Tenderise the night: Zack Snyder v the raw world

And it’s not just the director in the VR cubicle. In there with him is composer Hans Zimmer, who said that he was after “a score which deals with and celebrates the farmers and the people in the heartland of America… those endless plains,” and proceeded to conjure this via “a grouping of pedal steel guitars instead of the usual string section, banging titanium and steel sculptures, and organizing a who’s-who of drummers.” Aiming for the feelings and mood of the American Midwest – Kansas wheat fields, honest toil, Ma Kent’s homestead – and doing so without any intention of tapping the innate musical bedrock that would conjure that connection for an audience – no Copland, Bernstein, Ives, not even at a remove. A virtual reality indeed. He’s still at it in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, when Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman – of indeterminate character in the film, although let’s go with the template and assume Greek, philosophical and godly – gets an ultra-modern electric guitar lick that suggests she arrived on a skateboard.

Snyder too walls himself back into a comfortable – i.e. uncomfortable – virtual reality by the time the new film gets to its incurably dull night-time battles between giant special effects, while the shoehorned-in set-ups for future films are unfathomably woebegone. And yet, the first half is a film of a detectably different cape, quite unlike Man of Steel. The 9/11 opening is excused almost immediately by the image it allows of Bruce Wayne acting out the contemporary news reports and running into the dust while everyone else runs in the opposite direction; his subsequent nightmare-driven mania for retribution is a closer look at male self-knowledge than anything Clark Kent is allowed.

The calamitous plot-holes are par for the course, but having young Bruce Wayne undergo an actual ascension to his adult role – an assumption into a life of agony – is surprisingly strong meat, and Jeremy Irons catches the paternal anguish behind the drollery of Alfred the butler in a way Michael Caine never approached. Even Jesse Eisenberg’s twitching, punchable Lex Luthor – despite being pretty much a dead loss – is the first waft of the eccentric to blow across Snyder’s VR clean-room. Snyder initially enables all this through relative restraint, keeping the digital asphyxia under control. Borrowing the Shostakovich waltz from Eyes Wide Shut for Bruce Wayne’s black-tie espionage and chat-up number with Wonder Woman may barely count as a functioning joke, but compared to Man of Steel it’s practically screwball.

They both burn in the digital inferno in the end. All this effort to perfect the gloriously imperfectable. Invoking a version of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, as the new film enthusiastically does, acknowledges its influence but overstates its authority; even at the time it didn’t displace other incarnations of the character, which carried cheerfully on regardless on paper, not to mention inside your head.

Film insists on being more definitive, $250-million films most of all; but free an image from accident or fluke and you might just free it from vitality also. Warner Bros’ wish to anchor their airborne mythologies to the rubble of real life remains perfectly explicable, as long as you prefer life in the VR cubicle to anything going on outside.