Review 612: Justice League

Justice League is noisy, violent, overlong, ugly and stupid. Its manufacture is a prime example of rushed world building on part of the filmamkers who desperate to keep up with the competition.

Determined to ensure Superman’s (Henry Cavill) ultimate sacrifice wasn’t in vain, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) aligns forces with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) with plans to recruits a tea of metahumans to protect the world from an approaching threat of catastrophic proportions. The task proves more difficult than Bruce imagined, as each of the recruits must face the demons of their own pasts to transcend that which has held them back, allowing them to come together, finally forming an unprecedented league of heroes. Now united; Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Cybory (Ray Fisher) and the The Flash (Ezra Miller) must save the planet from Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds), DeSaad (Pete Guinness) and Darkseid (Ray Porter) and their dreadful intentions.

The basic plot is the same Josstice League but it's told in an arguably more cohrent (though I use coherent in a loosist sense) way.

The central theme of the film is that people are stronger together. This is most clearly visible in how we see Batman and Wonder Woman recruit Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg to fight Steppenwolf and how they initially work together to stop him. But then after their first encounter with him, they’re talking about how they can only defeat Steppenwolf with Superman by their side which heavily undermines that message. 

 
One of the major problems from Batman v Superman carries over to Justice League: There are too many characters. With so much time being taken up by Steppenwolf’s invasion and fleshing out the various members of the League, there really was never enough room to juggle subplots such as Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and Martha Kent’s (Diane Lane) grieving over the loss of Clark; Victor Stone's estranged relationship with his father Silas Stone (Joe Mortan)

Director Zack Snyder’s direction is overly flashy and self indulgent. complete with sweeping camera angles to give the film a sweeping scope and yet there so many scenes like a weird scene of yodelling for Aquaman from fishtown people that could’ve been cut and do little but bog down the pace.

The cinematography is garish and lurid, the score by Junkie XL is turgid and excruciating. The action scenes, which consist of superpowerd people biffing and bashing disposable CG Parademons, are dull, the costumes are clunky and look as though they’ve been hastily put together in a spare room. The production design is  the special effects are awful, The Apokoliptians are hideous. They pose a strong argument for the Razzie’s to reinstate their award for Worst Visual Effects. There's also a scene in the finale where Snyder doubles down on his usage of the Flash with usage of the Speed Force which audience will find crowd pleasing but personally, I found it to be overproduced exercise in style over substance. Watching it, I couldn't help but compare it to those same sequences from the CW Flash show and how emmotionally charged they were in comparison. 

Teetering on a bloated, pretentious runtime of 242 minutes, Justice League has severe pacing issues, practically the first two hours are dedicated to introducing Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg and infodumping the backstories and it bogs the pacing down when we as an audience are already fully aware that an alien invasion is on the horizon. Seriously, there is no reason for a film, this ambitious and of this scale to be this long. And while the expanded The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg material gives these characters some much needed depth, there's no escaping the fact that these three really should have had their own solo movies and cramming in their backstories serves as a detriment to the films story, stakes and overall pacing. But even with that added backstory, I still wasn't really a massive fan of any of these characters.
 
Ezra Miller gives an amiable, likeable performance in the role of Barry Allen/The Flash but just doesn’t quite come across as a movie star. I missed that mild mannered goofiness and tragedy that Grant Gustin had in the TV show. His intro scene does a great job of establishing him as a humble everyman who only uses his powers when necessary. He fills the role of the comic releif character well enough and his increased confidence is refreshing from Josstice League. Yet I still can’t help but feel that he’s not really the priority. Miller's just isn't that compelling compared Gustin in the long run.

 

Ray Fisher's Victor Stone/Cyborg is a character that gets considerably fleshed out in this version.  
Zack Snyder has described Cyborg as "the heart of the movie" and Fisher has described his arc as emotional, and allegorical of "the journey that Black people have taken in America." Victor was once a brilliant young scientist at S.T.A.R Labs and Gotham City University (GCU) football star with a bright future ahead of him and all of that was ripped away from him one fateful night where he had a horrible accident.

 

While I still don't care for his characterisation, Arthur Curry/Aquaman has some more meaty material in the Snyder Cut. Initially a gruff and cynical loner who turns down Bruce Wayne's offer to join the League and wants nothing to do with his heritage whilst also expressing contempt for Atlantis, he still dedicates his life to protecting the Icelandic fishing village because he believes no one else will help them. When he does join the team, he acts the cynic, though he genuinely admires his teamates idealism. He fills that role well enough. Unfortunately, Momoa plays him as the same gruff and tough barbarian that he's often typecast as. 

