Managed to watch the Ultimate cut today. What a phenomenal, sprawling epic this film is...such a shame that theatrical cut is what most people saw and what most people will ever see.
Now, to be clear I admire and appreciate Snyder's approach with these characters. This "deconstructed view" that places these characters in our problematic, corrupt world and tries to imagine how they would navigate it. How they would be viewed, by a more cynical, modern population. A lot of people don't have patience for this thought experiment. It puts the characters in a tricky position and keeps them from being light, wise-cracking, and chipper. If you can't get past Batman killing or Superman being troubled by what's going on around him, in BvS, this cut is not going to do much for you.
However, if you felt that there were moments in the film that really worked, moments that were puzzling, and that the film felt too choppy editing-wise. You stand the most to gain from this cut. I put myself in this category. This Ultimate Edition was sooo much more cohesive and better-paced. I'll give you an example...the Ultimate Edition introduces us to Gotham and The Batman in far better manner than the theatrical cut, because the scenes have room to breathe. In the theatrical cut we enter the scene with the bats escaping the chimney, which is a ham-fisted way of saying we're about to enter a batman-oriented scene. The ultimate cut shows police-men hanging out before getting called out to a crime scene, and then we see the shot of the bats flapping about. It tells us that the Batman is here, or has been here. It makes for a much more mysterious and cooler introduction to the character and the world. There are so many scenes that have be re-worked and re-postioned like that, throughout the cut, which allows the film to work better, flow better, and flat out make sense.
Also, Superman gets his film back, in this cut. We all know Snyder loves Batman, but you really get to see the respect, admiration, and appreciation Snyder continues to have for Clark/Superman, too. Such great Clark/Superman/Smallville/Metropolis stuff here that it gives creedence to rumors that WB execs wanted the film to be more Batman heavy, and probably had some of the great Superman stuff forced out.
I have a lot more to say about this cut, but, overall, I'll just say that this cut serves the ambition of the BvS concept, in a far better way than the theatrical one did. It's so obvious that the theatrical cut was focused on moving from one climactic scene to another to hastily keep audiences attention, but it did so at the risk of chopping up the main narrative and removing the motivations that were pushing most of the characters forward.
My only slight negative that is a holdover from the theatrical is that the apocalypse/Justice League stuff was too "out there" and too much to stuff into this film. They do so some stuff with the audio to make the apocalyspe/flash stuff a bit more digestible, but I don't know...I understand the logic of setting the seeds for Justice League here, but they should made it a post-credits scene or something.
I'm really looking forward to watching this version many more times and also as double-bill with Man of Steel, because this version is a far better companion piece.
