The DCEU movies are a special piece of work: And we don’t mean that lightly. They have a very specific vision and a very interesting way of telling their stories. Of course, they also have…a lot of interesting issues. And the more movies in the universe that get made, the more questions we have.

That’s cool! Superhero stories get better the more questions we have. And boy, the DC movie universe raises a lot of questions. We have some stuff to ask Superman, some stuff to ask Wonder Woman, a whole lot of stuff to ask the Flash…and so on. After all, this is the Justice League, the main defense to protect earth from all the nasty stuff out there….maybe we should wonder just what is going on in their movies. So, we’re going to talk about it!

All the odd motivations, all the intricate plans that don’t really make sense, all fight scenes that leave us with questions – we’re going to discuss everything. We aren’t going to promise that we’ll solve every DCEU movie problem by the end, but at least we’re going to be clear about what doesn’t make sense.

25 These Guys Are Really Casual About Their Super Secret Identities

Seriously, are they even trying to protect themselves? Sure Batman wears a cowl and Flash wears a…weird helmet, but Superman and Wonder Woman don’t really where disguises at all. And, let’s be clear, they were all caught on camera will full facial features, so really everyone should have known. Wonder Woman has been working as a historian for decades. Superman has his face printed in the newspaper will every article. Come on, we all know who they are. Maybe the DCEU should just accept it.

24 Batman’s Dreams Will Never Make Sense

So, Batman has some dreams in BVS. Or…visions. The problem is that nobody knows what they really are. Sure, Flash from the future shows up, as he sometimes does, and warns Batman about a random threat – but here’s the thing, Flash doesn’t have the power to penetrate dreams. And Batman is shown to be definitely dreaming. Yet he has these visions of the future, including the apocalypse, and that is sort of…true. Is Batman psychic, or what? We really need to know how this works, everybody.

23 The DCEU Flash Really Doesn’t Deserve To Be Trusted

I mean, Batman met him in a junker’s garage in the back end of nowhere. He literally admitted that he scavenged from dumpsters and didn’t know what he was doing. His father is in prison, and even if you believe he is innocent, that’s still a fact. So Batman shows up and in a moment trusts him, because he is….poor, we guess? Honestly, Flash is worth a background check at least, and maybe don’t invite him onto your superhero team until you know a little more? Because the guy would do anything to get his father out of jail….which does lead to Flashpoint.

22 The Real Squad Mission… Doesn’t Add Up

After several starts and stops and some long exposition, the Squad does get involved in a crisis. This time, there is a city getting enslaved by the Enchantress, who was a good guy until she was not, which everyone should have seen coming. The problem is that the main Squad quest was to recover someone from the city…who turns out to be Amanda Waller, their guru. She definitely should have known if one of the Squad went AWOL, and she shouldn’t have been anywhere near them…so what gives?

21 Cyborg’s Creation Stories Are At Odds

Cyborg gets a lot of time in the Justice League, and it works out pretty well. He’s a cyborg, he tears stuff up, he’s briefly worried about his new life…the usual stuff. But a big problem surfaces when you look at the timeline. In BvS, you see files showing Cyborg coming to life because the Mother Box did hijinks on his ending body, as happens. However, this was before Superman went kaput, and in Justice League, Cyborg specifically says the Mother Bos only came to life and saved him because Superman was ended (uh, sort of). So, which was it, Cyborg? We have two different timelines going on here!

20 Lex Luthor’s Motivation Still Makes No Sense

What does Luthor want, anyway? Okay, obviously Luthor in the DC universe is apparently insane and really likes dispatching people in ridiculous methods. But he isn’t totally like the Joker – he does seem to have some overarching beliefs that guide his plans. One of those beliefs is that the world is in danger from superpowered people because they are….uhh, superpowered. Anyway, he really hates them. But then, almost immediately, he turns around and creates a superpowered monster, which is at every level worse than a superpowered human-ish person. What gives Luthor? You are really not thinking this through.

