(Hey so I haven’t written on here in months, I’ll post an explanation a bit later but here’s my first review in some time)
There’s a school of thought that suggests that when reviewing a film, one shouldn’t need to reference anything about the production or background and just analyse what’s there on the screen. I get that, and while I don’t abide by it myself, even if I did there would have to be some exceptions; Warner Bros/DC Comic’s long-awaited Justice league, is such an exception.
Honestly, I think that, even for people who don’t like the film at all, Justice League deserves to be remembered as a strange artefact of what a studio was desperately trying to achieve in 2017. To my first point, we know that this version of Justice League was originally conceived as a continuation of what Zack Snyder had been doing with the DC Universe, starting off with the divisive Man of Steel (which was never originally supposed to be the inception of a ‘shared universe’), and continuing with the generally ridiculed Batman v Superman – a film which depicted a world which fears Superman and in which Batman is a terrifying psychopath – films which should never have been the basis of any kind of wide continuity. Then there are a couple more factors to consider, firstly that the negative reaction to BvS, coupled with the positive one to the exceptional Wonder Woman solo movie have caused Warner Bros. to reconfigure the grim tone of their tentpole franchise to make it lighter. Then on top of all of this, a family tragedy resulted in Snyder having to leave the project altogether, being replaced with Avengers director Joss Whedon who conducted re-shoots in addition to altering the script (he receives a co-writer credit).
We’ve seen plenty of movies before that seemingly come off a studio production line, ticking boxes of what the executives want to see, but have we have seen a studio attempt to reverse engineer one from an existing, presumably mostly finished film? I’m not sure. I bring this up as I can’t pretend this prior knowledge didn’t influence the way I viewed Justice League, I was expecting a rushed Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, and in many ways, you could fairly call it that. You can’t help but find yourself looking for which parts come from where – whenever a character delivers a quip – is the shot in close-up? Then it was probably a re-shoot against a greenscreen. The film visually resembles previous Snyder efforts (though is noticeably more colourful in places), but is all the style his? Are all the jokes Whedon’s? Reports vary on just how large Whedon’s contribution was, I’ve already heard some people cynically giving him all the credit for the “good” parts of the movie while blaming Snyder for the rest, but we just don’t know for sure.
I’m genuinely curious to know how kids with zero interest in the behind-the-scenes stories receive this movie though, because I’d imagine that for the most part, they’d find it coheres. The two other stipulations enforced by Warners on Justice League, that it meet its original release date and have a run-time below 2 hours affect it in contrasting ways. A lot of the CGI doesn’t look great, there are already many, many accounts of people mocking the movie for the already infamous fact that Henry Cavill’s moustache had to be digitally removed during re-shoots. I honestly doubt you’d notice that too much if you weren’t specifically looking for it, but the two primarily CGI characters – team member Cyborg and villain Steppenwolf – could both have been improved significantly.
It is very obvious that the film has been cut down to the bone from a much larger movie as well, there are a few characters – all played by quite famous actors – who appear for probably under a minute, including J.K. Simmons’ Commissioner Gordon, and Amber Heard in an Atlantis-set scene that makes no sense at all. Cyborg and The Flash have backstories involving father figures that are hinted at early on then never satisfactorily delivered upon. There’s a random Russian family that features heavily in the film’s third act but we have no idea who they are or why we keep cutting to them when it first happens. But at the same time, the film just zooms along, moving at a much faster pace than any recent superhero movie.
And you know what? Despite all these undeniable flaws, I quite enjoyed the movie. Beyond just analytically trying to spot what’s what, and marvelling at the strange existance of this finished product, I mostly had fun with it.
What’s left of the story is as generic as it comes, we learn via a Lord of the Rings-esque flashback that after an ancient battle, three powerful devices (called “Mother Boxes”, but they might as well be called ‘McGuffin Boxes’) were spread among the Amazons, the Atlanteans, and the humans. Now, with Superman gone, big horned, hideous CGI villain Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds) and his army of ugly flying demons return to Earth to reclaim them and rule the world…or something. Batman then decides to put a team of superhumans together to stop this. Steppenwolf is as boring a villain as superhero movies have had, which doesn’t help matters, but we don’t spend a great deal of time with him until the climax.
Ben Affleck’s Batman appears to have undergone a significant personality change since we last saw him, he’s now all upbeat and keen on teamwork, not that Affleck himself seems all that enthusiastic. Far more keen to make a mark are Enza’s Miller’s Flash and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman. I can imagine both may prove divisive, Miller is all about youth and enthusiasm, providing a lot of the film’s comic relief where as Momoa portrays a radically different take on Aquaman; a whisky-swilling hardman. I enjoyed both performances, but they probably would have both been better served had they been introduced in solo movies prior to this team-up, rounding out their back-stories and giving the audience a chance to get invested in them. But Warners was always keen to put the cart before the horse when it came to Justice League.
Rounding out the team is Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, a far more serious character – Fisher’s performance is pretty solid, even as he’s undermined by the fact that he’s about 90% CGI. Unsurprisingly, by far the best member of this team, or indeed movie (or indeed franchise) is Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, the one character the DCEU has got well-and-truly correct. She’s fantastic whenever she’s onscreen, even if the number of butt/upskirt shots of her are glaringly obvious in comparison with her solo movie, and at least WB seem to have realised this, giving her what feels like just as much screen-time as Batman.
And then, non-spoiler alert, we have Henry Cavill’s Superman, a once-beloved character who was treated so badly by BvS. Of course he comes back, though when he first does, he’s in confused mode which seems to have been done just to have him fight with the other League members. I was very concerned by this, but it does give us one of the film’s best moments as he glances at The Flash in slow-mo, and in what seems to be one of the more positive results of the shortened runtime, he’s soon back to normal. And by that I don’t mean how he’s been in this franchise before, I mean classic Superman. We only get a small amount of this in the final battle but it is so great to see Cavill finally get a chance to play Superman as the beacon of hope he’s supposed to be.
Justice League is a mess, and I truly feared the worst when the review embargo broke 2 hours before I saw the movie. I sat waiting for it to start flicking through my twitter feed seeing headlines about how awful it supposedly was, but as I watched it, I kept waiting for the awfulness to start and never felt that it did. Yes, this is the DCEU openly attempting to course-correct before our eyes. It’s not trying to be edgy or ground-breaking, it just wants you to like it, and like I said, I had fun. The first Justice League movie shouldn’t wind up being just another generic superhero movie in a world swamped with them, but I’ll take it.
Moving forward, I hope that the DCEU doesn’t try and make another team-up for the foreseeable future, they have a goldmine of characters, they should pursue them and just move on from the Batman v Superman debacle like it never happened. I like the new characters introduced here enough to hope their solo movies turn out well, and whatever they decide to do with Batman (put him on the shelf? I dunno) they should probably just keep connections to this core trilogy of Snyder movies to a minimum. This doesn’t fill me with hope about the DCEU but it doesn’t leave me fearful either. Hopefully in the long run it’s a step in the right direction. But one last thing, please, oh please can we get a good Superman movie now?
3/5
White on Film 