Like it or hate it, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice is not a shallow movie.
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The plot is complex enough that a common critique of the film is that it’s confusing. The characters’ motivations and plots are more easily understood on a second viewing.
And after three times around, I’m still finding most Easter eggs.
Not just a few, mind you — lots more Easter eggs.
This is a movie that’s just chock full of Easter eggs. We already listed about 20 of them, we’ve got a handful more that might or might turn out to have any truth to them, but we’re looking into them…and this time around? 26 more things that needed to be pointed out.
So…what did we see? What did we miss?
Read on, and comment below.
Fearing the actions of a god-like Super Hero left unchecked, Gotham City’s own formidable, forceful vigilante takes on Metropolis’s most revered, modern-day savior, while the world wrestles with what sort of hero it really needs. And with Batman and Superman at war with one another, a new threat quickly arises, putting mankind in greater danger than it’s ever known before.
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Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is now playing in theaters.
ZORRO
As Bruce was leaving the theater on the night Thomas and Martha Wayne are killed, most fans noticed that a Zorro film was indeed playing in the cinema. That’s a near-constant thing in the comics, with The Mark of Zorro or The Mask of Zorro frequently being depicted as what Bruce and the Waynes have just seen.
Of course, the dark, masked avenger fighting for justice would make a mark — so to speak — on the traumatized youth.
Since the scene takes place in 1981 (as later seen on Martha Wayne’s crypt), it’s likely that the Zorro film was there as a special presentation, but the other film on the marquee — Excalibur — was actually new at that time.
1939 HARBOR WAY
Over the police radio, you can hear “1939 Harbor Way” reported as the address of the location where those two young Gotham cops first meet Batman.
1939 is also the year readers first met Batman, as Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s urban vigilante debuted in Detective Comics that spring.
SUBTLE NAME-DROPS or COINCIDENCE?
Alfred talks about the White Portugese as a “phantasm” — the name of the villain in the beloved animated movie Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm — and describes the Kryptonians as “gods hurling lightning bolts,” which some have taken as a nod to Shazam.
IS THAT LUKE FOX?
One of our readers on Facebook (sorry! I can’t find the message!) suggested that the young black fighter Bruce Wayne helps in the fight club when he’s trying to track Knyazev could actually be Luke “Batwing” Fox, who has a background in MMA.
Given that this Batman has already gone through at least one Robin and has a long history prior to this film, it’s not impossible…!
…AND IS THAT VICKY VALE?
A lovely blonde woman named Vicky introduces Lex Luthor at his library benefit, prompting one of our readers to suggest it could be Vicky Vale.
Of course, in the comics she’s generally not blonde at all…but she was in Tim Burton’s Batman.
PROMETHEUS
Not only is Prometheus the name of a DC Comics villain…but the mythological story of Prometheus and the notion of man conquering a god was already invoked by Lex Luthor as an anti-Superman metaphor in Superman Returns.
MUST THERE BE A SUPERMAN?
This line, uttered by Charlie Rose, is also the name of a track on the score.
More importantly, though, it’s the name of a very famous comic book story that wrestles with some of the same issues the film does.
“Must There Be a Superman?” is the fifth track on the CD, and if that title sounds familiar to you, it’s only because you’ve been paying attention to Superman lore at some point in the last few decades.
Originally the title of a story in Superman #247 from writer Elliot S! Maggin and the legendary Superman art team of Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, “Must There Be A Superman?” was a question posed by the Guardians of the Universe, who supposed the Man of Steel was interfering too much in humanity’s destiny.
They brought Superman before a galactic tribunal which, if you squint real hard, seems a little like the Congressional hearing that Holly Hunter’s Senator Finch will bring Superman before to explain his role in the Battle of Metropolis in Batman V Superman.
