Justice League review
I’ll preface everything I say that I never wanted to hate Justice League. I have a distinct memory of a thirteen-year old me walking out of Man of Steel with one thought; “That movie was alright, but wait till they get around to doing the Justice League! That’ll be awesome!” And now, after reassessing most of my opinions on Man of Steel, witnessing the combined artistic and commercial failures of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, closely following the horrifying debacle of a production history Justice League has had, watching the horrifyingly toxic DCEU fanbase amass and offer idiotically meaningless defenses for why their Cinematic Universe sucks, AND have Wonder Woman come out and not only be good, but a perfect example of how the DCEU could fix itself, I make no exaggeration in saying that I was frankly DREADING having to sit through Justice League.
If you weren’t aware, Justice League has had quite literally one of the worst production histories of any movie I’ve ever seen. Having already been in production when Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was released to dismal reviews and box-office returns not even close to what the studio had been hoping for, Justice League had to undergo what could only be described as a massive course correction. Geoff Jones and Jon Berg were brought on as executive producers to essentially rework the entire vision of the DCEU, and the backlash against Dawn of Justice heavily factored into every decision made going forward. Unfortunately, things got much worse from there. In May of this year, Zach Snyder stepped down from the post production process due to a horrible family tragedy and Joss Whedon was brought on to finish the film. Whedon ended up being the director in charge of the nearly twenty-five million dollar reshoots ordered for the film in July, sparking rumors of massive tonal changes to the final film. Adding to that, they scrapped the entire original score composed for the movie by Junkie XL and replaced it with a whole new one composed by Danny Elfman; complete with his original ’89 Batman theme woven in. And you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to go back and watch the first official trailer released for the movie and compare it to the last official trailer released to notice huge, and I mean HUGE, differences in visual effects and color grading. Now differences in trailers to finished films are increasingly common nowadays in big budget releases. For example both Spider-man: Homecoming and Thor: Ragnerok have very important pieces of information purposefully missing from their trailers that impact how scenes play out in the movie. But with Justice League, it’s very obvious that the movie that was initially shot wasn’t the movie Warner Bros. wanted, and that they were re-hauling everything up until zero-hour. As someone who wants to go into the industry someday, words can’t express the sympathy I feel for the hundreds of people who desperately worked on this film to make something presentable under such a tight schedule.
So now, with the world’s biggest qualifier attached to the front of it, I will confidently say this. Justice League is a more enjoyable movie than both Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad… Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean Justice League is a very good movie in its own right. It’s very clear that Warner Bros. went into total damage control mode and decided that releasing an under-two-hours-weightless-dud was preferable to another three-hour-artistic-misfire like Dawn of Justice. The resulting product is a franken-movie where anything and everything that could be trimmed off was cut in order to make this as palatable for a broad audience as possible regardless of artistic sensibilities or cinematic cohesion. It’s easily digestible, doesn’t demand much of your mental effort, and doesn’t stick around longer than it needs too. But as a result it becomes impossible for me to register any kind significant emotional reaction to Justice League, positive or negative. So, yeah, I guess if this was the best case scenario, call this the most existentially depression movie of 2017.
(Spoilers from here on out)
Justice League may still bear Zach Snyder’s name on the final product as director, but this is easily his least artistically distinct movie to date; and it probably goes deeper than the fact that his usual Cinematographer Larry Fong couldn’t return to work on it. It’s very, very clear that whatever plans Snyder originally had for Justice League’s story and tone died the minute Warner Bros. got ahold of the final Rotten Tomatoes score for Dawn of Justice; and that’s even before you add Whedon’s reshoots into the picture. I’ll say this much for Dawn of Justice, I may have absolutely hated its half-baked attempts at being thematically dense, but at least they were attempts. Anything remotely interesting in terms of story or thematics seems to have been x’ed out entirely in terms of replacing it with a far more standard story and structuring. Said story and structure is entirely composed around character beats, action-scenes, and exposition. So yeah, if you wanna compare this to a Marvel movie and you wouldn’t be very far off. The resemblances to the final product of Justice League and The Avengers are certainly uncanny, except that The Avengers is frankly a thousand times better than this movie. In fact, given how visually ugly, emotionally weightless and generally unappealing the whole movie is, Justice League ends up resembling an Asylum knock-off of the original Avengers, rather than a legitimate competitor. And it’s all because of its execution.
