Starring Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Bardem, the film was originally set to star Christian Bale who later dropped out.

The feature by the reclusive Malick is a romantic drama centered on an American man who is torn between the woman who moved to the U.S. to be with him (Kurylenko) and the appearance of a local woman from his past (McAdams) as his marriage falls apart. The film managed to polarize audiences in Venice.

Full text of Bardem's voiceover in the trailer below.

You shall love whether you like it or not. Emotions, they come and go like clouds. Love is not only a feeling; you shall love. To love is to run the risk of failure, the risk of betrayal. You fear your love has died; perhaps it is waiting to be transformed into something higher. Awaken the divine presence which sleeps in each man, each woman. Know each other in that love that never changes.

[Source: The trailer is exclusive to TheFilmStage.com via Huffington Post]

Latino Review's stories are quite usually accurate, but until the news receives official confirmation, I'm taking this with a big-ass grain of Kryptonite. Besides, as cool as this sounds, there's a hell of a lot more from DC's storied history worth mining for the first cinematic team-up between Superman and Batman (and the rest, cough.) I think DC and WB need to consider all options available to them before committing, so to help them out, here are three other superpowered super stories worth exploiting:

1. Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985)

By the 1980s, the DC universe had stopped making sense thanks to 40-plus years of superhero funnybooks that had been reactively and haphazardly modified to suit the aesthetic tastes of the times. Batman was both the grumpy avenger of the 1970s AND the campy 1950s version whose relationship with Robin unfairly inspired the moral panic book Seduction of the Innocent. Superman was both a stiff-necked last son of Krypton and the guy who had Krypto the Super Dog. No superhero's official backstory made any sense at all, basically, and DC's official explanation, the Multiverse (all these various contradictory versions of characters existed in numerous parallel dimensions) now made less sense than Mulholland Drive.

To fix this mess, DC writer Marv Wolfman came up with Crisis, in which two godlike beings — The  Monitor and his evil counterpart the Anti-Monitor — used DC's various character incarnations in a battle over control of the Multiverse. Total destruction was narrowly avoided when even stalwart villains like Darkseid joined the fight to stop the Anti-Monitor — the result being that DC became a single universe once more and some inconvenient characters were erased seemingly forever from Continuity. (RIP: Supergirl and Barry Allen.) Subsequently, that universe was rebooted, and the next two years saw Superman restarted at issue 1 and the publication of both Batman: Year One and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

Since Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight series and Zack Snyder's upcoming Man of Steel both take their cues from the post-Crisis DC universe, they don't need a reboot, but not so the rest of the DC movie and television continuity. We know Darkseid is the villain of the Justice League movie, but that doesn't mean his evil plan couldn't have the happy result of willing the recent Green Lantern movie, and the old Wonder Woman and The Flash tv shows out of existence forever. A Crisis-inspired plot could give us new versions of those characters without the tedious need for any sort of origin-story movies. Just so long as Mark Hamill's Trickster stays in the picture.

2. War of the Gods (1991)

You know which character is unfairly ignored, despite frequent, abortive attempts to revive her onscreen? Wonder Woman. By far the DC superhero with the most potential for epic plots full of crazy mythology this side of Superman, Wonder Woman is an immortal demigod and the second most powerful active superhero in the DC universe. Too bad though, because instead of the terrifyingly powerful Amazonian princess we need, every attempt to bring Wonder Woman back ends up being some silly faux-feminist nonsense that manages more than anything else to infantilize the character. This is why of all the trepidations I have about Justice League, the most troubling is how she'll be portrayed.

Warner Bros. can fix this by basing the plot of Justice League on the War of the Gods crossover, which was created to celebrate Wonder Woman's 50^th anniversary. That story had the ancient Roman gods go to war against the ancient Greek gods (which is kind of like the original cast of Beverly Hills 90210 starting a gang war with the cast of the CW's 90210), while pantheons of other ancient cultures rose up and tried grabbing a piece of whatever was left. Wonder Woman and her fellow Amazonians of  Paradise Island end up having to save Earth, with some help from DC's other heroes (including a Brainwashed Captain Marvel).

Darksied, being the antagonist of DC's New Gods, is the perfect behind-the-scenes manipulator to rile the old gods. And best of all, it gives Wonder Woman, criminally neglected in filmed-entertainment for almost 40 years, a chance to be front and center of Justice League without it coming off as painful tokenism.

3. Hostess Snack Cake Wars

Finally, we come to the greatest and the timeliest crisis for Warner Bros.' Justice League to overcome: The horrifying shortage of Twinkies.

From 1975 through the early '80s, Hostess advertised heavily in the pages of Marvel and DC comics via a series of hilariously irresponsible short comics featuring each company's superheroes and villains battling over control of — no, seriously — Hostess snack cakes. You can see the whole series of them here. Each adventure involved either some nefarious villain's plot to steal or disrupt the supply of these delicious, obesity-causing confections — believe me, I know. #formerfatkid — or superheroes using Hostess cakes to foil criminal activity. No matter who lost, we won, however, because Vanilla Pudding Pies were the shit.