19 Batman Doesn’t Sneak In Nearly Enough

Oh, of course, Batman is a little aggressive in BvS. That’s sort of his whole story arc. He gets in the Batmobile and just shoots. But let’s leave aside all the stuff about whether that’s a good Batman story or not. It happened. The problem is that we see Batman blasting into places and information early on (like Luthor’s secrets) and then we see him, later on, sneaking in to get similar data. If Batman could sneak in all the time, why did he blast in? Is it just for fun? Because we know that Batman has been through a lot, but maybe he should think this through.

18 Aquaman Is Also Psychic With Humans, Apparently

Think back to Justice League. Batman tries to recruit Aquaman to join his new gang of people who want to save the world, and Aquaman says, “LOL.” But then everything gets messed up when the big bad guy (Steppenwolf, although let’s be honest, his name isn’t important) teleports to Atlantis and steals the Mother Box held by the ocean people. There’s water magic and triton battles, it’s pretty good – but then Aquaman vanishes from the story until Batman and the League are fighting Steppenwolf in some deep sewers, and Aquaman suddenly shows up to save the day with a big wave, which is his thing. But how did Aquaman know to come there? His powers don’t go that far.

17 Just How Do Those Parademons Smell Fear, Anyway?

We learn early on in Justice League that parademons – those winged, monstery guys who form the horde that fights the Justice League – smell fear and appear to attack those who fear and turn their bodies into more parademons. Not the worst idea for faceless hordes, but we do have some questions. Like, how do they sense fear, and what kind? They attack Steppenwolf at the end because he was afraid of Superman (let’s be honest, none of the others had that effect), but why not go after Flash? Flash’s whole story was that he was a scared kid! But he’s the only one who can sneak past and rescue hostages. Pretty suspicious.

16 Okay Justice League, Should You Have Called The Squad?

Let’s admit, the Justice League did their job. They defeated an evil sorceress by combining their powers, which including firewielding, big lizard strength, sharpshooting, swinging a big mallet in short shorts, a magic sword that acts just like a normal sword, and, uhh, some boomerangs. We aren’t saying that they are the best team on earth, but they proved willing to save a city from destruction, and a lot of them survived. Batman is willing to take all sorts of risks, so why didn’t he call up the Squad for help too? You know he could.

15 How Did The Kryptonians Learn English?

Okay, first things first. As DC fans know and as everyone learned in Man of Steel, Krypton had its own language. We may hear it in English, but it’s obviously there, especially with their alien “El” names. Fast forward years to win General Zod and his crew escapes to earth. They struggle a bit, getting used to the air and getting crazy new powers from the sun. However, one thing they don’t struggle with is their perfect command of English, which we know from their conversations with earth military. They had, at most, a few months to learn a brand new language without a trace of an accent. Were the Kryptonians hiding secret language learning technology? Because that would be nice to know.

14 Please, Wonder Woman, Explain Your Ares Win

We love that Wonder Woman did defeat Ares in a big blast of lightning (we don’t love that, in the long run, it didn’t really make a difference at all). But we are also confused. Let’s take it step by step. First, Zeus and all the gods try to fight Ares. Ares beats all of them, and no one can destroy him. Second, Zeus creates Diana as the last god before fading away like the others. Third, we learn that Diana is actually the godkiller, the one able to end gods herself, which is how she defeats Ares. Fourth – wait what? If Zeus had the power to create this person the whole time, why didn’t he use it? Why was that literally the last thing he did?

13 Why Did Superman Take So Long To Join The Justice League?

Superman comes back from beyond – spoilers, we know – thanks to a tricky scheme by the Justice League which probably shouldn’t have worked. At first, he’s confused and weird, until he goes back to Kansas and gets comforted by his girlfriend. And then he’s all better again! But wait – during this, the Justice League really needs help defeating Steppenhorns and his gang of generic monsters. We already knew Superman could zoom around the world at top speeds thanks to every Superman movie ever made, so why does it take him until the last second to show up? He should have been there long before then.

