(Warning: spoiler for the movie ahead.)
You may have noticed when seeing "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" that it's pretty darn dark. I personally respect the boldness of director Zack Snyder to give us conflicted versions of Superman and Batman, with good and evil not so easily defined.
But there is an instance in the movie where Snyder takes things too far.
In the opening of the movie, Lois Lane (Amy Adams) travels to the Middle East to interview a terrorist. The interview goes awry when the photographer with Lane turns out to be a CIA agent, leading to a bloodbath that includes the photographer being killed and Superman showing up to rescue Lane.
If you know your Superman history, if any photographer on the Daily Planet staff would be working with Lane, it would be Jimmy Olsen. But Jimmy's name is never uttered in the scene.
Well, if you stuck around for the closing credits, you would have seen that the actor playing the photographer/CIA agent in the scene, Michael Cassidy, is credited as Jimmy Olsen.
It's a pretty grim way for lovable Olsen to go out with a bullet to the head. And don't feel all that bad if you didn't catch this, as there is no mention of Olsen at all in the movie. You would think at least, while making out in the bathtub, Lois and Clark would mourn over the death of their good friend Jimmy. And, yeah, wasn't it crazy that he was really a CIA agent?
Then again, you could make the argument that Snyder, who has said all he's trying to do is adapt the comics that he loves, is taking a page from source material.
In Mark Millar's 2003 comic series "Superman: Red Son," which follows the premise of what would happen if Superman had been raised in the Soviet Union, Jimmy Olsen is a CIA agent. And if you want your minds blown a little more, in the series he recruits Lex Luthor to kill Superman.
Snyder told Entertainment Weekly why Olsen gets the cameo treatment.
“We just did it as this little aside because we had been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go, and we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”
In fact, Snyder admitted to EW that originally they wanted a star to play the Olsen role. The actor he had in mind was Jesse Eisenberg.
“I thought, if it were Jesse Eisenberg and he got out and he goes, ‘I’m Jimmy Olsen,’ you’d be like, oh my God, we’re gonna have Jimmy Olsen in the whole movie, right?’” Snyder says. “And then if he got shot, you’d just be like, ‘What!? You can’t do that.’”
Eisenberg was signed on to play Olsen, but while searching for a Lex Luthor, Snyder decided to go young with the character and moved Eisenberg into the villain role.
Snyder also noted to EW, that in the extended R-rated Blu-ray of "Batman v Superman" out this summer, it is clearer that the character is Olsen, as he introduces himself to Lane.
"Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" is currently in theaters.
