Justice League tries to serve two directors...and fails
In general, the DC Extended Universe has been remarkably underwhelming. It’s confusing, given that DC comics has two of the most recognizable and popular superheroes ever created. Superman and Batman essentially created the genre—without Jerry Siegel, Joel Shuster, Bob Keane, and Bill Finger, comic books (and the movies that have come to dominated the film market) would look very different.
But other than Wonder Woman, the DCEU movies have largely been critically panned. This isn’t due to some film critic conspiracy against DC Comics—if there is one, I’ve been left out of the secret meetings entirely. Instead, the blame can be placed at the feet of Zack Synder.
Synder isn’t a bad director, necessarily. It depends on what you look for in a film. He excels at creating cinematic moments, at crafting elegant and expressive scenes accompanied by a particular taste in music.
However, Snyder has little interest in story. Narrative focus is almost an afterthought in many Snyder films and as a result his outings in the DCEU have been more than a little messy and confusing.
Thematically, Snyder has some interesting ideas but he never seems to capitalize on them. So when it was reported that Snyder had elected to step away from Justice League due to a family tragedy and the studio brought in Joss Whedon to reshoot key scenes, it made a lot of sense. But it seems that even the wit of Whedon couldn’t replace all of Snyder’s worse impulses.
Still, Justice League is miles better than Batman vs. Superman. It’s just that it has no heart of its own. The film is a blatant cover version of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it misses a lot of notes along the way.
Justice League picks up not too long after the events of Batman vs. Superman. The Man of Steel (Henry Cavill) is still dead and great danger is afoot without his protection. The Caped Crusader (Ben Affleck) is doing his part to combat the appearance of this winged evil, bug-like Parademons from an unknown world, and he and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) undertake the great task of putting together a team of superpowered individuals from around the world: Aquaman (Jason Mamoa), the King of Atlantis, Flash (Ezra Miller), a speedy goofball, and Cyborg (Ray Fisher), a mostly robotic football player.
For nearly an hour and half, the film treats audiences to the wonders of exposition, trying to do in one film what Marvel did in five. The results are about what you’d expect. Ultimately, the team comes together to fight Steppenwolf (played by a terrible CGI version of Ciarian Hinds), an otherworldly being hoping to reform the Earth to his liking using three magic boxes.
Beyond the generic storyline, the CGI in the film is by far the worst part. It’s no secret that Henry Cavil was required to do his reshoots sporting a fancy mustache on behalf of Paramount’s latest Mission: Impossible film—it was removed during post-production and the results are unnerving. The villain too is poorly designed and rendered.
Overall, the film has an unpolished, distracting look to It. None of this is helped by the fact that Cavil’s Superman has the charisma of a canned ham. No amount of CGI can improve the writing. Even Joss Whedon was unable to write the story out of the corner it found itself in.
The jokes all fell flat—the audience I saw it with sat stone faced throughout most scenes. Not even Gal Gadot, who probably gave the best performance in the film, was unable to add any spark to the proceedings. Justice League is as paint by numbers as it gets.
This is to be expected, however. Warner Brothers is more than aware of the DCEU’s reputation. They are attempting to fix the film by making it as audience friendly as possible. Whatever attempts at interesting themes were tried in previous films are abandoned here for an average superhero story.
I don’t know that anyone will be angered by the film, although there are definitely better ways to spend an afternoon. And so, the DCEU continues to limp along. It will probably do well enough internationally to warrant more films. Whether American audiences are interested in seeing them remains to be seen.