Green Goblin Reviews: Justice League
So……..Justice League, eh? As best as I can, I like to try and separate the goings on behind the scenes of a film with the finished product that we see on screen. But more and more, that’s becoming a harder task to accomplish. And with a movie as big as the formation of the goddamn Super Friends, most of us could have deduced the overall plot structure about one hour after walking out of the garbage fire that was Batman V Superman. What was less predictable is how much or how little Warner Bros. attempts to either re-shoot or double down on previously established audience reaction. Then there’s the tragedy that happened to Mr. Snyder’s family earlier this year that forced him to step away completely from the project and turn the reigns over to his good friend, Mr. Joss Whedon. So with a previously established film universe that’s only batting a 1-in-4 average, the studio spread too thin trying to cater to everyone at once and multiple actors eyeing the door and counting down the clock until their contract is up, I was honestly not expecting much when I sat down. I’m glad my expectations were low, because it gave me the opportunity to be surprised. Not…..ya know….a lot, but hey; progress is still progress.
So to kick things off from where we left off: Superman (Henry Caville) is dead. And with his death, the Earth is more exposed than ever before, not only to human folly but also extra-terrestrial attack. Sure enough, strange insectoid-like soldiers called Parademons have been showing up in locations all over the planet, looking for three ancient Mother Boxes that hold immeasurable power. Their leader, the comically named Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds), is seeking out the boxes to destroy all human life and alter the Earth’s design to cater to the coming of his master, Darkseid. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) feels he owes a debt to his fallen mommy-buddy, Superman, for being a jerk and attempting to murder him previously. So he utilizes the (no other way to put this) marketing documents that he stole from Lexcorp to recruit additional heroes to defend Earth. Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is already present and helps Batman to recruit Arthur Curry (the Aquaman, the King of Atlantis, played by Jason Momoa), Barry Allen (the impossibly speedy Flash played by Ezra Miller) and Victor Stone (the technopathic Cyborg, played by Ray Fisher) in order to come together and stop this cataclysmic threat from reaching fruition.
Now, on paper, this film sounds eerily familiar to the Avengers. An evil harbinger to a much bigger and better known bad guy comes to earth, via warp tube in order to steal a magical space cube and has the ability to turn allies and innocent people into enemy combatants? Yeah, that’s surprisingly dead-on. What’s missing however is….well……nearly everything else. I’m not going to pretend that the movie doesn’t have some quality bits to it. It does. Despite everything surrounding him, I’ve grown a bit more accustomed to Affleck’s Bruce Wayne. It’s good to see a Batman that isn’t psychotic 24/7 and actually cracks a joke or shows nervousness every once in a while. Even in the original BvS film, Affleck was ok, but was crippled by the writing and directorial choices of the film he was in. And Gal Gadot is still great in the role of Wonder Woman. But the new heroes are just not very likeable. I don’t know whose fault this is, but Ezra Miller went with a weird “Sheldon Cooper crossed with a Starbucks hipster” persona for Flash and I know they were going for quirky, but it just came off as grating a lot of the time. At one point, he rants to Bruce about his distaste for brunch and it comes off like a conversation a person might have while high and not tracking their own thoughts well enough to hold conversation. Fisher’s Cyborg is a bit more understanding, but there’s also much less of him to work with. And from the previously shown teasers and press footage, I’d say quite a bit of his backstory was left on the cutting room floor. They talk about his accident as just a vague explosion and never want to address how it came about or (god forbid) show it to us. And his cranky resentment might hit harder if we’d maybe seen him during happier times with his family. At least you do inevitably get a “booya” out of him, so that’s something. And then there’s Aquaman…….just…….what the fuck, people?!? If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Warner Bros was doubling down on the farcical “nobody likes Aquaman” trope by making his character just repulsive in personality. It’s only somewhat toned down by being played by a big Hawaiian Dothraki beefcake, but his overall persona is equivalent to that of a douchebag Jersey Shore reject at a gym. Look, the jock superhero persona can work, but you have to add some theatricality to it. Look at Thor: He’s got roughly the same pompousness to him, but he offsets it by speaking in a very over-the-top thespian vernacular (“This drink; I like it. ANOTHER!!”). I knew I was gonna have problems with Aquaman the instant I heard him say “Dressed like a bat? I dig it.” Oh, and secret identities don’t matter for shit anymore as far as I can tell. You got Aquaman calling Bruce Wayne (a public figure) “Batman” in the middle of a crowded bar, and other characters calling him Bruce out in public, while in the cape and cowl. More of a nitpick, but just once, I’d like Batfleck to just turn to a character and go “dude, shut up. I have an image to keep up!!”
Honestly, these character complaints might be subjective, but I think we can all agree that the villain in this film is easily the most forgettable since……well….since the last bad DC film. And at least Enchantress had a decent design (before she became a glittery belly-dancer); Steppenwolf legit looks like they took the model of Shinnok from Mortal Kombat X, stretched him out and just copied and pasted him onto the screen. He legit looks like a Playstation cutscene (actually worse than Cyborg, which is impressive). He’s not given any personality other than “I’m here to kill everyone.” and he’s not even very good at that. Despite my gripes about the heroes’ portrayals on screen, their interaction with each other was still digestible, compared to the fight scene where wolfie shows up, swinging his big dumb axe.
Perhaps his motivations were better explored at some previous point. Heck, perhaps Cyborg and Aquaman were given actual backstories at one point, rather than just exposition by side characters, but it doesn’t matter now because this film has been hacked to shit in post. You can tell that at some point, this film was 3+ hours long and more than likely, just as convoluted as its predecessor. Looks like at one point, they were trying to make Cyborg and Flash into a bit of a Bromance akin to the Beast Boy/Cyborg friendship from Teen Titans, but that only gets a tangential nod. Perhaps at one point, they were gonna have Diana and Bruce become somewhat of an item, but that got nixxed too. The fact is that unless it was designed to look cool in a trailer with their discount Alex Ross aesthetic, it was more than likely cropped out of this project. And re-shoots here stick out like a sore thumb, to where regular audience members in my theater could spot them. The color palette at one point was also clearly suppose to have that same washed out look as well, but was “fixed” in post, giving the entire film a too much oversaturation, with the color red just bleeding everywhere. And when more than half the heroes had Red as one of their primary costume colors, it’s annoyingly noticeable. And yet, despite all this, I actually WOULD like to see the inevitable Director’s Cut down the line. The items left out might actually make future viewings of this film much more tolerable. Or it could all just be terrible stuff that needed to be left out anyways. It’s a coin toss, but having to rely on extended editions in home media isn’t really doing the brand any favors.
Ehhhh……………..look, it’s not gonna set the world on fire. It’s still better than Batman V Superman. And Suicide Squad. At no point was I angrily glaring at the IMAX screen in shock, but at the same time, the film never gives you enough to sink your teeth into to even become invested. And despite everything else, I’d still recommend checking it out, if only to see where Warner Bros’s heads were at with how to fix the DCEU in mid-production. The things that go wrong in this film are honestly kinda fascinating in and of themselves; rather than trying to fix the character beats from previous films, they’ve just stepped back and offer much less of them in favor of showing more special effects and quips. It’s the cinematic equivalent to eating a container of cake frosting; all fluff and filler with no nutritional value. Also, you might not find it as enjoyable a few hours later.
5/10 We all know you’re gonna probably see it regardless. Just set your expectations accordingly.