Detailed analysis of both what's seen and said along with viewer interpretation, Very SPOILER heavy, so proceed with caution,
I'm just going to dump this and crash out, so have a ball, guys,
HAIR vs NO HAIR
>>67763114
Having thought about this a good bit, I'm convinced that we can't take anything Lex says at face value. It's suggested by Lois that he's a psychopath, and from his own reply("Psychopath" is a three-syllable word for ideas too big for small minds), it seems he agrees with her, embracing what others call psychopathy as yet one more sign of his intellectual superiority.One thing we know about psychopaths is that they like to maintain control. One of the ways they do so is by never letting anyone glimpse their true motivations. With that in mind, let's talk about what Lex tells us he wants.
From the very earliest scenes, he links Superman with supernatural power, even if the power he associates him with is demonic I believe he does this to play on the superstitious fears of those around him while believing none of it himself. It's just an attempt to get others to give him what he wants - access to the Kryptonian tech and Zod's corpse.Why does he want access to it? His stated reason is that it's to give us a deterrent against Superman. The Kentucky Senator suspects he has ulterior motives far more insidious and tells him such. Her perceptiveness coupled with her scruples become a stumbling block to Lex, so he seeks and finds another route to what he wants through Cherry Jollyrancher. If his goal were simply to kill Superman, he now has the tools to do so. I don't think that's enough for him though. He now has knowledge, he now has power, but there's one thing he still lacks:
Adulation.
why was he suicidal and wanted to destroy earth
>>67763145
While Superman is a controversial, divisive figure. one thing he's frequently shown doing is inspiring an almost religious awe in the masses. For Lex, it's not enough to kill Superman. He has to vilify him, make a monster of him. His stated reason is to show people that Superman is not some infallible, all-powerful god. The funny thing is that he's right. I don't for one second believe that Lex himself is being honest here, either. It's not that he simply hates "god," or doesn't believe in a divine power. It's that he wants to take "god's" place. We're shown early on that Lex is making an effort to discredit Superman's actions. He takes advantage of the Senate hearings to not only eliminate the Kentucky Senator and tie up a loose end with the disabled security guard, but to place Superman front and center in yet another controversial tragedy. The press does exactly what one might expect and questions Superman's involvement, seeking to feed off that controversy by implying his failure to act makes him somehow complicit with the bombing itself.
Enter the Bat.
>>67763174
Lex is above all things shown to be opportunistic. The security guard mentioned previously serves as an excellent example of how Lex seeks to make the most of any asset that comes his way. While there are those that believe that Lex was the mastermind behind the returned checks, I disagree. We are given no indication that the guard was even on Lex's radar prior to being arrested. At the very minimum, a year and a half of time had passed before the guard defaced the Superman monument. While I would need to review the scene to state this with absolute certainty, it appeared to me that he had been returning the checks for a far longer period than his involvement with Lex would cover. Ultimately, it does not change the nature of Lex's plans.
He waits.
Once Bruce's vendetta against Clark comes to Lex's attention, he sees in him an unwitting accomplice and seeks to turn Bruce's fear and rage to his advantage. Having already deduced their true identities at some point, Lex has continued to apply pressure to both of them, attempting to orchestrate a confrontation. Lex fully intends the kryptonite to find its way into Bruce's hands in a way that will allow him to continue to appear blameless. Only Clark's interference prevents Bruce from acquiring it during the dock chase, forcing Lex to wait even longer for Bruce to steal it from his research facility. Once that finally occurs, Lex need only keep teams in place to abduct Lois and Martha, and await Bruce's preparations to be complete.
Fight night.
>>67763145
No, he doesn't agree with her. He blatantly says she doesn't understand, and therefore she's mislabeling him. I didn't read the rest because it seems predicated on an idea you seriously missed, idk how.
