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I’m not much of a self-professed nerd. I’ve never been one to flock to a sci-fi movie opening. The comic books I read are mostly of the graphic novel kind featuring sullen teenagers as opposed to caped crusaders and masked crime-fighters (although I’ll admit that I read a few months’ worth of X-Men back when I was in fifth grade). I enjoy action movies just fine, and I’ve seen my fare share of comic book adaptations in recent years. But honestly, I’ve gotten really tired with the genre. The reason? They feel so much less fun than they used to be.

I remember being obsessed with Tim Burton’s 1989 big-screen adaptation of Batman as well as its sequel, Batman Returns. I even loved the first Joel Schumacher-directed Batman sequel, Batman Forever — a star-studded action epic featuring Val Kilmer in the role of the dark knight, vying against Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face and Jim Carrey’s Riddler. I still bought the action figures (and, more importantly, the soundtracks), participated in the cross-market capitalism that was buying associated plastic cups at McDonald’s, and even bought the VHS tapes six-to-eight months after I saw the movies in theaters. Hell, I even watched the much derided Batman & Robin twice, simply because I really liked Batman and was willing to give any Batman property — well, any live-action Batman property, that is — a fair shot.

But I didn’t stop at Batman, either. I saw the first round of Spider-mans (remember the heady days of the early aughts when we thought Tobey Maguire would be enough Spider-man to last us a couple of decades?). I saw the first round of X-Men movies, too, and especially liked X2. I gleefully paid money to see Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City and enjoyed the bold, stylistic approach to Frank Miller’s anthology series.

And then, of course, there was the onslaught of comic book adaptations that tried to revive the genre and take it into a different direction. Two directors are responsible for this gritty, somewhat realistic take on the comic book movie. The first, Zack Snyder, mostly plays with the overwrought and completely humorless sense that the genre has come to embody in the last decade, with his overblown green-screen epics 300, Watchmen, and Sucker Punch. I’ll be honest: I’ve only seen Watchmen, which was as ridiculous as I expected it to be (it’s quite polarizing, after all). And I did not see Man of Steel, because even the trailer for that movie seemed tedious and I could not imagine sitting through another two-and-a-half hour Superman movie, especially one that attempted to make the story of an extraterrestrial savior of humanity to be any way realistic.

But while Zack Snyder’s aesthetic is still rooted in grandiose machismo that, at its root, is fantastical, it’s another director who has completely ruined the superhero genre for me. It is, of course, Christopher Nolan, who managed to strip all of the fun from Batman with his trilogy of films that followed Gotham’s personal protector.

I’ll admit I enjoyed Batman Begins just fine. I mean, it was a little boring — I didn’t really care about Bruce Wayne learning martial arts, and I really wish I didn’t have to sit through another dramatic reenactment of his parents’ murder. But, because the gritty realism of the film’s approach was still relatively new, it felt like a fresh attempt to tell the story in a new way. And I was as excited as anyone else to see The Dark Knight, especially considering Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker — Batman’s greatest foe, at least in the eyes of the casual Batman fan who knows of the world of Gotham exclusively through the cinematic lens.

But, man: The Dark Knight was a goddamn chore. I know people love it, but I can’t stand it. I concede I’m a bit of pedant when it comes to my response to the film, but something really set me off as I watched it, desperate for it to end. In a two-plus hour film featuring explosions and moody tones and car chases and at least two men driven mad by having shit thrown in their faces (be it pancake makeup or burning acid), in no place during the film did anyone seem to accept the conceit that the entire premise was absolutely ludicrous. Guys… Batman. He’s a rich guy who dons tights and fights crime. Crime perpetrated by men in makeup and brightly colored clothes (and more tights). Only in Christopher Nolan’s view of Gotham, the tights are replaced by a military-grade teflon suit and the Joker’s perfect makeup reimagined as erratic and manic as his character.

But… we’re still talking about grown men wearing costumes and fighting each other on public streets. Are you suggesting to me that comic books do not exist in this world? Because if they did, the people of Gotham would put a stop to all of this nonsense so quickly because even they would see the Joker and the Batman as lame weirdos rather than any sort of threat way before they dug up the access to afford rockets and tank-sized Batmobiles.

And yet, this movie is supposed to be so good because it’s so real? Lighten up, dudes!

I felt obligated to see Nolan’s third film in the franchise, The Dark Knight Rises, which managed to commit the greatest offense, as far as I’m concerned: it even managed to make Catwoman boring.

Now, one could easily tear apart my entire thesis here. I mean, maybe superhero movies, as a genre, just aren’t for me. I like musicals, after all! But that’s another genre that is slowly seeing its classic tropes be widdled away in order for the mainstream audience to embrace it. You may think superhero movies and musicals don’t have much in common, but think about it: the flair, the flamboyance, the utmost derision for “realism.” In musicals, regular people burst into song and dance in order to express their emotions. In superhero movies, villains express their emotions by taking over large metropolitan cities — freezing them, attacking them with an army of penguins, unleashing large amounts of chemical gases. Why? It’s exciting, that’s why! It’s a movie, not real life!

Can you imagine how distraught I was that Les Miserables, a melodramatic stage musical that can’t be taken too seriously because all of those revolutionaries spend more time singing than they do actually taking on the powers that be who repress them (which is probably why they all die in the end anyway), was supposed to be more real in cinematic form because its actors sang live rather than lip-syncing to their studio-produced vocals? God, that was terrible. Why the hell would anyone want to break the fake conceit of a movie musical — the fantasy of unabashed and unexpected musical numbers — to make it seem more realistic? Musicals aren’t real!

Just as Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables made me never want to watch a musical movie again, Christopher Nolan’s boring Batman series made me care even less for superhero movies. No, I can’t even get into the Marvel universe — and those guys at least look like they’re having fun. And there’s no way in hell I’m catching Zack Snyder’s attempt to bring gritty realism to Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Oh, two inherently good guys duking it out for, what? Because of fan fiction? No thank you. If I want realism, I stick to movies about regular human beings. When I want the insanity of a comic book brought to the big screen, I’ll always have the memory of Batman Returns — I’ll just picture Michelle Pfeiffer’s pitch-perfect Catwoman cackling at the idiocy of these dudes who want their childhood fantasies to morph into adulthood realities.

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Photos: Everett Collection