We went to see Justice League Friday night with some friends. Fun movie. If you’re into superhero movies, then you will enjoy this. Grab some popcorn and go.

No spoilers here, but some general observations on superheroes, if I may:

The “what if” element of comic book superheroes has always been fascinating to me. What if you could shoot laser beams from your eyes? What if you could fly? What if you were unbreakable? What if you could punch something so hard it would go into orbit? It’s some pretty far-out imaginary thinking, and it’s fun to do! They gave Superman all those powers, and he’s been superheroing with them for, what, going on eighty-five years now?

I can still enjoy comic books – I’ve got quite a few issues boxed up in the basement, and I dig them out from time to time – but I can’t look at superpowers as anything but magic now.

The Flash was one of my favorite superheroes when I was a kid. Guy can run so fast you can’t see him go by. Trouble is, the friction he’d have to generate to go that fast would trench the ground from the spot where he started to the place where he stopped, and he would leave a trail of superheated plasma in his wake that would incinerate everything around him, to say nothing of the multiple sonic booms shattering everything that wasn’t already in flames. Also, he wouldn’t be able to corner for shit. His turning radius at Mach 1 would be measured in miles, so in the city he would have to run in a straight line and any taxi or pedestrian that got in his way would be flattened (or incinerated, but we already covered that).

Why would I want to spoil superheroing like this with facts? I wouldn’t if the movie hadn’t brought it up first. Batman noticed the Flash wore a heat-resistant costume, presumably to protect him from friction with the air, ignoring that the costume was held together with what looked like piano wire. Pretty sure that would fall apart before he hit the speed of sound. Also, the Flash covered every part of his body with heat-resistant material except his face. So I guess his face is indestructible. And Barry Allen (the Flash’s alter-ego) said his crazy-fast metabolism made him hungry, as he was gobbling down a pizza. That must be one high-octane pizza. It takes orbital rockets about five minutes to burn through tons of explosives, but he can run faster than the eye can see after fueling up on sausage and mozzarella. Cool cool.

Batman is my son’s favorite superhero. Timbo says that’s because Batman doesn’t have any superpowers. He’s just really strong and good at fighting, and he’s got a lot of gadgets. I say, he does have a superpower: he can stop time. It’s the only way to explain how he has enough time to build the gadgets. If he couldn’t stop time, he would spend his whole life building those gadgets and never have any time left over to get out there and fight crime. Now I know they sort of explained that Wayne Industries has an armaments division that cranks out his toys but, if that were true, then Batman’s superpower would have to be mind control, because how else would it be possible that he could use all those impressive gadgets in full view of the public and nobody would ever point at the latest news broadcast on a TV set in a bar and yell, “Hey! That looks just like the bat-shaped jet plane we made only one of at Wayne Industries!”

Sticking with Batman for another minute: He’s got to have some kind of regenerative powers, or he’s unbreakable, because no human being, no matter how bulked-up or highly trained, can take the hits he can, then get up and walk away. Even if his costume is some kind of body armor, there’s a limit to how much punishment it can take for him, and Batman is taking hits in this movie that would definitely kill your run-of-the-mill mortal being, no question. Put it this way: If you were inside a can made of an indestructible material and I pushed you off the top of the Empire State Building, when I opened the can you would be nothing but jelly and a pile of broken bones. It wouldn’t make any difference that the can didn’t get scratched or dented. That’s what’s happening inside Batman’s apparently indestructible armored costume whenever some super-powered being punches him across the room and he comes to a sudden stop against a wall. He would be oozing out of every seam of his suit instead of staggering to his feet groaning to bravely face his attacker again.

And there’s that face problem again: Batman covers ever part of himself in an armored costume but his face? None of the bad guys ever think of shooting him in the face? He never gets shot in the face by accident? Seems like a pretty poor costuming choice for the sake of a little face time.

Superman’s powers are really very easily explained: He’s an alien. Aliens can do things so advanced it looks like magic. How else to explain how he’s flying? Hell, he’s clearly levitating in these movies. Levitating! He can control gravity with his mind! And he can not only make himself fly, he can make other things fly. One scene in Justice League showed him carrying a building intact through the sky. There’s no way he simply picked it up in his hands. A building is made to stand on its foundations; it isn’t engineered in a way that would let anything grab a small part of it and pick it up. Superman had to be controlling the force of gravity! That’s a pretty awesome superpower! And pretty much all the superpower you need, when it comes right down to it. No superbaddie could touch you if you could send him flying into space or crashing into a mountain just by thinking him there. Funny Superman never does that, though. He mostly only punches. Which is great eye candy, but still puzzling.