Justice League
Year: 2017
Director: Zack Snyder & Joss Whedon
Starring: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Ray Fisher, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller & Jason Momoa
Runtime: 120 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 07/07/21
Director: Zack Snyder & Joss Whedon
Starring: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Ray Fisher, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller & Jason Momoa
Runtime: 120 mins
BBFC: 12
Published: 07/07/21
The DC Extended Universe got off to a rocky start with the generally ok Man of Steel, painfully dull Batman v Superman, and straight up bad Suicide Squad. But thankfully 2017’s Wonder Woman proved that the series could potentially hit the ground running again, and all the weight resided on Justice League. Unfortunately, Justice League had a notoriously troubled development, most notably with original director Sack Snyder stepping down during post-production, and it being picked back up by Joss Whedon who put the film through some extensive reshoots and ultimately got the thing into theatres. It’s one of the most infamous superhero films ever made, made only more so thanks to the recent release of the extended and re-edited ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’. But I’d never seen the original, so is 2017’s Justice League the pretty good team-up film everyone thought it was in 2017, or is it a steaming turd that needs to be burned and buried as per the opinion circa 2021?
In the wake of Clark Kent/Superman’s (Henry Cavill) death, Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) has somewhat unsuccessfully tried to assemble a group of superpowered beings to defend Earth from whatever threat may come next. But when Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) returns to Earth with the intention of gathering three ‘Mother Cubes’ and destroying the planet; Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller), Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa) agree to aid Batman in taking on the greatest threat Earth has ever known. With their best hope being to bring Superman back from the dead.
In the wake of Clark Kent/Superman’s (Henry Cavill) death, Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) has somewhat unsuccessfully tried to assemble a group of superpowered beings to defend Earth from whatever threat may come next. But when Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) returns to Earth with the intention of gathering three ‘Mother Cubes’ and destroying the planet; Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller), Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa) agree to aid Batman in taking on the greatest threat Earth has ever known. With their best hope being to bring Superman back from the dead.
I’m in one of two minds about Justice League. On the one hand I feel like it’s definitely a more competently made film than Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, as well as more enjoyable. But on the other hand, I recognise that it doesn’t do anything particularly well either. I think the biggest factor working against Justice League is the runtime. If you’ve read my reviews for MoS, BvS, and Wonder Woman, you’ll know I felt those films were a little on the long side. I wasn’t the only ones to hold these opinions and Warner Bros. listened, in fact they listened a little too well. Justice League had a strict two-hour runtime applied to it, no longer. So, we get an exactly two-hour long Justice League film that has enough story to fill something twice that length…but yet simultaneously it still manages to make the film feel as though it’s got time to spare by making the story as barebones as it possibly can.
You want character development? Sorry, not enough time for that. Forget development, do you want proper character introductions? Sorry, not enough time for that either! Do you want to understand why the villain wants to destroy the Earth? Whoops, looks like that’ll need to be left out to stay under two hours. You want stupid jokes that don’t fit within a characters previously established demeanour? Sure, tons of time for that!
It’s like Warner Bros. saw all the negativity BvS got and decided to just swing Justice League as hard in the opposite direction as they possible could, without working out how that could be done. So what Justice League is, is a two-hour treatment of a script that feels like it was written for a Saturday morning cartoon.
You’ve got Batman cracking jokes, The Flash doing physical comedy gags, and Aquaman parading his fragile masculinity around like a peacock but getting shut down every few minutes. Cyborg is a glorified get out of jail free card for whenever technology becomes an issue, and that’s basically all he does the entire film. Wonder Woman is just…I don’t even know. I kind of forgot she was there a lot of time because she plays second fiddle to the men, which I’m sure was exactly what we wanted after her solo film kicked so much ass and Patty Jenkins worked her butt off to make a statement about female visibility and equality in action films.
You want character development? Sorry, not enough time for that. Forget development, do you want proper character introductions? Sorry, not enough time for that either! Do you want to understand why the villain wants to destroy the Earth? Whoops, looks like that’ll need to be left out to stay under two hours. You want stupid jokes that don’t fit within a characters previously established demeanour? Sure, tons of time for that!
It’s like Warner Bros. saw all the negativity BvS got and decided to just swing Justice League as hard in the opposite direction as they possible could, without working out how that could be done. So what Justice League is, is a two-hour treatment of a script that feels like it was written for a Saturday morning cartoon.
You’ve got Batman cracking jokes, The Flash doing physical comedy gags, and Aquaman parading his fragile masculinity around like a peacock but getting shut down every few minutes. Cyborg is a glorified get out of jail free card for whenever technology becomes an issue, and that’s basically all he does the entire film. Wonder Woman is just…I don’t even know. I kind of forgot she was there a lot of time because she plays second fiddle to the men, which I’m sure was exactly what we wanted after her solo film kicked so much ass and Patty Jenkins worked her butt off to make a statement about female visibility and equality in action films.
What worked though? I mean there was definitely some ok stuff in there. It was nice to see more of Bruce Wayne, and even get Batman in a couple of fight sequences where he doesn’t look like a fridge with legs. Ezra Miller puts in a great performance as The Flash. There’s a whole lot of colours too, the film’s pretty to look at most of the time. That’s pretty much it.
But even these good things are tinged with bad. Tackling the visuals first, it’s so jarring to go from BvS to this…even Wonder Woman which had significantly more colour than the other DC films looks washed out compared to this. It’s like the gamma and contrast got dialled all the way up so everything is super vivid, but nothing looks real. Part of this is probably because hardly any of it is…the vast majority of the film was shot on a green screen and the CGI is iffy at best. Then even Ezra Miller, who is arguably the best actor in the film, is given so many bad jokes to say that it drags the whole thing down.
There’s not a whole lot more I can say on the matter without going in circles. Whilst Justice League certainly isn’t the scum of the Earth as people would have you believe nowadays, it’s not exactly a good film. I had fun with it during some moments but the story feels like we got the elevator pitch rather than the finished treatment, the jarring tonal shift never stops being distracting, the CGI is just not good, and on the whole it’s basically exactly what we should have expected from a DC Extended Universe Justice League film.
But even these good things are tinged with bad. Tackling the visuals first, it’s so jarring to go from BvS to this…even Wonder Woman which had significantly more colour than the other DC films looks washed out compared to this. It’s like the gamma and contrast got dialled all the way up so everything is super vivid, but nothing looks real. Part of this is probably because hardly any of it is…the vast majority of the film was shot on a green screen and the CGI is iffy at best. Then even Ezra Miller, who is arguably the best actor in the film, is given so many bad jokes to say that it drags the whole thing down.
There’s not a whole lot more I can say on the matter without going in circles. Whilst Justice League certainly isn’t the scum of the Earth as people would have you believe nowadays, it’s not exactly a good film. I had fun with it during some moments but the story feels like we got the elevator pitch rather than the finished treatment, the jarring tonal shift never stops being distracting, the CGI is just not good, and on the whole it’s basically exactly what we should have expected from a DC Extended Universe Justice League film.