Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Programming Note: Back in March/April of 2021, I wrote a review of the then just-released Snydercut of Justice League for [REDACTED, but a different REDACTED than last time]. I’m actually not a thousand percent sure this actually got published back then, but I’m putting it up here now for roughly its 3rd anniversary. I did a little cleanup, but mostly I left it as it was, three years ago. On an amusing personal note, writing this was one of the things that caused me to think “you know, I should really re-light the blog.”

So, #snydercut. The tl;dr is that by any reasonable metric it's a lightyears better movie than the theatrical Whedon version, and that it's absolutely a Justice League movie by the guy that made 300.

Is it any good, though?

There's something to be said for just raw, un-compromised artistic vision, and this is clearly the movie ZS set out to make, and dang did he ever make the heck out of it.

It's extremely Zack Snyder. The guy has a style, and this might be its apotheosis. If nothing else, he knows how to make stuff look cool, and every character has at least one moment where they're doing the coolest thing imaginable. If I'd had seen this at 15 I'd have lost my damn mind. And that's kind of the point—this is a 15-year old's idea of what cool and grownup is.

The whole thing operates at this level of just Operatic Pomposity. Extremely silly stuff is happening constantly, and the movie just plays it completely straight-faced, as if this was the most amazing stuff you have ever seen. I mean, SIXTEEN minutes into the movie, the literal greek god Zeus shoots a Jack Kirby character with lightning, and the movie shoots it like it’s the end of Macbeth.

And you can kind of see why. The "other guys" have established a brand for self-aware, slightly self-deprecating superhero movies, and you want to carve out a space where you don't look like an Avengers knock off. Problem is, the only space where this material can work other than "Robert Downey Jr smirking" is "as goddamn serious as possible", so they went with that, and it's hard to blame them. Well, and there's also a genuine audience of people who think Frank Miller is a genius non-ironically, and I'm glad those people got a movie for them.

Having the movie at full prescription strength is intersting, because all the bad ideas are still bad, but they're fully baked, and you can see where they were going with it.

It's almost boiling over with ideas it can't figure out how to land.

ZS knows instinctually that character conflict is interesting, but can’t figure out how that works. Instead, everyone settles into this kind of grumpy-surly mode, but never actually disagree about anything.

It keep gesturing at other, better movies. There's an absolutely lyrical scene where Barry Allen saves Iris West from a car crash in the middle of a job interview that both nails Barry's character as well as finally figuring out how to show The Flash's powers in live action. Wonder Woman stars in a 10 minute Indiana Jones movie with torches and secret doors and everything. There's a really neat sketch for a movie about Lois Lane and Martha Kent dealing with their shared grief over Clark's death, and exploring what it's like for the people who knew the real person when a famous person dies, and THEN, as soon as Lois decices to move on, Clark comes back to life.

Heck, I'd take any of those blown out to 90 minutes, no question. Still, abbreviated as these sketches are, they’re good!

But, theres at least two colossal conceptual screwups in the movie that even this version can't do anything about.

The first is trying to invert the Avengers model, and introduce everyone in this movie and then spin them off. It ends up as an amazing counter-example of how well put together the first Avengers really was. Consider: basically every speaking character—Heroes AND Villains—as well as the core McGuffin, had already been introduced, so all that movie had to do was remind the audience who everyone was and then say "oh no! this guy from that movie has teamed up with aliens to get that thing from that other movie!" And BAM, you get to start 2/3 into the story and just RUN. Justice League has to spend the first 120 minutes just explaining things so that the rest of the movie can even happen.

The second big screwup is trying to go for the Kirby Fourth World / New Gods / Darkside stuff in one gulp. There’s so much there, and this movie has to push most of it to the margins. The result is a movie where the actual bad guy only shows up right at the end and has no lines, while the rest of the time they fight his least-interesting henchman.

As kind of a bonus mistake, the movie picks up where BvS left off, which means a dead Superman, which means most of the middle of the movie is a speedrun of “The Search for Spock” but for Superman. And it’s massively irritating, because the emphasis is all in the wrong places. Literally no one on earth thought Superman was going to stay dead, and even less people thought that he was going to sit out a Justice League movie. So the Return of Superman stuff in the middle is never interesting, it just feels like padding in a movie that already has too much going on. One more sublot jammed in that could have easily been stretched out into it’s own story, or should have been left behind in the conceptual phase.

