Review: Justice League

When it was released in 2017, Justice League already had everything running against it, where Marvel had tackled the shared universe model and came out on top, DC’s attempts had been met with... mixed reviews, ranging from flawed (Man Of Steel) to outright garbage (Suicide Squad). The whole film had to introduce four of the six key members of the League, as well as reintroduce a seventh member later on, deal with a moustache problem AND set up the stakes the bring them together, all in just a couple of hours. Plus the tragic personal events that led to Zack Snyder having to leave half-way through filming and Joss Whedon taking over to finish the film. Honestly it’s surprising that the film we got is even watchable, I feel kinda bad for shitting on it since it’s trying so hard but it was never going to work and I thought as much a couple years ago when I first saw it.

But with the steadying news of colossal re-editing, allegations of Joss Whedon’s abuse of power and a fabled ‘Snyder Cut’ coming out since the film’s release Justice League has never really gone away, and now with the Snyder Cut confirmed, filmed and ready to be released within just a couple days of this review I figured I should go back and see where the Whedon Cut went wrong, and if Snyder’s original vision can fix anything.

I won’t lie, he’s got his fucking work cut out for him if this is his starting point.

With the world still reeling from the death of Superman (spoiler warning), Bruce Wayne has begun to notice strange, demonic creatures appearing on earth, fearing that with Superman gone someone or something is using the turmoil to stage an invasion, Bruce reconnects with Diana Prince to bring together a group of super-powered individuals in the hopes of protecting Earth from whatever might attack them.

That turns out to be Steppenwolf, a vanguard from the planet Apokolips who arrives looking for three Mother Boxes, great and terrible vessels of power that, when combined, terraform whatever plant their own into the Hellscape of Apokolips itself. Steppenwolf lost the boxes 1000s of years ago when he first attacked Earth only to be driven off by the combined forces of Humans, Amazonians and Atlanteans who split the three boxes between their races. Now he has returned with an army of parademons with the intent to use the hopelessness caused by the loss of Superman to finish what he started and take control of Earth.

After Steppenwolf steals the Mother Box from the Amazonians, double down of getting their team together, seeking out nervous wreck Barry Allen, sullen fisherman Arthur Curry and believed dead college football star Victor Stone. But with all of them having to deal with their own problems and personal issues, the chances of forming a league is looking less and less likely and time is not on their side.

I’m gonna be completely honest here, for the first half of this film I was into it, it wasn’t perfect but I thought the setup was pretty damn solid, setting up a Superman-less world and the power of Steppenwolf as to why Bruce and Diana needed to bring more people together. Almost everything in that first hour just clicked, the recruitment scenes, the reluctant heroes, the impossible odds that the villains somehow overcomes, it’s admittedly nothing we haven’t seen before but it worked well with what the film was going for and I briefly thought that I might have been too hard on this film first time round.

Then the second half comes, everything kicks into high gear and that’s not a good thing. Right after the League’s first battle with Steppenwolf they realise he’s too powerful to beat without Superman, but not only do they have an instant plan to bring back Superman, they decide to go through with it about 10 minutes later. The whole thing from conversation to action to Superman’s return (spoiler warning) takes about 15 minutes and it was then that I realised that the film was rushing through to get to it’s ending that it had abandoned any sense of pacing or proper build-up and instead was focussed solely on hitting any beat it needed to, and not even hitting them that well. The first half wasn’t the slowest thing but it at least had some parts where it felt like there was time to catch-up, in the second there’s just no breathing room and considering by this point we now who each team member is and what they’re facing, this should’ve been the time to see them interact, instead we got action scene after action scene with little in the middle to separate them all.

It didn’t help of course that the story isn’t even that good, not as bad as I remembered but still not great, Steppenwolf’s plan to conquer Earth is so Saturday morning cartoon it’s not worth mentioning and the whole return of Superman thing makes sense in context but it ends up actually making the other members of the League look weaker compared to the sheer O.P. nature of the guy. And that’s not even bringing up some of the truly idiotic decision making peppered throughout the film that only serve to move the plot forward. It’s not a mess because it is somewhat cohesive, but it’s utter weaksauce trying to do too much with too little.

Likewise the acting feels half-hearted since there’s not much for anyone to work with, some of them I can understand, Amy Adams as Lois Lane and Diane Lane as Martha Kent serve as reminders of Superman’s humanity but since he’s dead most of the film there’s not a whole lot for them to do, while others like J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon and Joe Morton as Victor’s father Silas Stone feel like they were forgotten about on the cutting room floor, Silas especially since his fractured relationship with his son felt like it was leading to something until he was pushed away.

