My nephew Jordy sent me this, and I think it's about the best critique of Zack Snyder's “Batman v. Superman,” not to mention Zack Snyder's entire career, that I've seen. Evan Puschak, the nerdwriter, gets at why Snyder's movies are so monumentally, fundamentally stupid: “his preoccupation, his obsession, with moments at the expense of scenes”:

Even better—and I was so caught up in all the other idiocies of BVS I didn't think to mention this in my review—Snyder has zero sense of place. The Daily Planet is meaningless. Ditto the Batcave. The Batcave! C'mon. Metropolis and Gotham City are interchangeable. I think it goes back to Snyder's love of green screens. There's literally no there there in his movies. Cf. my 2012 review of “The Spirit”:

Does anyone else get claustrophobic in these digital-background movies? “Sin City,” “300,” this? The world isn't the world. It's reduced to this small, awful space where these small, awful things happen, which the filmmakers pump full of their hyper-masculine, hyper-sexual hyper-meaning. The men beat each other to pulps, the women, smart and sexy, watch and calculate, and everyone thinks themselves the center of the world. Because they are. Because the world has been reduced to this.

Directors with a great sense of place? Think the Coens or John Sayles. Check out “A Serious Man.” For good or ill, we are products of place and upbringing. The character of the place leads to the character of the individual leads to the character of the story. Sndyer's movies die on the vine because green screen is not a place. “'Batman v Superman' runs for two and a half hours,” Puschak says, “with a heaping helping of big moments; and yet I don't quite feel like I've been ... anywhere.”