Batman v Superman: Dawn of JusticeSave

Gotham City, 1981. The film reopens the most-told sequence in comic-book cinema: Thomas and Martha Wayne walk their eight-year-old son Bruce out of the Monarch Theater after a Zorro screening, get mugged in Crime Alley by a desperate small-time criminal, and die in front of their son. The boy runs into the woods at night to flee his own grief and falls down an abandoned well at the edge of the Wayne estate. A swarm of bats emerges from below him. The narration — Bruce's adult voice, weary — describes the moment in dream-language. The bats lift the boy upward toward the well's mouth, his arms spread, gravity briefly suspended. "A beautiful lie. A way to escape what I knew was a hole I'd never crawl out of." The Snyder mythology reframes the well moment as a vision of transcendence. Bruce knows it's a lie. He grows up to live the lie anyway.

Metropolis. Eighteen months earlier, during the climax of Man of Steel (2013)'s World Engine attack. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck, mid-forties, gravel-voiced) is in a city helicopter en route to his downtown Metropolis office tower when Zod's Black Zero ship lands and begins terraforming the city. The Wayne Financial Tower collapses under the World Engine's gravity waves with eighteen Wayne Foundation employees inside. Bruce, on the ground in the rubble, evacuates a small girl whose mother is dead in the debris. He looks up at the sky and watches Superman crash through a skyscraper, fighting Zod. Bruce, watching civilian casualties from the alien war, decides Superman is the threat. He's been Batman for twenty years and he has never feared an opponent until tonight.

Present day, eighteen months later. Bruce Wayne is in his mid-forties, in mourning for Wayne Foundation employees who died in the Metropolis battle. He has been Batman for two decades. He has lost partners — Robin (Jason Todd's grave is in the Batcave with a vandalized memorial spray-painted by the Joker) — and he no longer believes the legal system can hold criminals. He's been branding criminals with a flaming bat-shaped iron, marking them so that in prison the other inmates kill them. He's drinking. He's bitter. He's preparing for war against Superman.

Meanwhile in Gotham's tech-startup district, Lex Luthor — Jesse Eisenberg, dyed-blond curly hair, twenty-eight years old, the most-divisive casting decision in the DCEU — has been quietly maneuvering. Lex is the heir to LexCorp, a defense and biotech contractor that lost an estimated $40 billion in Metropolis property during the Zod attack. Lex has been politically lobbying the U.S. government to give him salvage rights to Zod's downed Kryptonian scout ship and access to the Indian Ocean wreckage. Lex's senatorial liaison is Senator June Finch, who is also publicly investigating Superman's accountability for the Metropolis casualties. Lex pretends to be on her side. Lex has spent six months scientifically analyzing the Kryptonian scout ship's wreckage and has identified a substance — kryptonite — recovered in trace amounts from the Indian Ocean. The substance is radioactive to Kryptonian biology. It can kill Superman.

Africa, Nairomi. Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is on assignment in a hostile region investigating a CIA-adjacent special-ops killing. Mercenaries — actually a Lex-paid private military contractor — kidnap a desert village. Superman intervenes to rescue Lois. In the chaos, Lex's mercenaries machine-gun a row of villagers and frame Superman for it (the mercenaries had bought obsolete Kryptonian-style bullets to make the wounds look like heat-vision damage). The international press picks up the story. Superman is now blamed not just for Metropolis but for an alleged massacre in Africa. Senator Finch announces a Senate Capitol hearing to investigate Superman's accountability.

LexCorp gala. Bruce attends a Lex Luthor fundraiser at LexCorp's Metropolis tower posing as a fellow billionaire interested in investing. He plans to plant a hacker drive on Lex's mainframe to siphon out classified files. Wonder Woman — Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), here in a dark-green evening dress, looking the same age she does in Wonder Woman (2017) a year before that film opens — arrives at the gala as an art-dealer fence searching for a photograph of herself from 1918. She's been on Earth for a century and has been hiding her identity. She pockets Bruce's hacker drive as he plants it, then later returns it to him in a hotel bar with a USB note: "You don't know me. But I've known men like you. Find me when I leave." Bruce returns home and runs the decrypted Lex Luthor files.

The metahuman files. Inside Lex's classified directory, Bruce finds folder labels containing video files for four codenamed individuals he's never seen before: AQUAMAN, CYBORG, FLASH, and WONDER WOMAN (matching the photograph from 1918). Lex has been building a metahuman threat assessment for years and has been tracking each of them. Bruce, who has been alone for two decades, sees for the first time that he's not the only superhero on Earth. He decides Lex is right about something — there are extraordinary beings in this world and the planet needs a coordinated response. He plans to assemble a team.

Capitol Hill. Senator Finch's Senate hearing on Superman opens in the Capitol building. Clark Kent — Henry Cavill — is in the audience to testify. Wallace Keefe, a Wayne Financial Tower paraplegic survivor whose disability has been ignored by both Wayne and Superman, is in a wheelchair in the audience. Lex has paid Keefe to bring a lead-lined briefcase into the chamber containing a backpack-bomb made of Kryptonian fuel cells. Superman's X-ray vision cannot detect the bomb because of the lead shielding. Senator Finch addresses the chamber. Keefe activates the bomb at her podium. The bomb detonates. Finch and forty-two senators are killed. Twelve Senate aides are killed. The Capitol building's entire south wing is destroyed. Superman, on the steps outside in human form, runs into the chamber as the survivors are evacuated. He sees Keefe's burned wheelchair. He realizes Lex has played him. He exiles himself to the Arctic to grieve.

