This Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer played the other day before an Arclight showing, and it took only seconds before I began to feel the poison eggs hatch and liquify and spread through my system. Batman is furious at Superman for half-destroying Gotham during that 80-minute slugfest with General Zod? My loathing for Zack Snyder is much deeper in the blood. To me he’s the new anti-Christ — the Michael Bay virus squared. Feel this trailer, grapple with it. It doesn’t tell you exactly what the film is going to be in all of its manifestations, of course, but the general impression is ummistakable. I’m actually presuming that the first half will be semi-tolerable — it’s that last wham-bang third that I’m dreading.

The only element I’m looking forward to is Jesse Eisenberg‘s performance as Lex Luthor. The rest is going to be toxic.

I don’t care how musclebound he is or how much hardware he has at his disposal — Ben Affleck‘s caped mortal can’t duke it out with Henry Cavill‘s Superman, period. The concept has always been absurd. It’s not the superhero genre (I’m a serious fan of the two Captain America films as well as Ant-Man) but Snyder…Snyder is a huge problem.

Then again I might initially miss out, which is fine with me as I really don’t want this movie in my head. Dawn of Justice opens on Friday, 3.25, but I’ll be out of the country from 3.16 through 3.27, and I’m guessing that Warner Bros. won’t show it to non-fanboys until the all-media screening, which, given the Snyder-hate factor, will probably happen three or four days earlier — Monday, 3.21 or Tuesday, 3.22. If Warner Bros. is extra confident they might have the all-media the previous week, but it would have to be on Monday, 3.14 or Tuesday, 3.15, for me to attend.

“Plague of the Snyder,” posted on 11.28.13: “All corporate CG-driven superhero zombie movies are torture to varying degrees, but Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel was a stand- out. It delivered an 80-minute action finale (Henry Cavill‘s Superman vs. Michael Shannon‘s General Zod) that may have been…no, was the most oppressively boring, prolonged and soul-numbing experience of my moviegoing life, ever. I realize that Snyder was probably trying to top a similar action finale in 2012’s The Avengers, but something really foul and acidic came alive in my system as I sat through Snyder’s version.

“I decided then and there that Snyder, whom I’d started to intensely dislike after seeing Sucker Punch, is some kind of despicable aesthetic force. I hated Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives more as a start-to-finish creation. I was half-okay with the first hour of Man of Steel (liked the solemn tone, thought Cavill was pretty good) but that finale…man, that finale was something evil. So let’s consider the possibility that Snyder is an actual cinematic demon. I’m not exaggerating. I think he’s as much of a spreader of a kind of disease as Michael Bay was thought to be in his own right. And I fear that Batman vs. Superman…I don’t want to think about it.”