Review: Zach Snyder’s Justice League
While making Justice League in 2017, director Zack Snyder was forced to take a step back due to familial calamity. The final product, finished by Joss Whedon, was rather poorly received. After a somewhat weird social media campaign, Snyder was allowed to make his original vision of DC’s big superhero team, the so-called Snyder cut (it’s not really a cut when you add 70 million dollars to the original 300 million dollar budget, is it?). Although it’s unlikely that he would have been allowed to make a four-hour movie the first time around. And perhaps the most positive thing I can say about the Snyder cut is that it doesn’t feel like four hours and, well, that it’s better than the theatrical release (which is a really, really low bar). But otherwise, despite an occasional great moment, even some glimpses of genuine emotion, the two words that best describe this movie, for me, are sloppy and unearned.
The self-serious dialogue, which feels the need to spell out every little thing, can be tiring. It’s the way these heroes finish each other’s expositional sentences, though, and talk about how they’re suddenly not only a team, but Earth’s best defenders, that just feels completely delusional. Where do they get these ideas after having met mere hours earlier? Well, from the comic books that have clearly gotten a cursory glance while writing the script. They’re a team because that’s what is supposed to happen, not because of anything that happens in the movie.
The action scenes suffer similarly, with characters performing weird, jarringly inefficient moves just to look spectacular. Not every scene, mind you. There is some spectacular action in this four-hour superhero epic, of course; would be quite dreadful if there weren’t. Attention to detail is clearly not this movie's superpower, however. I could bore you with a list, but a single tiny thing exemplifies this for me. Near the end of the movie, someone presses play on an old-fashioned tape recorder, then rewinds for a bit, then presses play again. But the rewind time is longer than the playtime of the rewinded part, which makes no sense, since rewinding goes faster than playing the tape forward. Is this important? No, not really. It is a pretty good summary of the feeling the Snyder Cut left me with, however, that nobody paid enough attention, or worse, that nobody cared enough to get it right.
Look, if this is your jam (or if you’re one of the people who’ve attached their identity to the release of this movie for some reason), you’ve probably already seen it. If you’re still wondering whether you should spend four hours on this, though, the answer is probably no.
