The absolute first thing we have to talk about is terminology. As Steve Guttenberg once said to Roman on Party Down, “Have you ever had your writing read aloud?”
Note: These is Matt Rob’s essay on Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Check out the conversation between Matt and Natalie here.
Language lives. It changes. It morphs. It evolves like a Pokémon. Sometimes a specific definition of a word becomes the dominant one, and the other uses fall out of favor due to that definition’s ubiquity. When was the last time you used the word corn in its original usage, meaning an individual grain? This meaning of corn remains in words like peppercorn, barleycorn, and even in corned beef, which is brined using large grains of salt. In the United States we almost exclusively say corn when we refer to produce from the maize plant. The old definition remains in the phrase corn on the cob but is otherwise uncommon.
Other times a word takes on a new meaning that is ribald or profane, so the banal usage falls out of favor. Think about the last time sometime called a rooster a cock. Or if you speak Spanish, think how huevos is such common slang for testicles that blanquillos became the polite way to ask for eggs. This is my first problem with Zack Snyder’s Justice League (ZSJL).
Yeah, I’m talking about MOTHER BOXES. I get that it is a part of the comic book lore and possibly a term used in assembly line construction (?), and I don’t care. Box has taken on a very specific meaning in the decades since comic books became a thing. And adding the descriptor mother to it just makes the slang meaning even more obvious.
There are a bunch of unintentionally funny lines because of this, and it drove me nuts. Did no one on set break into laughter the first time Steppenwolf said “I can smell the Mother Box on your hands” or “the scent of the Mother Box is on you.” (NOTE: he says variations on this probably a dozen times.) So much self-importance is piled into these superhero movies. There is no way that the filmmakers wanted laughter at the climactic moment when Cyborg pushes his fingers into the Mother Box. What I am saying, DC Films, is that you should change the term for your MacGuffin.
Let’s move on.
ZSJL is four hours long, and that is too long for such little payoff. I honestly don’t know where the time went. There is about 30 minutes of scenes after the plot resolves, including that hella stupid alternate future moment with evil Superman. That could have been excised without hurting anything.
But a strong addition was more focus on Cyborg. I think his expanded storyline is interesting. Joe Morton was obvious value-added as his dad, so more Cyborg meant more Joe Morton, which was also cool with me. I was initially annoyed by this stunt casting because they essentially have him playing Miles Dyson (of Terminator 2: Judgment Day), but I always want to watch Joe Morton in movies, so I let it slide. Cyborg learning to live in society again despite his disability was unexpectedly moving. And him finding people who he can rely on added a real heart to the movie that was lacking in the theatrical cut.
I maintain that Jeremy Irons should have played old-and-busted Batman rather than Alfred. Or hell, let him play both. He would have been great. That said, I think that Ben Affleck was a pretty good choice for this iteration of Batman. The puffy face and world-weariness really fit. I am being serious, to be clear.
Was Ciarán Hinds actually on set, in a dumb horn mask or otherwise? I don’t know why they’d get a good actor with such an iconic face and voice and then modulate his voice and drown him in CGI. I wish that movies with computer-generated villains just utilized actual voice actors who would swing for the fences with the audio performance. Steppenwolf has almost no lines, and he always sounds reluctant when he talks.
The battle scenes have no juice. Everything is rendered well, but the colors are awful. Most of it happens at night and there is always smoke or flames obscuring everything. In the final fight in the abandoned Russian town, Aquaman is the same color as the parademons. In one scene he is flying/falling through the air and grappling up with parademons, but we couldn’t tell that it was him until after he stood up and shook out his hair. An entire stunt sequence of just browns and greys and flames and it has no dramatic weight because we don’t feel danger and can’t tell who is who. There is a reason that the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers uniforms are bright and the villains are mud monsters, you know. If the scene is just garbage nothingness twirling in the air in defiance of physics, at least let us see which garbage nothingness is the hero by giving them a bandana or a logo.
The movie also errs by never once showing Steppenwolf injured or remotely bothered by the superheroes in any way. There was a chance, during the scene under the Gotham River, when they should have shown him slightly injured. Then when he leveled up, the audience could have felt scared, because all the Justice League could manage was a small injury to him, and now he is even more powerful. NOPE. Steppenwolf is entirely invincible for every second of the movie up until he dies.
I don’t have much else to say regarding the two cuts of the film because I didn’t remember anything about this except how much I hated the finale. That part was a smidge improved in this new cut (“Wonder Woman leaps from the top rope! Oh my goodness, there goes Steppenwolf’s head!”), but this is still a drab, ugly slog of a movie save for a few bright spots. I really don’t recommend it.
Final Thoughts
- The Flash is great. Please use him more. Ezra Miller is twitchy and funny and I liked the little mentions of his speed physics (normal shoes burn off his feet, he consumes a zillion calories to offset the energy consumption, etc.).
- Billy Crudup as Flash’s dad is also good because Crudup is an awesome actor and it is usually advisable to hire believable performers to offset a script with phrases like “START THE UNITY OF THE MOTHER BOXES TO CREATE ANTI-LIFE.”
- Gal Gadot had little to do here but Wonder Woman remains the best of this generation of superheroes. The only thing better than melee superheroes is magical melee superheroes.
- Martian Manhunter was a great tease. Dear god, please get Harry Lennix out of procedural TV hell and into more movies.
- I could have used more Aquaman. I liked his Icelandic village and I liked that they made an attempt to explain why Bruce Wayne would show up overland, as the inlet was frozen over (the movie did not, however, explain why he wouldn’t just use one of his dumb jets instead of a horse). And I really liked the villagers singing as Aquaman swam away. It made perfect sense that they would revere this godlike being who brings them food and protects them in the dead of winter. I also liked that the blonde lady smelled his sweater after he departed. It was random and human and did more to world-build than a dozen scenes of battle.