See, while The Avengers had six movies worth of character arcs to build upon and resolve, Justice League starts with two characters with mostly resolved character arcs, then throws in three more characters we’ve never met in order to introduce whole new arcs and sides of the DC Universe, and then promptly decides to spend a hundred and twenty minutes doing basically nothing with any of them. I mean, make no mistake, I certainly did meet Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg in this movie, and I guess I know more about them and where they came from, but I’m not really sure I can say they grew or developed in any significant way. I’m even less sure if Batman learned anything or progressed as a character because it seems like all his major character changes happened off-screen in between Dawn of Justice and now. Seriously! I guess Wonder Woman comes closest to having an actual arc in learning to acknowledge her reaction to the death of Steve Trevor was a mistake and she needs to open herself up again, but that already feels like a lesson she learned at the end of her own solo movie; and the continuity necessary to accept this character arc feels like it’s already going to be ret-conned in Wonder Woman 2! And speaking of ret-cons, hoooooooly crap does this movie immediately ask you to suspend your disbelief to the breaking point by expecting us to believe that Superman wasn’t the sad, mopey mop-face we’ve been dealing with through Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice, and re-characterizes him as the ‘good’ version of Superman we’re all supposed to be familiar with. I mean I’m okay with this on some level, since it means Henry Cavill actually gets to be charismatic as Superman for once, but by extension this ret-con/re-characterization does a lot more damage towards negating and nullifying any of the thematic conflict Dawn of Justice desperately wanted to have. I know Warner Bros. wanted to course-correct, but it feels like Justice League wants to live in a reality where it can dictate its own context and not the other way around.
Now, that’s enough talking about thematics, lets talk technicals! Specifically the CGI… It’s awful! All of it! Every single VFX shot in this entire movie looks awful. Non of it feels like it has any real world weight or presence and just looks ugly onscreen. It’s clear every single visual asset was designed for totally different lighting and color grading than what made the actual movie. This is especially noticeable with the main villain, Steppenwolf (who, by the way, easily takes the new title of worst comic-book movie villain in a hotly contested market). Whatever physical motion-capture performed for him does nothing to help his performance feel tangible, since for some weird reason they’ve decided to make his proportions far larger than anatomically possible. So every fight scene just devolves into the various members of the Justice League trying to fight a beefed up Elder Scrolls boss. But hey, it’s the fifth DCEU movie, so that basically looks like it’s par for the course. What’s more disappointing is how it seems like neither Snyder nor anyone else in the entire production staff managed to think up anything remotely interesting for the action scenes or visualization of anything. Everything’s either bog-standard or outright visually unappealing, the action’s all serviceable but not memorable, and it all takes place in the most dreary of locations. There’s one cool scene that takes advantage of the Flash’s powers, but it’s a diamond in the rough. (Also yes, Henry Cavill’s mustache removal CGI is very bad and very noticeable.)
Given this went through two completely different directors at two different times, the performances end up being surprisingly cohesive. This is not to say that many of them are great though. Ben Affleck looks like he really wants out as Batman through almost the entire movie. Gal Gadot is fine, but she’s hugely underutilized compared to what we’ve seen from her earlier this year. Ray Fischer is actually surprisingly good as Cyborg, but the movie can’t follow through on any of the interesting ideas it suggests for his characterization. Ezra Miller is fine as the Flash, but his characterization is obnoxious and grating. And… I’ll be honest, I’m still not totally sure about Jason Mamoa as Aquaman. I mean he got a laugh from me every now and then, but I’m not sure he lives up to the expectation of ‘Polynesian Poseidon turned Jack-Daniel’s Spokesmen’ that his whole visual aesthetic projects. As I said, Henry Cavill actually gets to be somewhat charismatic this time around as Superman, but the times where he needs to be somewhat threatening fell completely flat for me. In fact there’s one use of a callback line to Dawn of Justice that would’ve actually had me gasp… had the context of his delivery had more build-up. Steppenwolf is a joke; barely a character and more of a loose collection of sequel set-up and corny lines wrapped in voice filters and ugly visual design. I feel sorry any actor, much less Ciaran Hinds, had to have the misfortune of playing him. Amy Adams’s work as Lois Lane feels so disjointed and disconnected from the movie happening around her that it’s a wonder she even has three scenes at all. It’s a shame to see her get the short end of the stick for the third time when she’s proven to be such an excellent actor elsewhere. Outside of that, the writing is wildly inconsistent and faulty. Continuity errors seem to abound, and there’s no sense of time structure anywhere. The entire first act feels like it’s moving at a snail’s pace while it introduces everyone, and there are more than a few lines that had me laughing openly (when they weren’t supposed to) and groaning (when they were supposed to make me laugh). Overall, I will say it benefits greatly from a far less self-serious tone than the preceding DCEU, if for no other reason than it helps the movie chug along faster.
I didn’t come into Justice League wanting to hate it, and I don’t know if I do. It’s filled with enough ham-fisted fan-service that the DC fans should get something out of it, and it’s a relatively easy sit compared to the other DCEU movies. If you squint at it hard enough it’s almost a good movie. The pieces are all in place for something genuinely good to take shape… it’s just not coming around today. It’s not the worst movie I’ve seen this year, not by a long shot. In fact, it’s not even the most fascinating cinematic failure Warner Bros. has released this year. I’m just saddened that considering all the trouble everyone involved went through, how long we’ve waited for a Justice League movie, and how the future of the entire DC Cinematic Universe currently rests on this movie’s box-office performance, this was the best they could do.
