Zack Snyder broke down the importance of the Martha scene in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Today during his live commentary watch-along, the filmmaker did his best to address a lot of the movie. Snyder spoke with candor and insight on a ton of topics, but that Martha scene is still being discussed years later. Well, as with a lot of things in Batman v Superman, it’s better to look at the thematic overtones of the film, rather than get bogged down in the particulars of the narrative. Snyder was striving to center the connection between the two heroes and mothers figure into that relationship heavily.
“It’s really this whole concept of branding criminals. The idea was that [Batman] had lost his own moral compass and he had become what he beheld. The whole idea of this movie is to create this arc where [Batman] confronts Superman’s humanity, that he finds himself again. That’s what the thesis of this thing is, that we’re all humans and that we all connect on a level. Our mothers have the same name. That is really sort of this fundamental, ‘we both have a mother, so we are both human.’ Even though Superman is from another planet, his connection to humanity is so clean that Batman is able to re-energize himself.”
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With how much of a lightning rod as this film has become, it’s not the first time that the director has had to tell the audience why Superman said that name. In fact, just last year, Snyder broke it down for a crowd at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design.
“It’s funny, because we, [screenwriter] Chris Terrio and I, we did reach that point in the movie, in our discussions… we knew how to get them to fight, right? But how do you get them to stop fighting?”
“That’s a tough one. And we sort of were just throwing down on their humanity and Batman realizes Superman has humanity, he’s not just a creature, he’s a man — he’s an alien, but he is as human as, in a lot of ways, he’s more human than him, right? He’s sort of embraced all the good parts of the human race, and so Batman’s able to sort of see, in a lot of ways, a thing that he is not. And I think that that was how we started to talk about it.”
Did you manage to catch the Batman v. Superman commentary this weekend? Let us know in the comments!