>>67763190
Bruce having prepared his killing ground, Lex abducts Martha and Lois and uses the one to draw Clark to him and the other to bend Clark to his will. It's at almost this precise moment when all of Lex's careful machinations begin to go awry. We have to assume that Lex never intended to spare Martha regardless of the outcome of Bruce and Clark's fight, as doing otherwise would only present future entanglements for him. The same goes for Lois. In order for Lex to remain above suspicion, he has to be planning on eliminating his two abductees. The most obvious course of action would be to kill them both by fire - a horrific way to go, and I have no doubt that he did not intend that point to be lost on Clark, but as will things related to Lex, what he says and what his real intentions are are very rarely the same thing. "We burn witches," he says, but I contend his reasoning goes deeper. Fire leaves no bullets for forensic analysis, Fire would burn away much trace evidence, and most importantly, fire is the one way that Superman would kill someone that doesn't require physical contact. He intended to frame Clark for the deaths of Martha and Lois to further reinforce the image of Superman as the dangerous, deranged killer in the aftermath of his fight with Bruce.
Dr. Luthor, I'm CIA
You don't get to bring boys
>>67763207
What others call label as psychopath, he calls thinking too big for them. That means anyone who calls him a psychopath just isn't as smart as him, at least in his mind,
>>67763216
It may seem that Lex's plans rely rather heavily on Clark winning, and I absolutely believe that he viewed Clark's victory as the only realistic outcome. I mentioned earlier that Lex's plan started going off the tracks the instant he delivered his ultimatum, and that is because of Lex's own failings. As a psychopath, selfless acts are an alien concept to him. To him, anyone acting outside of their own self-interest is behaving stupidly. Lex says that he understood early on that God can not be all-powerful and all-good and he intends to prove that by bloodying Clark's hands. That would all be well and good, were he to actually believe that Superman is a god. He doesn't. He thinks that amazing powers aside, he's just a man, ultimately no different than Lex himself, certainly no better. He looks at Clark and sees only a reflection of himself - a powerful man who does good only to serve his own image and ego, a man with something he wants. No, Lex beleves that Clark will react precisely as he would if presented with a similar dilemma. He fully expects him to win, to return with Bruce's head. Ultimately, the moral centers of both men foil him.
Doomsday.
>>67763268
If all had proceeded as Lex planned, Clark would have returned the victor, Lex would have made his call, and I fully believe that no matter what he said, the man with the flamethrower would have burned Martha. Clark would have flown off in a panic to find his mother and save her. Lex's mercenaries would have been previously instructed to depart immediately upon the time expiring or receiving his call on orders to find and eliminate Lois. It is at this point that Lex would have unleashed Doomsday to keep Clark occupied while Lex fled to continue to back-engineering kryptonian tech and kryptonite weaponry to eliminate whichever of the two remaining combatants survived, neatly laying the blame for deaths of Bruce, Martha, Lois, and possibly even the creation of Doomsday all neatly at Clarks feet. After all, who is the world going to believe - a serial murderer or the man trying to save mankind? It's the best of all possible worlds for Lex - wealth, fame, knowledge, power, and best of all, the worship of his fellow man.
Things fall apart.
>>67763288
Bruce answered his call. At that moment, Lex knew that all his schemes had come to naught. Bruce being on the other end of the call meant that Martha had been rescued. For that to come to pass, the Batman had to have defeated his mercenaries, which in turn meant that there was no one left to round up Lois. He's now irrevocably exposed as a monster himself. Don't misunderstand me - being a monster is of no consequence to Lex; he simply can't abide other people seeing him in that light. For him, that's a loss of power, of control, and it means that the worship he sought will be forever denied him. Lex, his exposure and fall from grace inevitable, opts to unleash his monster, in all likelihood rationalizing that life in a world where he can't have everything he wants, then life just isn't worth living, By his words, he'd unleashed Clark's death when in truth, the only death he cared about was his own. The battle departs, Lex bides his time perusing the surviving kryptonian databanks, only to discover a darker divinity that promises power beyond his previous imaginings.
Who do you think is reading this
>>67763145
i'd like to add that lex's relationship to finch is paralleled with bruce's relationship to alfred and clark's relationship to martha
they're all rational elder figures who see through the bullshit, their interactions with them is essential to the narrative
>>67763268
>Ultimately, the moral centers of both men foil him.
meaningful to the whole movie as well
>>67764043
Would you attach any significance to the fact that he kills her? Would that be symbolic of him murdering voice of reason and restraint, conscience, even? He did, after all, murder Mercy in the same scene.
