Let’s all take a breath from watching The Force Awakens and remember that there are more movies coming out in the future. One of those is the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. A new German ad spot has just landed and it shows off a bit of additional footage that we have not seen stateside before. It’s of the "blink and you’ll miss it" variety, so check it out below, and don’t blink.
This new spot looks to combine most of the action sequences from the most recent trailer, while eliminating nearly all of the setup. That approach certainly makes sense, as for a movie called Batman v. Superman, you want to be sure you’re getting the appropriate amount of superhero smackdown. The only really new shot here is one of Superman flying into the frame at high speed, while standing vertically. They’ve been working hard to make Superman as menacing a character as Batman, and this certainly shows him looking like he’s about to bring the fight to the bat. It doesn't bring much new to the table, but it does look cool and keeps us focused on something new until the movie is finally released. We only have a couple months left to wait.
The other highlight of the clip is hearing the Lex Luthor dialog in German. Hearing Batman referred to as "die fledermaus von Gotham" is actually hilarious for reasons we can’t quite pinpoint. We keep listening to it again and again. Actually, this brings up a much larger point. Lex Luthor sounds drastically different in German. We realize, of course, that Jesse Eisenberg isn’t recording all of his lines in German, but the tone is entirely different. Eisenberg’s Luthor is designed as a "what if Mark Zuckerberg was a supervillain" idea. He doesn’t have a deep and menacing voice. He’s young and brash. The German version is much more harsher. It goes to show how much a voice can impact a character. While the lines will all be the same, Germany may be getting a much different character then we’ll get over here. This will certainly impact how the movie is received.
On the one hand, Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor may not have been exactly the character we were all expecting, but he is a different character than the two protagonists to be sure. In German, all three of the characters we hear from sound pretty much the same. How many gravely voices can one movie really have?
Do you prefer deeper "obviously evil" Lex Luthor, or the higher pitched "sarcastic and cocky" version of the character? We’ll get our version when Dawn of Justice is released on March 25, 2016.