 
Let’s just get this off out chests, Gal Gadot can’t act! Her rapport with Bruce Wayne feels inauthentic and disingenuous because the two of they feel like they’ve only known each other for a few weeks at best despite the film taking place two years after BvS. Affleck and Gadot share no onscreen chemistry, they seem to be acting in front of rear-projections of themselves.  
 
As for Henry Cavill as Clark Kent/Superman, he didn’t appear until 2½ hours into the film and generally came across as a one-note punching machine. His “resurrection sickness” was largely glossed over in a thrown down with the League. 
After scrutinising the film, I offer you my summary of his character arc: Gets resurrected, has resurrection sickness, fights the League, recovers after some TLC with Lois and Martha, fights Steppenwolf. That lasts for the last two hours of the film. According to Zack Snyder, Justice League is supposed to be the culmination of the character arc that started in Man of Steel and becoming the “true” Superman as depicted in the comics, but honestly, this may as be the culmination of him getting dumbed down. His death looms over a large majority of the film like a shadow. Despite being feared by humanity he "sacrificed" his life for them. When he, eventually, gets ressurected by the League, a group of people he doesn't even know, he realises that there are others like him that see him a hero. His role in this film is about taking that second chance and choosing to stand by them. As Jor-El said in Man of Steel "They will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.” But because the films is already overstuffed with character backstory and superperfulous characters and Zack Snyder intentionality limiting Supes role in this film there wasn't time for Supe's arc to culminate or resonate with me in any meaningful way.

 
I’ve saved Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne/Batman for last because he has the one arc that really resonated with me on an emotional level and goes to a very logical place even if the initial foundation is shaky at best. Having witnessed Superman’s sacrifice to defeat Doomsday at the end of BvS, he realises how far he’s fallen and sets on a path of redemption to honour his sacrifice building a team. 
I don’t need such a pronounced deconstruction and reconstruction of his character, that worked in Batman Begins and Man of Steel because those versions of those characters were in their early days but with Batfleck all development has happened offscreen so the fact that he’s fallen off the deep end and has now found redemption means nothing. 

 
Despite Ciaran Hinds providing a capricious menace to role, I found little interest in Steppenwolf as a villain. 
Steppenwolf is, at the end of the day, a wounded animal. Someone who’s old, tired and trying to find a way out of his enslavement to his nephew Darkseid which he hopes to accomplish by conquering Earth. Unfortunately, he still came off as a damp squib of a villain due to never rising above the alien conquer archetype. 

 
As if the main players weren’t enough, as well as the titular League, Amy Adams, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Harry Lennix, J. K. Simmons, Jesse Eisenberg, Kiersey Clemons, Billy Crudup, Willem Dafoe, Amber Heard, Joe Manganiello, Ryan Zheng, Peter Guinness and Jared Leto all appear throughout the film playing Lois Lane, Martha Kent, Hippolyta, Antiope, Calvin Swanwick (revealed to actually be J’onn J’onzz/Martian Manhunter), James Gordon, Lex Luthor Iris West, Henry Allen, Nuidus Vulko, Mera, Slade Wilson/Deathstroke, Ryan Choi, DeSaad and the Joker respectively. About half of these characters could easily have been cut from the film because they’re given so little to do and contribute so little to the overall film as a result and resulted in the film being trimmed of its fat.
 
Ryan Choi and Iris West in particular are barely footnotes in the film that could easily have been cut. 
Vulko and Mera are merely there to spur on Aquaman. Heard, notably, delivers a British accent so dubious that Dick Van Dyke would have questioned its veracity.
 
Hippolyta gets to look great in Amazonian armor, fight some Parademons and spout action clichés I.E. “Show him your fear!” “We have no fear!” That’s never been uttered before. 
Darkseid, whose screentime is spent spouting generic bad guy lines such as “I have turned 100,000 worlds to dust. I will stride across their bones. And all of existence shall be mine.” Blah Blah Blah, I have conquered a thousand worlds before this one; Universal Domination will be mind! Heard it all before pal.

I am required to award stars to films I review. This is one of those rare times where I won’t. The star rating system is unsuited for this film. I think it’s a bad film, one so turgid, overproduced and boring that it occupies a closed universe where star ratings are irrelevant.

The Anonymous Critic.