BvS Lex Luthor was Right You Know

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice‘s Lex Luthor may not have panned quite as expected but he was right on the money on one detail.

Oh right, before we proceed any further, let me remind you that there are spoilers below.

In the film, Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) meets Holly Hunter’s Senator Finch in a private meeting in his study. There they discuss what they have to do with the Superman issue. At first Luthor is cordial and pleasant, regaling tales about his daddy-o (which could have been the real Lex Luthor, if you want to believe the interbutts). In one of his more interesting lines, he goes:

We know better now, don’t we? Devils don’t come from hell beneath us. No, they come from the sky.

And then we get to look at the painting a little closer…

All this time he was talking about Superman. He paid for that by the end of the movie but in hindsight, he wasn’t wrong.

He was definitely right when he claimed that the devil came from the heavens. Only that the devil he was gunning for was the Kryptonian. It was actually Darkseid. Only, he didn’t knew that he was referencing Darkseid. At that point in the movie, he was fixated on Superman. He had already made moves not just against Superman but even Batman with the hopes of them killing each other.

Along the way, he makes DOOMSDAY, and get this, contacts beings from another world.

So the funny part here is that it was his paranoia that put Superman through the ringer and it was the same paranoia that brought about the appearance and made “first contact” with the denizes of Apokolips.

This whole concept totally redeemed Eisenberg’s Luthor for me. And then in the film’s final movies, he goes full on “batshit” crazy as Batman leaves him with a threat, that made up for the Joker-ish performance in the film.

It’s also through his character beat that we are introduced to the concept of a threat from the stars. A threat that we deliciously see in another character’s dream… Batman and his ‘knightmare’.