Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

I’ve Already Seen the Light

In Neil Gaiman’s epic comic book series The Sandman, there’s a library at the heart of The Dreaming. Its stacks stretch to infinity, housing every book that was ever written—and every book that was ever conceived.

Incomplete works by Shakespeare, Crowley, and, I’m sure, King, form a magnificent catalogue of the subconscious that sparked my imagination more than the exploits of Gaiman’s archangels, nightmare assassins, and pumpkin-headed groundskeepers.

As a cinephile, I often wonder if The Dreaming has a video store, too. Maybe a classically preserved Blockbuster with endless aisles of films both beloved and abandoned. Recently, through online petitions and Twitter activism, DCEU fans actually pulled a movie from one of these fanciful shelves and brought it into our reality.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a new version of Joss Whedon’s 2017 film, Justice League—which Whedon took over from Snyder following studio meddling and, eventually, a family tragedy. You can wiki the timeline, but the long and short of it is: Whedon’s theatrical cut was almost universally panned, and led to an identity crisis for the already struggling DC Comics Extended Universe.

Choppily edited, weighed down by gloomy, rushed-looking CGI, and featuring a lead actor with a distracting, digitally scrambled face, the movie felt like a step backward from the optimistic adventurism of Wonder Woman, which preceded it by nearly six months. After Justice League came and went, rumors began circulating that a “Snyder Cut” existed, a much longer version that blew out the scope, filled in the plot holes, and generally proved that it had a reason to exist (beyond DC/Warner Bros wanting their own version of Marvel’s mega-successful franchise network).

Now that HBO MAX has swooped in with $70 million and an exclusive streaming deal that allowed Snyder to salvage his vision of the film, fans who turned “Release The Snyder Cut” into the world’s most powerful meme will be faced with a very tough question: was it worth the effort?

Nope.

Granted, your mileage will vary, based on A) the extent of your DCEU fandom, B) whether or not you saw (or remember) the theatrical cut, and C) how steep a curve you grade on (i.e. “We’re lucky they even gave us the ‘Snyder Cut’!”).

Despite a doubled run-time, there is no fundamental difference between films. Lots of altered or extended scenes that resurrect buried sub-plots do not equal four hours of “new” material. Steppenwolf, the intergalactic enforcer of planet-conquering maniac Darkseid, is still pathetic. The powerful Mother Box weapons, which Steppenwolf must bring together by destroying their far-flung guardians, still don’t make any sense.

And the core members of the fledgling Justice League still mix like oil and water. I don’t mean in that “eventually they’ll learn to work together” way. I mean Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, and Ezra Miller perform like they’re from different movies—which makes sense because Justice League is essentially a team-movie springboard for solo-hero films (the reverse of Marvel’s 2008 - 2012 strategy).

Sure, we get a lot more of Ray Fisher’s character, Cyborg, a college football star whose scientist father saves him using Mother Box technology following a near-fatal car crash. But this brooding loner who hoards his powers until the fate of the world is at stake is just absorbed into a collective of five other brooding loners who do the same.

I won’t wade too deeply into the rivalry between DC and Marvel movie fandoms, except to say that there really is something to the argument that the DCEU, under Snyder’s misguidance (abetted here by screenwriter Chris Terrio), turned our beloved aspirational superheroes into mopey, selfish recluses. Maybe this is the “realism” he wanted to inject into his movies, which speaks to a rather low opinion of humanity.

Fair enough, but isn’t one of the selling points of superhero comics that they present the reader with alternate realities? Dare I say, escapism?

When Batman (Ben Affleck) is reduced to a dour recruiter; when Superman’s (Henry Cavill) triumphant return from the dead is reduced to a temper tantrum followed by a somber walk through a cornfield; when mega-boss Darkseid is reduced to playing the pre-Infinity War Thanos role (watching from a distance as underlings continuously fail to do what he should have done himself—calling into question not only his abilities but also his judgment), well, it’s no wonder this Justice League feels like the Asylum version of Marvel’s Avengers.

There is no Tony Stark on this team—only a fashion-clashing cadre of Wolverines (and even Hugh Jackman had a twinkle to his rage, instead of just a bland sulk). The closest we get to levity is Miller’s Flash, whose pinball personality is so obnoxious I’m convinced he’ll be the first team member cut when a mature superpowered substitute comes along.

In fact, one of the only redeeming qualities of Whedon’s version is an exchange between Batman and Flash, which exposes the latter’s insecurities. Batman gets him to calm down for a second, think straight, and save lives. That scene has been excised from the “Snyder Cut”, and the movie suffers greatly for it.

I haven’t gone into spoilers here because, frankly, there’s little to spoil. Snyder does debut a new character, who hadn’t appeared in Whedon’s cut but, as is par for the course for both films, there’s little reason to care (plus the makeup on said character is atrocious). There’s also a bizarre dream-sequence epilogue involving Jared Leto’s Joker, which has been teased in the trailers. It takes a really long time to go absolutely nowhere, except to set up a movie we’ll never see.

Yes, this Justice League is just a one-off. DC/Warner Bros has already moved on from Snyder-as-showrunner with a slate of films that lean more in the Marvel direction—not just in tone, but in box office. 2018’s Aquaman, 2019’s Shazam, and Wonder Woman 1984 from last year are all markedly different from anything that came before (except the first Wonder Woman, of course).

These aren’t the best comic book movies ever, but they at least speak the language of comics fandom. The grim-’n-gritty era of mid-80s to mid-90s comic books may have had an outsized influence on Snyder. For every Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, there are five hundred issues of titans selflessly working together to crush evil, rescue the innocent, and call upon readers to be the best versions of themselves. Frank Miller and Alan Moore were right to offer intelligent critiques of an industry that had grown stale, but that’s not to say their targets needed to be destroyed; perhaps only course-corrected.

Marvel got it early on, and DC appears to be playing catch-up (intelligently this time). After watching the movie Snyder had in mind all these years ago, I wondered which version was better. The debate lasted two seconds, before I realized that there is no good version of this story. Its creator poisoned the soil from which both movies sprang. On the plus side, this knowledge set me free to drop Zack Snyder’s Justice League back in the “Return” slot and leave pop culture’s other “What If’s” in The Dreaming.