you were gonna put money on which of the two would eventually lose it and decide they had to rule the entire world, it's probably the mentally unbalanced control freak who plans how to murder his friends in his spare time.

He has his own concerns, but as a Pastor he also presumably knows what people need to actually hear. I don't think he's being deliberately disingenuous so much as just trying to be supportive to the extent that he's able. He recognizes what's happening and the diary is him venting his frustration over being unable to…

Yeah, but like, it's suspiciously unconnected to anything. Do we even know where she works?

Gennadiy is trying to put together an amateur hockey team and needs funds/players. He's working up to asking Stan to play goalie.

Vivian was just reasonable enough to make it up for debate on whether she was gonna be the bad guy or not, but in retrospect tipping over into a 'the devil you know' situation seems like the obvious move. Out with the moderates, in with the hard-liners!

It was the other way around, right? Ex-zombies can detect zombie. That was why Max Rager forced Major into being their serial killer, because he had Zadar.

Yeah, It's not that they necessarily need to dial back so much as just not have back-to-back-to-back obnoxious personalities. Liv is reaching the point of really being more trouble than she's worth for Clive on these investigations and half the time it's not even funny enough to be worth it.

Ah, I can't watch, I don't want to know!

Doug Liman switches to Justice League: Decaf

Making quips and running around isn't exactly brave new territory for the movie industry, either.

One of the weirder parts of the whole franchise boom is the consistency with which they double-down on the same actors. Like, is that just how bad things are now? The whole industry is risk averse to the point of being intensely paranoid?

Hey, if it gets Buckley his own movie, I'm all for it.

Oooh good call.

It does make sense that they'd want someone to at least keep tabs on Major, and once they found out about the cure, to get close to Liv as well.

Yeah. And also, like, shifting the general collapse of Gotham/Batman's spinal injury to the first act, instead of just having the entire back half of the film be one long climax. That way Bane is more impressive as a villain, and you have more of an arc with Batman getting his mojo back, JGL working with him and…

Combining Knightfall with No Man's Land was such a brilliant approach that it's baffling how it just totally fell apart structurally. I don't know if Nolan just bit off more than he could chew, or what, but it's definitely one of those films where it seems like another half-hour spent shuffling some scenes around in…