Justice League Review

So is it more Wonder Woman or more Batman v. Superman?

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I've been both looking forward to this movie and dreading this movie for months. I knew that I was going to see it and it was going to be a big decider in how DC is going to be making their movies for the next couple of years, and yet I didn't know what I was going to get. The quality of DC's slate of movies have varied wildly since 2013. Man of Steel was alright, Batman v. Superman was the worst movie I saw last year, Suicide Squad was a guilty pleasure for me, and Wonder Woman was just outright great, so I had no idea how this movie could go.

I could guess the general quality of the previous movies by their trailers, but the trailers for Justice League were harder to judge. They looked like Batman v. Superman, but had more charm and personality. I didn't know what to feel. So I just decided to say screw it, not try and overthink it, and just go into the movie and experience it fresh.

So let me make this perfectly clear; I am a DC Comics fan, and just because the movies differ from the source material doesn't mean that they're bad. I could nitpick the movie to oblivion and back about the differences between the comics and the movie, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about if Justice League is good or not. I don't care if they changed a character's origin slightly or if a character is acting differently from how they are in the comics. I'm open to change and new ideas. Captain America: Civil War wasn't a direct adaptation of the comic book, and it was a fantastic movie. I didn't rage that there was no Peter Parker reveal or that there wasn't an intergalactic super prison. I cared about if the movie was good, and it was. I don't play favorites when it comes to comic book characters or companies, so all's fair here.

Not only that, but any criticisms I am going to make about the movie are not a direct attack against Zack Snyder. Snyder had to leave the production due to a personal family crisis, and he has my deepest condolences and respect. I have problems with Justice League, but that isn't because I don't like the man who directed it. And if you want to attack this man for making this movie and call him a terrible filmmaker, or that he deserved what happened to him because he made a bad movie or had a bad interpretation of a character, then you have none of my respects. You are a petty and self centered person who is more preoccupied with the lives of fictional characters than the lives or real people. Have some humanity for chrissakes.

So are we good? Can I talk about Justice League...?

Okay then.

So Justice League takes place some time after Batman v. Superman. In it, the world is still reeling from the death of Superman, but now items called Mother Boxes have become active on Earth. There were three of them, and their activation brings creatures called Parademons to Earth, led by a being called Steppenwolf, a general that tried to conquer Earth thousands of years ago. Batman has been investigating the Mother Boxes and Parademons and has decided that he needs the help of Wonder Woman and other superheroes to stop Steppenwolf from turning the Earth into a giant cinder. So he tries to recruit Cyborg, the Flash, and Aquaman to help him and Wonder Woman save the world.

And that's about it. That's not a barebones summary of the movie, that is literally all that happens. A big bad comes, heroes unite, beat the bad guy into submission. It worked in The Avengers and yet it doesn't work here, and the reason behind that is pretty simple. Outside of Batman and Wonder Woman, we don't know any of these characters. We don't know about Aquaman, Cyborg, or even the Flash, so we have to spend half of the movie just getting to know them before we can even care about them. And does it work? Kinda.

The character we get to know most out of the new three is Barry Allen, aka The Flash. He's a much younger man that is more socially awkward and has a lot more in common with Michael Cera than anything else. I didn't really like him at first, mostly because he's everything that Barry Allen isn't, but once I took a step back and thought about him as his own character, he was fine. He's a guy that wants to do good, can be a bit scatter brained, but he usually does have his heart in the right place. I can't say that I enjoyed his action scenes outside of one, mostly because his super speed pretty much just meant the rest of the movie stopped as he walked around and did things, he he was a character I got to enjoy a bit by the end.

As much as woman adore him, Jason Mamoa as Aquaman was pretty underwhelming. He never really did much of anything in the movie besides be shirtless and have the occasional one liner. In fact, I'd probably go so far to say that he's the weakest character in the League, if only because there are a ton of different subplots and ideas that happened around him. He was undercover in a small village in Northern Europe, but then he went to Atlantis where I think he's their king, or maybe not, and his mom is dead, but I have no idea if the woman he was talking to was Mera or not, and he just never really added anything to the movie for me. Like if he was written out of the movie and it was just the other four, I probably wouldn't have noticed.