The question of Superman’s role in the world, and his part in shaping the destiny of mankind, is one that played heavily in the Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice prequel comics recently released by Dr. Pepper through the Blippar app. And both the theme — and the phrase itself — have popped up from time to time over the years since this initial 1972 story. Variations on it have sometimes been used as columns written by Lois Lane, including a “Why The World Doesn’t Need Superman” story that is referenced in Superman Returns….And Maggin cited his own story in his introduction to one of the handful of collections of the Mark Waid/Alex Ross miniseries Kingdom Come.
NICHOLSON TERMINAL AND DOCK COMPANY
When Batman is chasing down the Kryptonite smugglers on the docks, what’s the name on the side of a building, big as life? “Nicholson Terminal and Dock Company.”
That’s likely a nod to Jack Nicholson, whose turn as The Joker was the first to really embrace the darkness and violence that had been bred into the character from Neal Adams’s 1970s reinvention of the Batman mythology forward.
THE CAVE’S WATERFALL ENTRY
Throughout Batman’s history, many incarnations of the character have entered the Batcave through a waterfall. Sometimes it’s real, sometimes it’s an illusion, sometimes it’s directly into the cave and sometimes it’s a little more complicated.
This time, the “waterfall” was an effect created when Bruce Wayne drove down a ramp across a reservoir on his property. The Batmobile skidded down the wet road and into a long corridor that brought it to the cave.
It — like so much of Bruce Wayne’s personal property in this movie — is a great update of the classics, allowing Snyder to reinvent the wheel without totally abandoning what people expect.
SENATOR PURRINGTON
Senator Purrington is in fact a real U.S. Senator.
No, his name isn’t actually Purrington, but the man who sat next to Holly Hunter’s Senator Finch in the Superman hearings (and presumably got blown up) is U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, D-MA, a famous Bat-fan.
“We’ve never had Superman as a witness,” Leahy joked with local media. “And we’ve never had quite as much excitement as you’re going to see in this hearing [in the movie].”
Leahy has previously appeared in Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, as well as lending his voice to an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
MY WORLD
The phrase “my world” is a recurring refrain in the film — always from Superman or those directly around him.
“It did on my world,” he responds to Lois when she tells him that the logo on his chest means something to people.
“She was my world,” Clark says of Lois — both to Batman in the Knightmare sequence, and to Lois herself just before he sacrifices himself to Doomsday. Jonathan Kent also says the same about Martha.
“He’s from another world — my world,” Superman says of Doomsday when Wonder Woman wonders what it is.
“This is my world,” Superman tells Lois before charging into battle against Doomsday. The song in the soundtrack is also titled “This Is My World.”
Funny enough, Batman — terrified of and furious at aliens — never says it.
KANDOR
The Kryptonian Scout Ship identifies General Zod’s home as being Kandor.
In the comics, Kandor is a city on Krypton which was eventually kidnapped by Brainiac, shrunk and hidden away in a “bottle” for observation.
In the comics, both Zod and Jax-Ur, who was refrenced in Man of Steel, lived in Kandor at one point. It was also briefly used (in miniaturized form) as a base of operations for Rip Hunter and Supernova during 52.
CLARK CLEARING HIS HEAD IN THE MOUNTAINS
When Clark decides that he needs to rethink his approach to being Superman, he does so…high atop remote, snow-covered mountains.
That’s not an entirely uncommon place for Superman to go and think.
In Superman #59 in the ’90s, that’s where Superman and Lois had a heart to heart about what it meant for their relationship that she and Clark had recently become engaged — and then he’d revealed to her that he was Superman.
TONGA TRENCH
The footage of Aquaman in the files from Lexcorp is listed as having been shot at the Tonga Trench.
No real value in terms of the DCU, but it could tell us something about the Aquaman movie.
The Tonga Trench is a real place in the South Pacific, which lines up with the tattoos and some of the mythology that Jason Momoa has talked about playing a role in the film.
6-1982
The Mother Box recovered by S.T.A.R. Labs: Silas Stone refers to it as “USGov Item #6-1982” or something like that.
June 1982 was the first time Cyborg ever had a solo comic with his name on the cover — Tales of the New Teen Titans #1, which detailed his origin.
