A No-Spoiler 13-Item Quickie Review of “Justice League”

I was really hoping WB/DC would be surprisingly successful with this one, despite all the warning signs. Instead, it’s a cluttered, uneven, multiple-writers-awkwardly-edited-together mess. I mean, it’s not horrible, and I’ve spent money to go see more disappointing movies … but, honestly, while it was fun going and seeing it with my teenager, I sort of wish I’d waited for it to come available on streaming video.

I will endeavor to avoid anything that speaks to more than what was visible in the trailers. There’s at least one significant reveal that will be spoiled very quickly, but not by me.

1. The movie is famously a Zack Snyder movie that (due to tragedy in Snyder’s private life) Joss Whedon had to come in and finish, complete with partial rewrites and re-shoots, and no doubt with studio folk sticking their oars in.

The result is a movie with too many moods, too many characters, too many stories, and too much that just doesn’t quite mesh together, from plot lines to fight sequences.

In that latter point, the climactic fight sequence in particular feels like it went through too many drafts and tweaks. The pacing is awful (violent action! incidental dialog! critical moment! people running off! desperate fighting! people chatting!), and the sense of menace never builds beyond “So precisely how will they defeat the bad guy, because there’s absolutely no tension that they won’t, or even that anyone will get killed in the process.”

(Spoiler: They defeat the bad guy.)

2. There’s an effort to give every hero their own character arc. This works well for some (Flash), less well for others (Cyborg). While I laud the effort, it also means that we spend a lot of time distracted from the main plot by character engagement with their supporting cast. That we have, if not origin stories then heavy background stories, detracts from the core tale being told here.

There’s some very interesting thematic work around broken people having to be convinced that they are not only heroes, but can inspire others to greatness (and, indeed, have to, because everyone’s acting like hopeless nihilists since Superman got killed, two or three or four DCEU movies ago). Indeed, it’s a theme that’s actually explicitly stated in a couple of the better scenes. Unfortunately, it vanishes for long stretches of time, and too often when it comes up (as in the film’s wrap-up) it’s handled ham-handedly.

There are also elements of the “How difficult it is to bring a bunch of reluctant people with clashing personalities together onto a team” trope, but besides a few brief flashes of interpersonal conflict, that all sort of gets lost in the busy action of the final act.

3. Power balance is always a trick in super-group films. Avengers figured out how to have both Thor and Black Widow, Hulk and Hawkeye, all as effective combatants in battle. This movie has everything from a hero who can single-handedly beat the bad guy (as is clearly demonstrated, such that they have to keep coming up with poor reasons to distract them) to a guy whose power is that he’s rich enough to buy expensive vehicles that immediately get trashed, and there’s never a sense that they contribute equally to the team’s efforts. This makes the battle sequences feel terribly imbalanced.

4. The Big Reveal I mentioned (but won’t spoil) has some of my favorite moments in the movie (in terms of personal moments), but the underlying “What exactly is going on here” is muddied, and the whole thing feels anticlimactic both in what happens on-screen and in its effect on the world beyond.

5. For a movie with a Jack Kirby Fourth World villain and creatures and tech and so forth, nearly everything actually Kirbyesque was scrubbed out of the story except for the names and a few visuals. The movie was dying for some follow-up to the villain’s defeat. But we never got it.

Indeed, if you made the villain Mongul and replaced the parademons with generic alien mooks, it would make no different to the film. That’s poor use of the source material.

6. As the previous point suggests, the (virtually) moustache-twirling maniacal god-like CGI villain is about as interesting and realistic and engaging as that description makes him sound.

Also, how dreadfully convenient that the Bad Guy grunts in this movie are mindless aliens. This lets the Good Guys basically slaughter them without any moral issues being raised, I guess.

7. There are some fun uses of musical cues for these heroes that reference back to many-decades-ago cinematic versions of them. That’s helped in part by having Danny Elfman (who also did the Michael Keaton Batman films) doing this score. The problem is, Elfman is so over the top when in dramatic mode, that the movie’s effort to balance epic with personality moments and character humor jars.

8. Why is that guy in sweat pants? Because that’s not what he was wearing in the previous scene.

9. Flash kind of runs funny. His arm movements look more like swimming. That said, he’s my favorite character in the movie. Even if too many of his beats parallel the TV show, I would still like to see a solo movie with him.

10. Too many of Batman’s movements look CG or guy-wired. Yes, I realize that real people (let alone Ben Affleck) can’t do Batman-class stunts. They just need to be done better somehow.

11. All that Amazonian armor that got developed for Wonder Woman and which was available for use in shooting this movie? Nah, they went with something different, both for Modern-Day Amazons (more skin) and Bygone Age Flashback Amazons (leather, and lots more skin). Because Zack Snyder, apparently.

12. We saw the movie in 3D (because of timing issues). No problems with it, but I didn’t feel like it made the movie much better.

13. The movie has two end-credit scenes — one about a quarter of the way through, one at the very end. Both are worth waiting for, and are in their own way more enjoyable / engaging than much of the main movie.

In sum …

As I mention above, the obvious comparison in movies is between this film and Avengers. In my opinion there’s no comparison. Not only did Marvel set up most of the Avengers with their own establish-the-character solo movies beforehand (meaning audiences came in already engaged and knowledgeable about their background and personalities and capabilities), but the handling of character conflict, difficulties in building a team, and the overall smoothness of the plot and pacing of the battles in Avengers was significantly better handled than in Justice League.

And, even more fundamentally, while Avengers left me wanting more (I want a Hulk movie! I want a Black Widow and Hawkeye movie! I want another Avengers movie!), with Justice League I didn’t really find myself rooting enthusiastically for the heroes. All of them were, at various times, kind of jerks, or weak, or uninspiring, and I never really saw them meshing well as a team.

As a result, if you told me this is the final Justice League movie, I wouldn’t be pining for what else might have been, and if this were the last time we saw most of the individual characters, I wouldn’t send nasty letters to Warner Bros., either. I want more Flash, I want more Wonder Woman, I want … well, the others can have cameos in those films.

Bottom line: you could do worse than seeing Justice League, but wait until you can order it on-demand at home.

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