There were some things I really liked, though. As I alluded to earlier the way they represent the Flash by having him stay the same speed but having the rest of the world go into slow motion is absolute genius, a perfect fit for Snyder's slow motion fetish, and forehead-slappingly obvious once you've seen it. And even though Days of Future Past had done something similar with Quicksilver three years earlier, this movie keeps finding new ways to use the idea, and even the lighting, instead of being ridiculous, serves as a snazzy indicator that Flash speed has kicked in before you have time to process that the background has slowed down. The shot where he steps back and catches the batarang is brilliant, and was rightly the center of the trailer.

I basically loved everything they did with Wonder Woman? Great use of a great character.

I also like that they way they solve the “Superman is too overpowered" problem is to lean all the way into it, and just show him as being on a completely different level from everyone else. That shot when he's fighting the League, and Flash is running by the frozen slow motion melee, and then Superman's eye suddenly moves to follow Flash? That's one of the best things anyone's ever done with Superman in live action. And it almost makes the “Search for Superman” stuff work, because he operates less like a character and more like a bonus mcguffin—he’s the Death Star plans, and once the League has him back on his feet they’re in good shape.

But, here in 2021, the biggest ding on JL is that absolutely everything that this movie tries to do in terms of tone or content, Infinity War / Endgame does better. The way this movie tries to be all edgelord dark looks downright amateur hour in a world where the "goofy" superhero francise made a movie where the bad guy wins and half the main characters die, and then rolls silent credits in front of a stunned audience.

[TEMPORAL INTRUSION: Hi, Gabe from ’24 here.  The original version of this had a horizontal line marking a transition here, but I’m going to replace that with something a little more thematically appropriate and #helmancut my own review from 3 years in the future.

Obviously, this was all written before we knew they were going to finally put that cycle of DC movies out of their misery and hand the keys to the guy Disney accidentally fired over some tweets, or that Marvel was going to spend the next several years exclusively stepping on rakes they had carefully placed in front of themselves.  I’m on the record as saying I think “superhero fatigue” is really “bad-movie-with-assigned-homework fatigue”, but either way, it’s a real thing.  I agree with everything I wrote here, but after years of relentlessly bad superhero and superhero-adjacent movies, I wouldn’t have written all this in such an upbeat tone.  And also, I sorta failed to point this out before, but those last two Avengers movies weren’t that great either.  “Grimdark bummer-times serious” just isn’t a key superheros play well in.

What’s remarkable to me now is that in the spring of ’21, waiting out what we thought was the tail end pandemic and just before our fall plans were wrecked by the Delta variant, I still remembered enough about the theatrical JL that I could do a comparison without a rewatch; now, I’m not sure I could tell you anything that happened in any of those movies.  Honestly, the only part of either version of JL that I still really remember is that mini–Indiana Jones movie starring Gal Godot at the beginning.  With the entire exercise now in the rear-view mirror:  They should have done a lot more of that.

We now return to the spring of 2021.]

I may be slightly more interested in the practice of turning a "long bad movie" into a "shorter, less bad" movie than the average person, but I think it's fascinating to see this, the original, and compare it to what they shipped in 2017. It's clear what Whedon's marching orders were: "cut it down to two hours, and add jokes". And that first one is a hell of a thing. You can squint and see there's a decent 3 hour version of this with a really solid deleted scenes section on the DVD, but cutting out half the movie is going to require some serious restructuring. For starters, you gotta pick a main character. There's two obvious choices:

Cyborg is clearly meant to be the emotional center of the movie. He's the only character with an actual "arc" who ends the movie in a different place that he starts. There's a kind of neat story in there about moving through the stages of grief, learning how to deal with the cards life deals you, and then finding a new family and purpose. The problem is—and this is a darkly hilarious punchline after all the allegations and drama—it turns out Ray Fisher really can't act. He's utterly out of his depth the entire time, and is utterly unable to deliver what the movie needs him to. He seems like a neat guy who everyone likes, and he was clearly treated abominably, and Whedon is a garbage person, but cutting his part to the bone was clearly the right call. That guy has no business being anywhere near a big movie, much less anchoring one.

