Imagine you are in a life or death battle with one of the greatest heroes of all time, Superman himself. Years of anger, vengeance, and envy have been building up to this final climactic point. In the mist of an epic brawl you somehow gain an advantage on Superman. Right when you are about to make the kill, you realize that you and Superman have something in common, your mother’s both have the same name. Instantly your hate washes away and a bromance begins. It just so happens that this plot twist is used in Shakespear’s Macbeth as well as Batman vs. Superman.
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Reviewers did not take this twist very well. Commenters are ranting and raving about how awful that particular scene was resolved. To give the movie some credit, Zack Snyder was trying to find something that both heroes could relate to. We all know that neither of them is going to die, so Snyder needed something powerful to bring them together. What better connection can they have than the love they share for their mothers?
An even better argument in favor of the movie is that the scene is pulled almost directly from the final scenes of Macbeth. After Macbeth proceeds to destroy everything around him and earn himself countless enemies, his fiercest rival Macduff finally meets him in battle.
The fight is intense, both men are giving it everything they have in an all or nothing deathmatch. Right when Macbeth gets the upper hand, Macduff reveals that he has not born from a woman, instead he was removed from the womb surgically. Macbeth was told by a prophet that no man born from a woman could kill him, so when he heard this news from Macduff, he lost his zeal and was defeated.
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I know what you are thinking, still a pretty bad plot twist. But we can’t ignore the Shakespearian nod. However, just because the writers chose to use a scene from Macbeth does not automatically mean that the movie is suddenly worth seeing. The point is simply that the majority of the scene’s critics may not be aware that they’re actually making a much larger literary criticism of Shakespear.
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