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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a film full of “so THAT happened” moments. Remember when a jar of urine signaled Holly Hunter’s doom? Or when Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen was murdered by terrorists? Or when we saw torture pics of Martha Kent? Or just the whole my mom’s name is also Martha thing? Everything in this movie is extreme, off-putting, or extremely off-putting. That’s why the most “so THAT happened” moment in a movie ‘roided up on “so THAT happened” moments has to be… when Batman sent Wonder Woman an email.
Let that sink in. Roll that phrase around in your mind. Think about it. Really think about it.
The Dark Knight. Sent the Amazonian warrior princess. An email. In a movie that cost north of $250 million to make. And lasts two and a half hours. Something like one hundred million people worldwide watched Wonder Woman read an email—and open email attachments! This is so mind-boggling because on the whole, Batman v Superman wants you, the viewer, to feel the weight of its seriousness. Then, for two and a half minutes, you watch other people read email. How did this happen? Why did this happen?!
It all begins with a look between Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) and a mystery woman (Gal Gadot) at one of Lex Luthor’s lavish house parties.
That mystery woman is, of course Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman. Little does she know, but before this movie’s over, she’s gonna get an email from Batman.
Bruce is hanging around Lex’s place for two reasons: to make eyes at mysterious women, because he’s Bruce Wayne, and swipe data from the LexCorp mainframe because something something White Portuguese (?). To hack the system, Bruce attaches a hard drive to some computery bits in the off-limits section of Lex’s mansion. Then he returns to the party, and Bruce and Diana go through a quasi-Cinderella thing. Instead of Diana Prince dashing away suddenly leaving behind a glass slipper, though, she dashes away suddenly–carrying Bruce’s hard drive! Her carriage awaits outside but, because this is 2016 and Wonder Woman’s a bad ass, her carriage ain’t no pumpkin; it’s a sweet sports car that she drives herself.
Bruce and Diana meet up again at another swanky soirée, where we get to see another absolutely stunning look for Wonder Woman and a totally generic look for Batman. If you want to know what “you don’t know who you’re messing with” looks like, it looks a lot like Bruce Wayne holding a demigod back by the arm.
Diana reveals why she stole the information that Bruce stole from Lex: the bratty billionaire has a photo of hers that she wants back. Unfortunately, the stolen info is protected by “military-grade encryption” that she can’t crack. She actually turned the hard drive back over to Bruce before this chat even began, stuffing it in his car’s glove compartment without him even knowing it.
Bruce takes the hard drive back to the Batcave and begins the slow process of decrypting the data, which we watch for a few seconds. This movie loves showing off computer monitors. Bruce continues to click around in the stolen Luthor files whenever he’s not fantasizing about fighting demons or making kryptonite spears to use to murder Superman. That’s when, halfway through this film, Bruce discovers a folder labeled “META_HUMAN.” Click-click, open file, and we learn that Luthor’s filing system is just as ostentatious as he is.
It was really nice of Luthor to go ahead and presumably give each of these meta humans codenames and logos to match. Here’s hoping that LexCorp graphic designer gets credit when the Flash starts rocking that exact lightning bolt on his chest!
Bruce clicks on the “WW” design, which obviously stands for Wonder Woman IRL but who knows what it stands for in-universe. He’s greeted with images of Diana Prince from 2015…and 1918?!
Whaaaaaat?!
Also, yeah, the photo Wonder Woman is trying to get back…has already been scanned into Lex’s computer and most likely archived by whatever the super villain version of iCloud is. Diana, I’m sorry, but that photo is out there and there’s no amount of flirtatious espionage that will solve that.
Bruce is obviously confused, but he doesn’t email Wonder Woman just yet, because there’s still 15 minutes of plot to get through. Lex creates his Kryptonian Frankenstein’s monster Doomsday, Superman chats with his dead dad Kevin Costner, and Luthor kidnaps both Lois Lane and Martha Kent. Batman spends that 15 minutes preparing for battle and getting his anti-Superman armor ready for war.
Oh. And he also finds time to send an email.
While reading about the destruction happening literally outside her window, Wonder Woman gets an email from Bruce Wayne that definitely would have been blocked by any half decent spam filter.
“Boys Share Too”?!
Yes, this is a callback to their previous convo where Diana told Bruce that boys don’t have a habit of sharing. Still, I’ve heard horror stories from women about messages that begin with titles similar to “Boys Share Too.” This is an email containing important information! Howsabout an “URGENT” or “Found Your Photo” or something that doesn’t sound like the name of a teenager’s first emo band? Bruce is lucky this email didn’t get dropped into the trash.
Then Wonder Woman opens the email, and we learn quite possibly the most humiliating thing about Batman: he writes emails like your mom.
The world’s greatest detective doesn’t know how to find a complete paragraph. At this point, Diana makes a face that’s pretty spot on for what the audience is feeling:
Total exasperation.
As if that wasn’t enough, Wonder Woman’s cursor then hovers over an attached file and opens it. Yes, we watch this happen. Yes, Wonder Woman’s trackpad is a major player in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. She then watches three video files–three! We get cameos from Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher), because this is a shared universe superhero movie and there contractually has to be at least a half dozen superheroes in it someway, somehow. We see Flash stop a convenience store robbery, Aquaman pester an undersea camera, and Cyborg go from just a torso to a real half-robotic boy. All in all, you spend two minutes and 39 seconds watching Wonder Woman read emails and watch videos.
When have you ever wanted to spend two and a half minutes watching anyone read an email? Probably never. I get that all of this emailing gets out exposition in a totally modern way, but it is so mundane, so forced, and so pointless. Why does Wonder Woman need to know that Batman knows who she is? Wouldn’t Wonder Woman charge into battle against Doomsday because she’s Wonder Woman? And we all know DC is crazy eager to get their Justice League assembled, but did we really need to watch a meta human YouTube playlist in an already overstuffed movie?
Thankfully Wonder Woman is set entirely in World War I, almost a hundred years before that black and white pic of Diana was turned into the most epic email forward of all time. But November’s Justice League takes place in the present day, meaning it’s still entirely possible that Batman will form the mighty team via an email blast–one that isn’t BCC’d.
Photos: Warner Bros.