The worst for this is Ciaran Hinds as Steppenwolf, now to be fair to Hinds, he is suitable imposing, giving Steppenwolf some presence at least, his first scene where he decimates the Amazonians with little effort does hold up fairly well and there are moments of potential for him as the first villain for the League to face. The problem comes when you realise that that’s all he is, wasted potential, for as imposing as he is Steppenwolf never rises above ‘I want to conquer Earth because I’m evil’ levels of villainy, he’s not playing 4D Chess against the League, he’s not gleefully massacring people because he enjoys it, he’s just a 7ft tall grey mass with a chip on his shoulder from getting his ass handed to him last time he pulled this shit. It’s a complete waste of Hinds and a complete waste of the character.

Then again, the heroes aren’t done much better so clearly nobody is coming out of this film unscathed, maybe Gal Gadot as Diana, arguably the moral compass of the League, certainly the only one with any knowledge of what’s going on and able to fill in the gaps that the plot doesn’t bother to. Coming fresh off her solo movie, Gadot still has a lot of energy in the role and you can see the through-line from that film to this one, she’s still not fully over losing Steve and the last 100 or so years with humanity has helped her get over her naivety and surprisingly she’s not fully jaded by it either, still willing to jump into the fire and help people as often as she can, even being one of the only people to go toe-to-toe against Steppenwolf and easily hold her own. Out of everyone Diana is clearly the voice of reason for the group, not the smartest – since Victor is a literal computer – but the most understanding of what’s going on and knowing which way to lead the group away from danger, Gadot uses that maturity of her character to keep Diana as one of the few bright sparks that the film has to offer.

Another one being her theme music, which they soften slightly with a more orchestral sound than the original version but it still kicks the dick out of anything else on the soundtrack.

Ben Affleck continues his run as a rather underappreciated Batman, like Gadot, the through-line between Dawn Of Justice to here can be seen in Affleck’s performance, he’s no longer the angry vigilante branding criminals because he’s grown old and grumpy, having seen hope in Clark and seen Clark die for that hope Bruce has taken it upon himself to keep Superman’s memory alive – it’s hinted that there’s some element of survivors guilt which makes sense since Batman is born out of survivor’s guilt. Affleck does have some script issues where they try to inject too many comedic lines into his character, in light doses Bruce Wayne’s charm does work but when Batman himself is cracking wise it’s a little off-putting, but when Affleck is allowed to be serious he still manages to give a solid turn as the Dark Knight and it’ll be a shame if he doesn’t return because he has a lot of potential.

Where Diana and Bruce both have past films to lead their characters into this one, the rest of the League don’t and they suffer slightly from having to all be introduced at once. Jason Momoa has the charisma to portray the playful, sarcastic Arthur Curry with some hints of sullenness to lead into his solo movie, but he ends up being a little too Dude-Bro for my personal liking, I get that Arthur’s supposed to be the joker of the group to ease the tension but when everything he says is a joke it’s hard to take him seriously as a character, if not for Momoa’s natural charm I probably would’ve liked him even less.

Ray Fisher as Victor Stone held a lot of promise in his first few scenes, having survived a terrible accident thanks to his father’s cybernetic works but instead of being happy about living he’s withdrawn, angry and a little depressed about his new life, still trying to figured out who he is and what his relationship with his father and Fisher gives some good gravitas to the role to make it work. But after joining the League all he’s relegated to is being the team’s computer who occasionally malfunctions, anything with his father is abandoned, his own personal struggles are forgotten about and despite the occasional technical difficulty he seems to get over his whole ‘Am I man or monster’ deal pretty quickly.

Now given the rumours of Victor’s storyline being cut down and Fisher’s allegations of Whedon’s abuse are true then he’s been given the short end of the stick and I don’t blame him for being pissed off. I won’t get into it here but either way Victor deserved better than what he got here.

Rounding out the League was Ezra Miller as Barry Allen, and I could not fucking stand the little twerp, I don’t know if it was Miller’s over-the-top performance or if Barry being written like a fucking clichéd neurotic fuckheads but he was just so annoying with his constant whining and list of phobias and his cowardice and his dislike of brunch and his inability to just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes. Yeah I did not like Barry, he was too grating for me personally and I understand the what the film was going for, making Barry out to be the excitable newcomer, the outsider of the heroes who the audience could use to introduce them to this new world of heroes and in that regard Miller did... serviceably.