And then there's Cyborg, who is integral to the plot, and yet I feel like his enter backstory was a giant Cliffs-note. He was a human, he got hurt in an explosion, and now he's half human half machine. He has some dad issues, but by the halfway point of the movie that subplot is just dropped with no resolution. Plus he just looks terrible, plain and simple. He's most CG, which is understandable, but his design is just shoddy. He looks like an early PS1 model, with tons of little polygons popping out to make a metal suit. It's hard to explain what I mean, but you just need to look at him and see that his costume is just busy.

So the cast range from being good to uninteresting, but there's one major flaw that is really obvious throughout the entire movie. It felt like Justice League was rushing nearly everything it did. We had the team come together and fight the big bad in about an hour, and that includes us being introduced to our heroes and villain. The movie finally decides to slow down in the second half for more character moments and an honestly well done final fight, but the first half is just trying to rush three movies of character development into as little a time period as possible.

We do get an enjoyable action scene in the first half involving the Amazons, but outside of that and a flashback to a massive war between Steppenwolf and the Amazons, Atlanteans, humans, and even Green Lanterns (more on them in a bit), there're hardly any action scenes in the movie. I can really only recall three major action scenes, and I'm happy to say that out of the four three are genuinely good. One fight scene has a lot of callbacks to Batman v. Superman, but it does that in a much better way than I thought it would. Batman's infamous "Do you bleed?" line comes up here, but instead it's a pretty badass and awesome moment in the film, if not one of my favorite moments.

So moving on to Steppenwolf, he's easily one of the worst parts of the movie. While Lex Luthor completely missed the point of the original character and was just torture to see, Steppenwolf is a bore to watch. He's evil, he has a growly voice, he wants to take over the world, he's big, he's gray, he's just lame. The original Steppenwolf had a cool design of a burly man in bright purple armor with a menacing goatee. This Steppenwolf is grey with grey armor and a grey ax. He's generic.

And truth be told, a lot of parts in this movie do feel generic. The backgrounds are still grey for most of the movie, but we do get a lot of color during the action scenes, whether it's Barry's blue from going super fast or red for the Hellscape final fight. Every scene outside of the action scenes are boring to watch. Not only that, but we get a lot of the same character beats too that we've seen a million times. These heroes are better working apart, they don't want to become a part of a team, but they do for the sake of the world. It's a trope we've seen to death, and it's only made more obvious here because of the truncated nature of the movie. Look, I'm happy that the movie is less than 2 hours and isn't a slog to sit through, but there has to be a better way to balance it.

But let's get down to brass tacks. Did I hate Justice League? Is it a truly terrible movie and is the DC Cinematic Universe doomed to die??? No, it really isn't. It's nothing special, but it was cool to watch. It was a decent movie with decent ideas and some bad moments, but also some good moments. It was a movie that I could safely call successful. Granted, the bar for success was pretty low, but it still passed it, albeit it very slightly. I don't know whether or not that's good praise for the movie though...

But did Justice League save DC films? That's a trickier question. A lot of the harm that was done with Batman v. Superman has been addressed and rectified, but there's still a long way to go. Some elements still don't work, like Jesse Eisenberg, the rushed nature of these heroe's backstory, the grey tones and bland environments, and the fact that these movies seem to be hacked to pieces by producers for a variety of reasons. It's easy to tell that there are a lot of behind the scenes problems with these movies (minus Wonder Woman), and I don't know if that will be enough to end this franchise. None of that may even matter though if the Flashpoint movie is actually going to happen and if it retcons the entire series anyway.

But that's all in the future. What we have now is a movie that mostly works. It is functional. It gets the job done, and it is entertaining, just in a DC way. Now whether or not that means anything to you will determine whether or not you enjoy this movie, but there's no denying one key fact. It could have been a lot worse.