Fortunately, however, the actual main character of the movie is clearly Wonder Woman. All the critical decisions in the movie are hers, she's the one that figures things out and gets the big exposition, she's the only one that gets a side adventure at the beginning—she's even the only one that gets her own theme music. This is a fairly clear "Wonder Woman and the Justice League" cut where it sticks with her as a the spine as she figures things out and recruits a team; not unlike the way Steve Rogers stays as the spine of the first Avengers movie.

So Whedon, of course, cuts out all her scenes and shoots a bunch of new stuff to make Batman the main guy. And you can almost see the panic-logic here. Suicide Squad bombed, BvS got a much more tepid reaction than they were expecting, Wonder Woman wasn't out yet. Recentering the movie on the one DC character thats proven able to hold down a franchise is an easy call to make, and "this movie needs more Batman" is a seemingly safe choice. But damn, what a screw up. And then it gets all extra icky once you roll in all the stuff we now know about "Joss Whedon, Fake Feminist".

Were there better ways to spend that 70 million bucks? Probably. It it a great movie? Not really. This isn't a Blade Runner-style "good movie becomes great" recut, this a Heavens Gate-style "oh, it turns out they really weren’t incompetent".

I'm glad they did this though. Its easy to see why the cast was so disgruntled, and I'm glad we got to see the movie they signed up to make. As the various studios figure out what to do with their personal streaming services, I hope "original cuts" of movies becomes a thing. If nothing else, I hope this encourages Disney to drop the first version of Rogue One on Disney+, or even, dare I say it, the real Star Wars.

But you know what? We've all had our work fucked up by other people. I'm glad someone got to haul their real work back out the trash and say "no, I made THIS."

April 8, 2021: A Sketch From The Midst Of A Pandemic

This was originally written for [REDACTED] on April 8, 2021. I’m republishing it here on its 3rd anniversary .

I got my shot at the Sacramento County "distribution center" at Cal Expo. Cal Expo, for those who don't know or don't remember, is the permanent home of the California State Fair. It's plunked down unceremoniously on the north side of the American river, in the middle of a weird swath of the city that's been permanently in the middle of one failing urban renewal project or another for my entire life. These usually involve "rebranding" the area—according to a sign I drove past which is both brand new and already battered, I'm told we're now calling this area "uptown sacramento". It'll have a new name this time next year.

Cal Expo itself is a strange beast—a 900 acre facility built to host an annual 17 day event. The initial fever-dream was that it would become "DisneyLand North", mostly now it plays host to any event that need a whole lot of space for a single weekend—RV fairs, garden shows, school district-wide science fairs.

The line to get in to the vaccination site is identified with a large hand-lettered sign reading "VAX", surrounded by National Guard troops. Everyone stays in their car, and the line of cars snakes between dingy orange cones across acres of cracked parking lot. Enormous yellow weeds pour out of every crack, and I realize, in one of the strangest moments of dissonance of the last year, that this is the section of parking lot that in the before-times hosted the christmas tree lot. Now it's full of idling cars and masked troops in camo.

As befitting it's late 60s origins, Cal Expo mostly composed of bare dirt and giant brutalist retangular concrete buildings. They're all meant to be multi-use, so they've got high ceilings, no permanent internal fittings, and multiple truck-sized roll-up doors. They give the impression of an abandoned warehouse.

The line of cars contines into one of these bunkers. Incredibly friendly workers; a mixed of national guard, CA Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch of older RNs and MDs with strong "retired and now a docent" energy.

The whole thing runs like clockwork - directed into a line of cars, get to the front, get the shot, they drop a timer set to 15 minutes on the dashboard, and then directed out to the "Recovery Area", which is the next parking lot over full of other lines of cars.

The air is incredibly jovial. The woman who gives me my shot compliments my Hawaiian shift, and hopes we'll all be "somewhere like that" soon. A grandmotherly RN comes by and give me advice about where to keep my vax card. A younger guardsman in a medic uniform explains the symptoms to watch for, and then we shoot the breeze about Star Wars for a minute before he moves on. An older Guard Colonel walks by, sees the "JANSSEN" on the card on my dashboard and says "Ahhh! The one and done, NICE!" with a fist pump as he walks on.

Another HHS RN comes by and tells me my timer is up, along with every other car in the row. Another national guardswoman waves at me as I drive off. Everyone is wearing a mask, but you can tell everyone is smiling.