What's most interesting to me here are Terrio's defenses of his work on
Batman v. Superman. It's interesting to hear that in some ways, he fought to make it
less nihilistic than it already was -- someone Terrio doesn't name wanted Batman to still be branding people at the end, and Terrio fought against that, for instance. Terrior's primary creative focus seems to have been in Batman's character arc, which was admittedly one of the stronger parts of that film. (Even there, though, Terrio did not do enough work to justify Bruce's instant 180-degree-change from hating Superman to accepting Clark as a friend and equal, all over the mere coincidence of thir mothers having the same name. It almost, but does not quite, work.)
In other areas, I think there's just a fundamental disconnect between the kind of film Terrio wanted to write and the kind of film a Superman movie ought to be -- it's all well and good to say that you want to deconstruct Superman by making a comparison between the long-term consequences of his actions in Nairomi (
Nairomi???) and those of U.S. imperialism on formerly colonized nations, but 1) this is based on creative conceits that are more appropriate for an adult film than a children's hero character, and 2) this attempt at deconstruction
still does not actually have any payoff or reveal any deeper truths. There is, for instance, no indication that Clark in the expanded cut of BvS has a personal realization that he was being kind of racist in his actions in Nairomi -- the attempt at doing an "adult" version of Superman fails on its own terms because Clark at no point evinces the kind of maturity or self-realization an adult in his circumstances ought to have. (Also, revealing that the events of Nairomi were the result of Luthor's manipulation severely undermines the entire attempted comparison of Superman's intervention to U.S. imperialism.)
I really do appreciate Terrio's remarks about wanting to do a version of
Justice League where the characters are more emotionally three-dimensional, where there's a sense of love and purpose and redemption. If that's the case, then the Snyder cut of Terrio's script might be genuinely less nihilistic than BvS and than most of Snyder's other films. I'll probably find out this weekend.
Wouldn't most results be similar under the demands and restrictions of WB? It was going to be a disaster no matter who took over.
Setting aside the apparent fact that Whedon is an abusive piece of shit and that he apparently feels way too threatened when a black man disagrees with him:
I think Whedon's creative sensibilities were such that the 2017 edit was never
not going to be a Frankenstein's monster patchwork. Whedon was never
not going to try to reconceive of the entire project from the ground up, because he as an artist (insert predictable "Whedon's not a real artist" replies here) probably never supported the original Terrio/Snyder vision. The only way to avoid this would have been to hire someone who did not have a strong creative vision of their own and would be willing to just try to re-create Snyder's vision.
But that was
itself never going to happen, because Warner Bros. execs had lost faith in Snyder's creative decision-making even before he left the project as a result of the failure of
Batman v. Superman; they were essentially already trying to get Snyder himself to chance his creative vision in the middle of production, which is not itself a good decision either. (Not that hiring Snyder was
itself a good creative decision in the first place. His perversion of Alan Moore's thematic concerns in
Watchmen should have precluded him from adapting anything other than an Ayn Rand melodrama.)
Basically, the metaphorical ocean liner was going the wrong way, they tried to change course too fast, and instead the ship hit an iceberg.