Lex executes phase two. He kidnaps Martha Kent from her Smallville farmhouse and Lois Lane from her apartment, both in the same hour. He brings them to LexCorp Tower in Metropolis. He summons Superman to the LexCorp rooftop. He gives Superman the ultimatum: Lex has cameras on Martha. Superman must kill Batman within one hour or Lex will execute Martha. Superman, defeated, flies to Gotham.

Meanwhile, Bruce has prepared. He's built a Bat-armor exoskeleton — a heavy mechanical-augmentation suit weighing 280 pounds, with armor plating, mass-multiplier joints, and Kryptonite-tipped grappling spears. He's installed a Kryptonite-aerosol gas grenade launcher. He's spread Kryptonite mist throughout an abandoned Gotham warehouse. He's waiting for Superman to come to him.

The warehouse fight. Superman, exhausted and wounded by the Kryptonite gas, lands in the warehouse to negotiate. "I have to talk to you. Please." Bruce doesn't listen. He attacks. The fight is brutal — exoskeleton Batman, dosed up on adrenaline and physically using every gadget he has built for twenty years, vs Superman, weakened by the Kryptonite. Bruce throws him through three concrete walls. He kicks him into the floor. He pins him against an iron support beam with the Kryptonite-tipped spear at his throat. He readies the killing blow.

Then Superman speaks his mother's name. "Save... Martha." Bruce freezes. "Why did you say that name?" He raises the spear. "WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?" Lois Lane bursts into the warehouse — Bruce's analytics had been tracking her — and explains. Lex has Superman's mother. Superman has been begging Bruce to help him save her. The two mothers share a name. The most-debated plot turn in modern superhero cinema lands on a coincidence of nomenclature. Bruce, who has watched his own mother die in Crime Alley, drops the spear. "I'll do it. Save your mother." Superman is at last allowed to communicate. They become reluctant partners in eight seconds flat.

Bruce, in exoskeleton armor, raids Lex's holding warehouse and rescues Martha Kent solo. Wonder Woman has been operating in parallel as she's been tracking Lex's mercenaries for two days. She arrives at the LexCorp Tower the same hour Superman returns there. Superman confronts Lex on the LexCorp roof — Lex has activated the Kryptonian scout ship from inside the tower and is genetically merging Zod's corpse with his own blood in the ship's Genesis Chamber to create what he calls his ultimate failsafe: Doomsday. The bioengineered creature emerges from the Genesis Chamber as a 14-foot-tall, blade-skinned Kryptonian monster with no consciousness, no language, and infinitely-regenerating Kryptonian tissue. The creature is unkillable. Lex has not been stable since the kidnapping. He's been hearing voices in his head — "the bell has been rung" — claiming an alien evil greater than Doomsday is coming for Earth. Lex calls Superman to face the creature.

The Trinity. Doomsday wreaks havoc through Metropolis. Superman engages first, gets stabbed by the creature's bone-spikes. Wonder Woman arrives in full Themysciran combat armor for the first time in screen history — sword, shield, gauntlets, an entrance scored to Junkie XL's iconic electric cello theme. She lassoes Doomsday and takes the creature's first three hits without flinching. Batman, in his Bat-Wing aircraft, fires Kryptonite-tipped artillery rounds at the creature. The three of them are the first cinematic Justice League. Doomsday adapts and grows stronger with every hit. Superman realizes the only weapon capable of stopping Doomsday is the Kryptonite spear Bruce dropped in the warehouse — the same spear that nearly killed Superman an hour earlier. Superman flies to the warehouse, retrieves the spear, returns.

Superman vs Doomsday. Wonder Woman has chained Doomsday. Superman, weakened, dives at the creature with the Kryptonite spear. He drives it through Doomsday's chest. Doomsday, with his last attack, impales Superman through the chest with his bone-spike. Both fall to the ground. Doomsday disintegrates. Superman dies in Lois Lane's arms on a rubble-strewn Metropolis street. Wonder Woman and Bruce kneel nearby. Superman's last words to Lois: "I love you... this is my world... you are my world." The man who symbolized hope dies in his second movie. His body is flown to Washington DC for a state funeral. An empty casket is buried in Arlington with full military honors. The Kent-family private burial follows — Lois and Martha Kent at the Smallville cemetery — at sunset. As mourners walk away, Lois drops a handful of Smallville dirt onto the coffin lid. The dirt levitates for a half-second. It hovers. It floats off the wood. Superman is not as dead as the funeral suggests.

Prison cell. Lex Luthor has been arrested for the Capitol bombing and the murder of forty-three senators. Bruce Wayne visits him in solitary confinement. Lex's head has been shaved by the prison. He's no longer the polished tech billionaire — he's a sweating, hyperverbal lunatic, hearing voices in his head from something beyond Earth. "The bell has been rung. They've heard it. Out in the dark, among the stars. Ding ding ding. The bell can't be unrung. He's hungry. He's found us. And he's coming. Ding ding ding ding ding ding." Bruce leaves the cell shaken. He calls Diana from a private jet. He has the metahuman files. He has Aquaman, Cyborg, Flash, and Wonder Woman to find. He has a Superman to bring back. The bell has rung. The Justice League begins.