Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: Zack Snyder, Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill
IMDb Link
This is exactly what you'd expect from a series that is built upon the shakiest of foundations in Batman v Superman. Wonder Woman was the anomaly here, not a new trend.
Justice League tries so hard to 'correct' everything that was wrong with Batman vs Superman and spends so much time setting up future movies that it doesn't take the time to actually be a movie itself. This experience is nothing, just a raw two hours of failing to try that's only held up by some decent spectacle and one or two intriguing characters.
*
I'd warn spoilers, but there's really nothing to spoil, as the plot is cookie-cutter at best; a super powerful bad guy shows up with unclear motivations beyond "destroy Earth, become a god", so Batman gathers some superheroes and forms the Justice League to combat him. As an ensemble piece, the focus should be on character interactions, but the characters are so poorly defined that there's very little to get from that either. Affleck's Batman just doesn't want to be there and plays completely differently to how he was in Batman v Superman, Gadot's Wonder Woman is still the best thing about the series and the one shining light in this mostly dismal movie, Jason Momoa's Aquaman has no screen presence and feels utterly useless when Wonder Woman and Superman exist, Ezra Miller's Flash flits between charming and insufferable, and Ray Fisher's Cyborg is the only other interesting character in the movie besides Wonder Woman, and is held back by his incredibly poorly CGI-ed body.
Unfortunately, the bad CGI doesn't stop there; just about everything effects-based in this movie looks disgustingly cheap and fake for a movie with a $300 million budget, which is also a reason that this is a notable problem with the movie. Everything from Cyborg's body to the Parademons looks unfinished and rushed, never meshing with the world and harming the visual experience on the whole.
The thing that makes this all fall that much harder is the way the movie tries to backpedal on everything that was done in Batman v Superman while also relying on the movie to exist. So much of Justice League requires Batman v Superman to exist, yet it's so sure of its predecessor's mistakes that a lot of the film is a complete turnaround for the characters; Batman is suddenly murmuring awkward quips to himself and being generally useless, and when Superman comes back they essentially use the opportunity of his resurrection to make him behave more like the Christopher Reeve version. The corny, jokey tone exists within a film that us still very much the dark Snyder vision, and as such the film simply does not fit together at all. There's pieces of better movies here, but the whole film is just a Frankenstein's Monster of ideas and goals sewn together by a love of money.
The Verdict: Justice League is a complete mess from start to finish; everything from the tone to the characters to the music to the plot to the effects just don't fit together as a whole, as the movie flails about unsure of its goals and intentions. Don't bother seeing it; somehow a movie about the Justice League does nothing more than try to correct the mistakes of its predecessor.
Rating: 4/10
Published November 16th, 2017
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