ANARCHY
There was SO MUCH “anarchy” graffiti it’s really hard not to imagine that Lonnie Machlan had been there.
A longtime villain and sometime antihero in the Batman family of characters, Machlan recently appeared on Arrow.
And, yeah, the Riddler-style question mark everyone spotted in the trailers.
WHITE RABBIT
“Out of Trix.” Lex made plenty of literary references, and I didn’t cite them all here, but I think the fact that he made Alice in Wonderland/White Rabbit references a few times, and that he managed to convert one of them into a “Trix are for kids” reference? Impressive.
MMM-TRR-PLSS!
When Doomsday stops his fight with Superman to inspect the Superman statue in Heroes Park, it seemed very reminiscent of the moment in the comics when Doomsday first displayed real intellect — when he spotted a sign for Metropolis and connected it to an earlier TV ad he’d seen of a man shouting threats (it was a wrestling special).
METROPOLIS 8 NEWS
Metropolis 8 News, pictured reporting from outside of the Scout Ship site when Doomsday broke free, isn’t a nod to the comics (that I can remember), but the news show was on site during the events of Man of Steel.
It’s the network where Glen Woodburn got screen time spreading Lois’s secrets after Zod’s ultimatum was delivered.
SUPERMAN’S NUCLEAR MOMENT
From The Dark Knight Returns.
In that story, Superman is emaciated and near-skeletal when struck by a nuclear bomb, until he’s rapidly replenished by the sun.
Also worth noting: that sequence has a “mother… mother…” utterance from Superman, which might have served as the inspiration for the much-discussed “Martha” moment.
STRYKER’S ISLAND
While here it was just a convenient offshore staging ground for the battle with Doomsday — “it’s uninhabited!” the military exposits — Stryker’s Island is a prison in the DC Universe, named (obviously) for Riker’s island in real life, although its look and feel has always seemed a little more Alcatraz to me.
It’s one of a handful of often-reused superhuman prisons.
SUPERMAN’S DEATH POSE
When Superman dies in the film, he falls to the ground with his arms partially out. It’s not quite the Christ pose that you might expect from Snyder, who has always been heavy on his Messianic imagery with Superman.
Rather, it seems to be a nod to The Adventures of Superman #498, which featured a famous image of Superman’s body ostensibly taken by Jimmy Olsen (the actual cover was by Tom Grummett).
In the image, as in the film, his arms are splayed a bit away from his body with one hand closed and one open, and his right leg straight while the left is curled in toward the right one.
The fact that the camera viewed him upside down, not unlike the cover to Adventures #498 did, made the reference feel even more overt.
THE MEMORIAL IN THE STREET
In the comics, there was a plaque built into the street on the place Superman fell defending the city against Doomsday.
In Adventures of Superman #500, the Cyborg Superman destroyed the monument to announce that “he” was back.
DEMONS…OR PARADEMONS?
That painting in Lex’s office is one that I probably should have caught.
I was so hung up on the whole “angels and demons” metaphor that the painting had represented all movie that I totally spaced on the fact that when it’s turned upside down and the demons are descending from the sky, they bear a more-than-passing resemblance to Darkseid’s Parademons.
Nice bit of foreshadowing for the future, there…!
BELLE REVE
Fans online noticed that Lex Luthor was thrown into Belle Reve at the end of the movie.
Not only is that a prison familiar to fans of the comics — but it’s the one where the Suicide Squad are recruited from in this summer’s movie.
STAR WARS
From a reader:
When Lex gets sent to prison, his prison number on his orange jumpsuit is 16-TK-421, a Star Wars reference to the Stormtrooper who abandoned his post to investigate a noise on the Millenium Falcon in “A New Hope.” (From commenter RedFive1977)
I woud never have caught that, but it totally tracks with the ongoing bit of Star Wars/Batman V Superman viral marketing/Easter eggs.
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Image Credit: Marvel Comics
