The eponymous fight in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is the most unpleasant sequence I have suffered through in quite some time. Utterly one-sided, unrelentingly bleak, and violent for the sake of being violent, it is sickening to watch as one iconic American hero is distilled to the most toxic version of his id and made to pound unceasingly on another cultural icon, one who has, for the purposes of this moment, been reduced to the most paper-thin version of himself. There is no meaningful narrative drive towards this moment. There are no stakes that actually matter. There are no motives on display, by Batman or by Superman, that lend any of these actions gravitas or narrative worth. There is only the violence, only the pain, only the misery of watching one supposed hero get beat into righteous submission by another alleged do-gooder. Frank Miller himself would look at this moment and tell the filmmakers to take it down a notch, to imbue these characters with something resembling humanity. Me? I just sat in stunned silence, queasy at the sheer grotesqueness of this moment. Nobody else in the half-full opening-night IMAX auditorium made a sound either. Many had arrived excited, in Batman and Superman t-shirts and apparel. By this point, nobody was reacting to anything on the screen, audibly or otherwise.