Justice League (2017)

At this point everyone is familiar with what happened to the D.C. Cinematic Universe.  Marvel may be in the process of fizzling out by boring its audience with too many movies that are interchangeable other than the heroes and by pushing a plastic diversity that is a transparent ploy to try to get more people to watch by riling up their audience.  Still, before the MCU turned on its core fanbase, it had still released a number of good movies, and even a few exceptional ones.

D.C. seems to have had problems all along.  Warner Bros. has a habit of messing with their superhero films and habitually making things worse.  This isn't a new thing.  With Superman II, way back in 1980, they messed with director Richard Donner's vision, so much so that decades later a special "Donner cut" was released.  Despite that sounding like a piece of meat that one should definitely pass on the director's cut improved on what was not a bad film to begin with, and the best of the series that starred Christopher Reeves.  

33 years later they hadn't learned much.  Man of Steel was Zack Snyder's attempt to both reboot Superman and remake Superman II and, though it wasn't bad and made some money, it was tampered with.  Even more so was the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.  It had a big opening which quickly tapered off due to word of mouth that it was a bit of a mess.  It, too, was redeemed by a director's cut, and Zack Snyder was brought back to continue his series with Justice League.  His Superman films may not have been doing as well as Christopher Nolan's Batman films, even though Batman pretty much became the main character for the second film, but they were not doing horrible, either. 

With the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League, it's apparent things would have improved.  It began at the end of the battle between Superman (Henry Cavill) and Doomsday, with Superman dead and Batman (Ben Affleck) attempting to put together a team to battle a new threat, Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), who had been alerted of Superman's impending demise by Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg).  I am sure that it would have had its own director's cut as well since Warner Bros. was already demanding a brighter, happier vision than Batman v Superman's rush to an impending apocalypse.  It certainly would have not been four hours; we got an enhanced workprint version of Snyder's vision in 2021, with added scenes that carried on the future sequence from the previous film and tried to give Jared Leto's version of the Joker a reason to exist.  The main certainty is that the movie would not have been what arrived in theaters.

Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) have teamed up to try to find the other people with super powers that were under observation by Luther.  These include Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), a young man with the ability to travel at high speeds, Victor Stone (Ray Fisher) who was turned into a cyborg in an attempt to save his life and Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa), a descendent of the Queen of Atlantis.  Victor and Arthur are hard sells and, after facing Steppenwolf the first time, Wayne realizes that there is a missing piece of the puzzle in their attempts to defeat him and his army of Parademons.

This involves using one of the objects that Steppenwolf wishes to obtain, which is a powerful bit of biomachinery called a Motherbox.  The other two were kept on Themiscyra under the guardianship of the Amazons and in Atlantis while the third was buried by King Arthur to keep it out of the hands of the rest of humanity.  Found during World War I and now in the hands of the U.S. government the team decides to use it to resurrect Superman, with almost disastrous results.  In the end, with the help of Lois Lane (Amy Adams), he remembers who he is and agrees to help save Earth one more time. 

Zack Snyder's name is on the finished product, but only about 10 percent of his movie is here.  Joss Whedon took over directing and, instead of doing the logical thing and finishing up a few reshoots and making sure the CGI was completed, he instead opted to remake almost the entire movie.  This meant a rush job with tons of horrible effects - most infamous was erasing a moustache on Henry Cavill - and completely changing the tone of the movie.  Most references to Darkseid were erased, the look of Steppenwolf changed despite the fact he had already been toned down by Snyder at the studio's request and there is no mention of an impending future with an evil Superman.  Victor Stone, aka Cyborg, became a side character rather than one of the main drivers of the story.  Lois Lane, who had been a major supporting character in the previous film, was relegated to little more than a cameo for Adams. 

Many of the reshoots don't even make sense.  The whole scene where he flies Lois back to his childhood home in Smallville doesn't have enough differences to justify the effort, the money or the mangling of Cavill's upper lip.  The battle between Clark Kent and the rest of the Justice League after his resurrection is nowhere near as effective and an entire subplot of Superman and the Flash saving civilians is thrown in for no reason at all.  This movie is almost all Joss Whedon's film, to the point that Snyder's cowriter Chris Terrio wanted his name removed from it.  

After seeing both films I have to agree with most that, despite its length and its pretentions, Snyder's version is better.  Again, if it had made it to theaters, it would probably have been cut down.  The studio wanted something around two hours, and Snyder would have delivered something slightly longer with the promise of a director's cut when released to streaming and Blu-Ray, same as with the previous movies.  There was still enough interesting core story that even with that much cut it would still have been a good film that advanced what Snyder had in mind.  While the theatrical release isn't a horrible film it is a bland, soulless one.  Little of the interesting character Bruce Wayne had become with Ben Affleck in the role remained and a bunch of lame humor was introduced.  Everything in this movie is no more than going through the motions and it feels like product and not the art, however flawed, that Snyder intended.

The result is the beginning of the end of the DCCU.  Snyder had to leave due to the suicide of his daughter, while Whedon's treatment of actors and others eventually came back to haunt him.  Justice League was the first outright flop in the series and, as always, Hollywood allows people a lot of leeway to be awful and creepy until they stop bringing in the money, and this opened the floodgates to bring Whedon's past behavior to the light.  Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher in particular suffered from Whedon's abuse.  Also, instead of setting up a future invasion by Darkseid and a Superman that had gone insane due to the death of Lois Lane, this set up Lex Luthor forming an organization to fight the Justice League.  Neither story came to fruition.  Despite Wonder Woman providing a small ray of hope that same year, the decline that was apparent with Suicide Squad had irreversibly set in. 

Justice League (2017)

Time: 120 minutes

Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Ray Fisher, Jason Momoa, Henry Cavill, Ciarán Hinds

Directors: Joss Whedon, Zack Snyder