Of course, now we know that if the average super villain was serious about destroying the supply of Hostess Ding Dongs and Twinkies, they should have gotten their MBA. So why not make this current event the basis of Justice League? Have the ruler of Apokolips form an asset management company, buy Hostess, and loot it from the inside via perfectly legal tricks like destroying the employee fund. Thrill to the helplessness of the Justice League as they fail to convince a bankruptcy court that not only should Hostess employees get to keep their pensions, but that Darkseid is planning to destroy the universe. Darkseid could even run for president, citing his business acumen as proof of competence and rendering Superman painfully impotent as cable news channels constantly demand to see his Kryptonian birth certificate.

Far-fetched? Hell yes, but no more so than the idea that unions are a force more evil than the Legion of Doom.

So what would you like to see in the Justice League movie? Sound off in comments.

Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. 

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"I never met Maya because she’s an undercover CIA agent — it would not have been a good thing to do," said Chastain, who said that she based her performance on the research she was given by the film's screenwriter, investigative journalist Mark Boal. That research included reading Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and The Road to 9/11 and immersing herself in the surroundings of her onscreen job.

"I had the props person print out all of the photographs of the terrorists and I hung them in my room at the hotel," she said. (The production shot in Jordan and India.)  "So even when I'd come home from the set, they were always around me."

Given the unavailability of Maya, Chastain said, "I had to approach [the role] like any other character I've played," explained, adding that when it came to "questions that I couldn't answer through the research, I had to use my imagination, [director] Kathryn [Bigelow]'s imagination and Mark's to create a character that went along the lines that respected the real woman."

The actress, who's currently starring on Broadway in the period piece The Heiress, said that the fearless, intelligent and extremely independent character she plays in Zero Dark Thirty "represents this generation of woman, and that was really exciting."

Chastain has generated strong Oscar buzz for her intense, flinty portrayal of the always-analytical Maya, and she explained that her character's emotional reserve was, in many ways, antithetical to the work that she does. Describing herself as a "smiley," "very sensitive and very emotional girl,"  the red-headed beauty said that "as an actor, you spend your whole life trying to be emotional and keeping yourself emotionally open.  So, to find [Maya's] humanity within that arc was a great feat that would have been impossible without Kathryn and Mark's leadership."

Boal also refused to talk about the real-life inspirations for his characters saying that "many of them are still working and we take protecting their identities very seriously." Of Maya, he said only: "I want to emphasize that it's a character in a film, but based on a real person."

Bigelow, who also participated in the press conference, took pains to explain that the hero of Zero Dark Thirty is a woman thanks to history not a feminist agenda. "It’s extraordinary that women were pivotal, but it’s also that those were the facts. That’s the hand we were dealt. And that's how we chose to deal with the story," Bigelow said. "The most important element of it was keeping the truth of the story. That’s what drove me. That’s what motivated me."

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According to Deadline's Nellie Andreeva, a casting breakdown calls for Wonder Woman/Iris (maybe that's just a code name, let's hope) who's at least 5'8" and looks to be in her twenties; the character "comes from a remote, secluded country and until now has spent most of her life as a soldier and a leader on the battlefield."

Wonder Woman may be a leggy Amazonian goddess who's handy in a fight, but her journey is so Beastmaster 2: "Because of relentless brutality of her life at home, Iris looks at our world with absolute awe and astonishment. She’s delighted ­and just as often horrified ­by the aspects of everyday life that we take for granted: skyscrapers, traffic, ice cream. It’s all new and fascinating and sometimes slightly troubling­ to her."

This Wonder Woman is a tactless heroine with no social skills who's an overachieving idealist who "can tell when you're lying to her," although it's unclear whether that's because she has a Lasso of Truth or if that iconic accessory has been metaphorically internalized.

"Iris is completely unschooled in our world, our culture, our customs," continues the breakdown. "And she’s completely inexperienced at interpersonal relationships. She has no social filter, does not suffer fools, and tends to do and say exactly what’s on her mind at all times. She’s bluntly, refreshingly honest. She can tell when you’re lying to her. And she doesn’t have time or patience for politics or tact because she’s too busy trying to experience everything our world has to offer. There are too many sights to see ­ and things to learn ­ and people to care for. Hers is a true, noble, and generous heart." Etc., etc.

Avengers director Joss Whedon (who's also tackling Avengers 2) was set in 2005 to write and direct his own Wonder Woman film, which would have also followed a fish-out-of-water approach. Whedon described his version of the Wonder Woman mythos to Rookie Magazine last year:

“[Wonder Woman] was a little bit like Angelina Jolie [laughs]. She sort of traveled the world. She was very powerful and very naïve about people, and the fact that she was a goddess was how I eventually found my in to her humanity and vulnerability, because she would look at us and the way we kill each other and the way we let people starve and the way the world is run and she’d just be like, ‘None of this makes sense to me. I can’t cope with it, I can’t understand, people are insane.’ And ultimately her romance with [classic Wonder Woman love interest Steve Trevor] was about him getting her to see what it’s like not to be a goddess, what it’s like when you are weak, when you do have all these forces controlling you and there’s nothing you can do about it. That was the sort of central concept of the thing. Him teaching her humanity and her saying, OK, great, but we can still do better.”

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. is concurrently planning a Justice League movie and Wonder Woman standalone films, which will need to find their own starlet to don that star-spangled onesie and boots.

So, let the casting games begin! Shout out your best picks to play "Iris," AKA Wonder Woman, in the comments below.

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