>>67763307
>suicide
>self negation
>leading to ascension, all three characters are transfigured in different ways
ALBERTO VS BARBOSSA
MIND VS CELL
PLAN VS FAIL
>>67764134
lol brah what do you think
>>67763362
The same idiots defending BvS, unironically referring to it as capekino.
Still Best Luthor to Date
>>67763190
>"you let your family die!"
this line suggests that lex was behind it all. the guy was living like shit and it's probably because lex took his cheques and wrote on them
>>67763268
i don't think lex could guarantee that clark wouldn't kill him there and then if martha died, and that's a risk he probably wasn't willing to take. you're probably right to a degree because lex was openly taunting clark about his mom being dead, but i don't think that was his entire plan
>>67764423
i think lex directly refers to that line when he's talking to superman
lex actually gets jumpy whenever clark looks like he might get aggressive
not sure but i think there's some other line where he says something about how he can't be touched or else dead martha
>>67764557
>i think lex directly refers to that line
yeah and the only way he could know that is if he wrote it, i doubt he was monitoring the mail of every superman victim
i don't know why superman would not kill lex if martha was dead though. saying he can't be touched without martha dying is redundant if martha is dead, unless lex mistimed it a bit and expected doomsday to be ready by the time superman arrived as so to distract him
>>67764603
i think this goes into the anon's comment about how lex can't imagine someone that acts in the interest of others
>i can take you in without breaking you
>>67763145
>Adulation
>Enter the Bat.
>Fight night.
>Doomsday.
>Things fall apart.
>>67763288
Interesting. I don't think the film gives us enough info to look into that much detail at Lex's motivations, I saw it as a more straightforward hate of Superman's power and god-like status. How do we know what Lex would do if Superman actually Batman?
I like your view on why he set Bats and Supes up to fight though. It seems like a win-win for Lex, if Batman wins then Superman's dead anyway, if Superman wins he looks like a murderous psycho who killed a rival. Hadn't thought of that.
>>67763307
I saw things slightly differently. Doomsday is Lex's desperate attempt to exert power over Superman after initially failing, he's powerful since he created this thing. And of course there's the blood ritual and satanic imagery to show he's got very sinister intentions, and is defying the "gods" (the council of Krypton).
>>67764702
the win-win scenario is an acknowledgement of classic villain tropes
also, the placement of our three main dancers, batman, superman, and lex as the struggle for power reaches it's climax.
>>67763145
He's psychotic, not psychopathic.
>>67763190
He knows about the guard because it was published in the papers that Bruce helped rescuing him.
>>67763362
I read it.
>>67765685
So did I.
I find it fascinating that BvS, of all movies, has generated such in depth analysis of film on this board. This thread isn't even a one off, the last BvS thread had a massive discussion about symbolism.
It's fantastic. It's a shame this doesn't happen with most other films (I mean other good films, not any old shit). I've never really been into capeshit but MoS and BvS have got me interested and sold me on the idea that capeshit can be more that formulaic marvel quipfests
>>67765763
And notice how this board pretends to be patrician and flaunts its knowledge around, but when any semblance or attempt at trying to understand a movie and actually discuss it is automatically parried with contempt and rejection.
>>67765849
Exactly.
The only thing detractors of this movie seem to say is "it was shit" with no real points or "it's not making X amount of money". It doesn't matter if a movie is good or does well (or isn't and doesn't respectively), I'd still like to analysis why it was good/bad, and try to understand it completely before passing judgement (or not judging, for some movies it doesn't seem right to just sum it up as X/10).
Strangely, MoS and BvS threads have given me hope in /tv/
>>67766022
>Strangely, MoS and BvS threads have given me hope in /tv/
.........
bro...... what are those movies about again?
>>67766105
People paid to watch BvS just for the fight, it would've been the same for them to fastforward everything else.
>>67766105
The duality of man.
>>67766105
H-hope?
also Bill Wilson
>>67766301
bump
Great analysis OP, but consider these.
>>67765402
>>67765574