12 Wait, Does Steppenwolf Become Weak When His Armor Is Off?

We already mentioned that Steppenwolf is eventually defeated by the parademons because they sense his fear. But really, how did that work? We see Steppenwolf getting punched a whole lot. Even when Superman joins the fight, there’s a ton of punching before the parademons even attack. The turning point seems to be when Steppenwolf starts losing his armor. Suddenly, he’s a lot smaller, almost shrunken, and it’s the end for him. Is there any particular reason why losing his armor makes Steppenwolf weak and scared? It’s not like he really needed it. Although super courage-giving armor would have made him more interesting.

11 The World Misses Superman – But Why?

Justice League had a whole lot of work to do. One of the big jobs is making Superman seem likable, because he doesn’t have a great history in that area. He snapped a certain neck in his first movie, floated like a cold god in the second movie, and generally letting people get destroyed left and right while he did hero stuff. That explains why the first two minutes of Justice League are Superman giving a heroic, kindly speech to a phone cam. But it doesn’t explain why the rest of the world is convinced. Superman perished at the end of his fight with “Doomsday” so all the people know is that he once again destroyed a city while fighting an alien bad dude.

10 Why Does Steppenwolf Need Any Humans To Tell Him Things?

Steppenwolf has a special connection to the Mother Boxes. They call to him somehow, which is fine because Mother Boxes are magic and technology and gods all rolled into one, so they can do what they want. That leaves us with some plot problems. We see Steppenbadguy interrogating people specifically so he can find a Mother Box. Why is that? If he is called to all the Mother Boxes through space and time, why can’t he just go to it? Even better, why didn’t the Mother Boxes call to him before Superman was even on earth, before Batman and the Flash were born? Why did they even wait?

9 SVB Has A Big Gotham Problem

In Superman vs. Batman, we see that Gotham is in pretty bad shape. We mean, compared to normal. Apparently, Robin has bit the dust and Batman has given up a lot of his work, so the city is a center of villainy and destitute people and lots of nighttime. Just, so much nighttime. But why didn’t Superman take care of that? The movie already shows that Superman isn’t afraid to zoom all the way around the world to stop a shootout, so why didn’t he help cleaning up nearby Gotham? After all, he doesn’t appear to care much about the Batman until Batman makes that a problem.

8 Is Lois Really The Key, Though?

Back to Batman’s weird dream in BvS: Man, that was weird. But at the end of them, someone who is almost definitely Flash from the future warns Batman that Lois is the key, whatever that means. The problem is that means…almost nothing. Lois does a couple randomly important things. So does Alfred. So does Wonder Woman. How is Lois any more the key to saving the world than anyone else? We never know, because it never makes sense. Of course, Flash isn’t the most intelligent guy in this universe, so maybe he just messed it up.

7 What Exactly Are The Mother Boxes?

Okay, time to wind back around to those super weird Mother Boxes. What can they do? Everything! They can communicate telepathically, terraforming worlds, transform random football players into cyborgs, float mysteriously … just about whatever you want. And this brings us to a very old DC question: Just what are the Apocalypse powers based on? Is it magic? Then why can Cyborg hack it? Is it technology? Then how did the old gods defeat it? Is it both? How does that work? As you can see, we have a lot of questions. Basically, Mother Boxes are everything at the same time.

6 Modern Day Superman Has No Birth Records, Remember

Back in the way back, it was fine when Superman arrived from another planet and was adopted by Kansas farmers…because records weren’t great back then. These days, everyone needs a birth certificate and a social security number and everything else that comes with legally being born in a country like the United States. Superman, of course, has none of this, because his origin story is the same, just moved up a bit. So how in the world did Clark Kent go to school, let alone get a job at a newspaper? Are the Kents just really good hackers or something?