But god did I want him to stop verbalising every single thought that entered his mind.

Now direction is gonna be a weird one to talk about since I’m not sure how much is Snyder and how much is Whedon, some say it’s still majority Snyder’s work, some say Whedon had a massive redo over most of the film, I can’t say which is which until the Snyder Cut is released so for this review I’ll refer to it as Snyder’s film because it’s his name, but I won’t put all the blame on him since I can’t say if he is to blame or not.

I will blame Whedon personally for a couple of things, the shitty reshoots with the most half-hearted CGI inserts of characters I’ve ever seen – for fuck sake Arthur is a different colour gradient to his fucking surroundings – and for the shitty joke where Barry lands on top of Diana with his face in her tits because Whedon pulled the exact same stupid joke in Age Of Ultron and it wasn’t funny there either.

Now for all it’s flaws there are moments in the film that work, Diana’s opening scene against the terrorists in London is still pretty damn excellent and a great reintroduction to her character as she just makes this organised group look like rank amateurs without even breaking a sweat, likewise when Steppenwolf goes after the first Mother Box the battle against the Amazonians gets things moving without feeling like the film’s blew its load too early. Arguably the film’s best scene is Superman’s return, with Clark still confused as to what’s happening and seeing a bunch of super-powered strangers, he naturally goes apeshit and it’s a kinda fun scene, the moment where Barry is using his speed-force to try and get the jump on Clark only for Clark’s eyes to immediately clock him is still a solid comic-book moment. When it comes to action, I won’t knock the film too harshly because it’s decent enough stuff.

But that doesn’t excuse a lot of the other problems, I could write another 500 words on the atrocious CGI and about half of those words will be about the moustache, I know it’s been memed to death but they took the real-life face of Henry Cavil and tossed it into the uncanny valley and it’s fucking weird. But let’s ignore the stache for a second and complain about some other things, the green screen is so obvious that they would’ve been more realistic to have a hand-drawn background instead, Steppenwolf’s layer looks ripped straight out of He-Man with half the budget and while not all of Barry’s running scenes are bad – some of them are actually quite good – there’s a few of them where his CGI running force is rendered on top of a CGI background and it’s too much visual FX work making both elements look even worse as a result.

Or course bad CGI does not mean a bad film – Black Panther proved that in spades – but thankfully this has more shit that we can fling about, the editing for one is horrible, like I said earlier there’s no room for the film to just breathe and take everything in, four hours might be a bit much but clearly the two hour mandate for this film was nowhere near enough because there are times when it felt like after they cut out all the big scenes everything else was having seconds shaved off in order to fit the running time and you definitely notice those missing seconds when things jump around like Barry forgot his Ritalin. The inconsistent tone is also an issue, humour to ease tension isn’t a bad thing, but with most of the humour being either cringey – the fuck were you thinking with the face in the boobs joke again Joss? – or just plain not funny it draws attention to the fact that you’re trying to make the fulm funny when the darker tone and more serious elements don’t allow for it.

But what really sets this film out is that it’s boring, yeah the action scenes are decent and some of the cast are charming but it’s all for naught when the film is this boring, even the film’s best elements are nothing new and have been done better elsewhere, the whole storyline feels like seven different plots cut and pasted from other better movies and comic books with nothing to connect them all, Steppenwolf isn’t even worth being called forgettable and the whole thing is in such a rush to get to the end that by the time it’s over you’ll have no idea what actually happened except that it looked like a PS2 game and not one of the good ones. I was happy to laugh at the film on my first viewing but actually giving it a full review now and knowing the Behind The Scenes drama I do feel for DC fans, there is so much more than could’ve been done with this film but idiotic studios, family tragedies and a general lack of knowledge doomed this film from the start and it never stood a chance.

At the time of writing I’ve not idea if The Snyder Cut fixes any of these issues so judging Justice League on its own merits, it’s pretty bad, not as bad as I remembered, Gadot and Affleck do the best with what they’re given, some of the action scenes are decently fun and the first half showed promise. But that promise is what makes the rest of the film suck so much by having to abandon most of its own plotlines in the second half to make room for bad jokes, shitty editing and shittier CGI. Given that at this point in the DCEU I’ve not really given much of shit about any of their films I can safely say there’s nothing about Justice League that I hated, but that’s because nothing in this film gives me any reason to feel anything about it. And arguably that’s an even worse way to see it

5/10