A vast improvement from the Whedon cut? Sure. But far from a masterpiece.
A vast improvement from the Whedon cut? Sure. But far from a masterpiece.
J oss Whedon and Zack Snyder are quite a pair of personalities to hire for the same project: Picture a concert in which the Go-Go’s open for Metallica. Snyder is a medievalist, all blood and iron. Whedon is a mall rat, all lip gloss and diet soda. That Warner Bros. hired Whedon to finish Snyder’s 2017 Justice League when the latter had to bow out due to family crisis sheds light on corporate hand-wringing about the most valuable property at Hollywood’s most important studio. After Snyder made 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice — the world’s first $850 million-grossing box-office disappointment — and the Marvel movies had come to dominate Hollywood the way no franchise has ever done, Warner Bros. felt inclined to tiptoe away from Snyder’s deep, dark, disturbing mythologizing. The DC movies may have been more interesting than the Marvel ones, but they were also getting to be a lot less entertaining and a lot less profitable. So: Bring on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer guy! Whedon predictably drained all the brooding, somber heft out of the project and replaced it with fizz and candy.
I shared in the general rejoicing when Snyder was allowed to finish and deliver his four-hour version of the film — Zack Snyder’s Justice League — to HBO Max. Snyder is an interesting filmmaker; Whedon is not. Snyder has ideas; Whedon has quips. Nevertheless, Snyder’s movie is a letdown.
What I ask of ZSJL is what I ask of any movie: Make me feel something. At first, I felt relief: Wow, this is a lot better than Whedon’s version! But malaria is better than Whedon’s version. The new cut is merely a run-of-the-mill 21st-century comic-book flick, only more ponderous and broody than average. I’ll take ponderous and broody over meretricious and smarmy any day. But Snyder’s cut doesn’t match the caliber of the finest “dark” superhero movies, such as the ones by Christopher Nolan and Snyder’s previous efforts, Watchmen and Batman v. Superman, both of which did an intriguing job of exploring how superheroes wear out their welcome and even gods on earth could come to be hated.
ZSJL, by contrast, is about mighty people punching and kicking each other all over the digital landscape. The scary scenes aren’t scary, the action scenes are only semi-thrilling, and the jokes are terrible. Virtually everything said by the Flash — played predictably irritatingly by one of the most irritating actors alive, Ezra Miller — is a would-be witticism that just clangs off the hoop. There isn’t a single line of dialogue in the entire four-hour extravaganza that goes swish through the net. It’s all “Get the hell off of me!” or “I do competitive ice dancing” — blandly functional or horribly witless.
Snyder spends the first two hours of the movie introducing everyone as Batman gets the band together to fight the giant-monster-alien Steppenwolf, who looks like a sack of metal edges with a steer’s horns on his head. In other words, he looks ridiculous. He is all comic book, no drama. He and his even larger and eviller boss Darkseid are trying to gather three gadgets called Mother Boxes that have been hidden on earth for aeons in the aim of creating a plague-current that will wipe out life on earth. Big problem here: There’s absolutely nothing about any of these guys or their fell doings that stirs any of those deep-inside fears we all have. It’s subway freaks such as the Joker who really disturb us. Steppie is just a big lug from outer space. Nolan made a breakthrough in situating Batman in a recognizable simulacrum of the world we live in. Snyder has thrown that away.
If you’re going to spend two hours developing characters (with a couple of undercard battle sequences thrown in), those characters had better be deep and vivid. They aren’t. Jason Momoa’s Aquaman remains a breezy roadhouse bro. (And why is he flying around 100 feet above the ground in a battle scene? Wouldn’t he be a fish out of water?) Three of the characters have godlike powers: Ray Fisher’s Cyborg in some ways surpasses Superman: He could manipulate world finances, or launch all nuclear weapons, just by thinking about them. Pretty heavy, no? What young man could resist using such mental powers? They could drive a fellow to some dark places. Yet we hear about them once, and that’s it. Cyborg is 100 percent a good guy, hence really boring. In a late Last Temptation of Christ–type scene he isn’t even tempted, which makes him more perfect than J. C.
Wonder Woman keeps popping up in silly “Cue Wonder Woman theme music” moments and was previously interesting, but this time she’s a bore, too. She kicks ass, Aquaman stabs guys with his trident, and when Batman is up against an army of “parademons” — nasty insect men armed with laser machine guns — you’d think any single one of them would be a fair match for him since he can’t fly. Instead, he nonchalantly mows them down by the dozen. Snyder never brings across the feeling that any of this hurts or that Batman is really in danger. He’s more like the shooter in a video game, and video games are not cinema. Plus Ben Affleck, as always, cannot act. He can’t do angry vigilante, he can’t do privileged playboy, he can’t do worried world citizen, he can’t do anything. He can slightly furrow his brow, and that’s all he’s got.
In the best scenes, the Flash’s electrical powers get routed through the mysterious forces of the Mother Boxes to revive Superman, who was killed in the previous movie. When he wakes up, he’s grouchy. Who wouldn’t be? Pissed-off Superman is the only really interesting detail of the movie, but this is largely leftover mojo from Batman v. Superman. When Superman finally does fall in line, it turns out that all of the punching and kicking and flying around of the other five Justice Leaguers deployed against Steppenwolf is irrelevant. When Superman shows up, he’s like the Monty Python foot: One big stomp, and we’re done. The climactic battle scene is pretty ho-hum anyway: Think of the finest digital effects and slow-mo and chiaroscuro cinematography and the most atavistic/bombastic music being applied to a World Wide Wrestling match. It’s all just bodies being heaved this way and that. Crash, boom, bore. You have to make the audience care, or none of it is affecting.
Snyder has a tendency to be monotonous, which he understands, hence all the bad jokes told by the Flash. But he’s most comfortable when he is just pounding away at the audience, as if he’s doing a four-hour drum solo. After three hours of Snyder’s thudding “intensity,” I should have been pumped for the climax. Instead, I shut the movie off to take a break. When I turned it back on, it was more of the same. Heroes, villains, punch, kick. The movie isn’t terrible. It held my interest. But none of it made me think. None of it delighted me. None of it made me go, “Wow” or even “Oof.”