Justice League - Review Thread

I can see why Wanda is so happy. She owns a very expensive vibrator.

Ewan McGregor said they shot a scene like that for Michael Bay’s the Island but the MPAA made them cut it.

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Remember when Kevin Smith was a well-regarded film director?

I liked Tusk more than Red State, to be honest. Red State just tried way too hard, while Tusk was just wildly wonky. Yoga Hosers was even wonkier, so I enjoyed it more than those two.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot had some good jokes (Ben Affleck's jab at BvS was incredible), but it was too much of a retread to be impressionable. Plus I still think it's weird that he gave his own daughter dialogue on how badly she wanted to give Chris Hemsworth head.

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is largely terrible, but Affleck is funny in it.

The musical guest should have been Steppenwolf.

Snyder Cut sitting with a respectable 74% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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www.nytimes.com/2021/03/14/movies/zack-snyders-rough-and-tumble-ride-with-justice-league.html

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Directed by Zack Snyder

I'm two minutes in and the recreation of Superman's death scene is already one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen.

I'm bracing my butt cheeks, because if this is a sign of things to come, this is going to be baaaaaaaaad.

Reading through this account, Whedon still doesn't get blacklisted unless the Carpenter stuff comes out, which apparently did during the investigation.

Most of this the worst stuff sounds like the execs, but what a cluster.

It doesn't sound like they had any sort of HR structure, so with Fishers agent going direct to the Warners head, I can see how things would spiral further.

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www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/chris-terrio-justice-league-batman-v-superman

Chris Terrio is not pulling his punches anymore. For five years the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Argo kept his mouth shut about his work on the DC films Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, even as scorn from critics and fans exacerbated already-painful behind-the-scenes memories. Worst of all, he agreed with many of their complaints.

He described the films that Warner Bros. released to theaters in 2016 and 2017 as incoherent misfires, undermined by corporate meddling, poor franchise planning, and tone-deaf decisions that prioritized costly VFX sequences over coherent storytelling. Terrio believes that Zack Snyder’s director’s cuts of both are much stronger, if still imperfect movies—an overall vindication of their work together.

In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, the screenwriter said the #SnyderCut of Justice League, recently released as a four-hour-plus event on HBO Max, righted a kind of cinematic wrong perpetrated by studio leadership that has now almost entirely moved on from Warner Bros.

Terrio first joined the DC Universe to rewrite an existing Batman v Superman script because its Batman actor (the director of Argo) had qualms about the project. “I think the studio brought me in to appease Ben Affleck, because they thought, Okay, well, we have this movie star who is reluctant about doing this, so why don’t we bring in his guy?” Terrio said.

The screenwriter was frank about trying to make sense of the film’s warring heroes, turning their fight into a metaphor for a divided America, while attempting to fix elements he too found nonsensical or offensive. Studio officials then demanded that 30 minutes be removed from the theatrical cut, most likely because shorter run times mean more daily screenings, often resulting in higher box office earnings. Terrio said that act sabotaged the narrative.

“If you took 30 minutes out of Argo, as they were from Batman/Superman, it would make zero sense at all. Critics would say, ‘what a lazy screenplay,’ because the characters don’t have motivations and it’s not coherent,” Terrio said. “And I would agree with them.”

Even the title of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a disaster, he said, that primed audiences to roll their eyes at the film well before its release.

Terrio hoped Justice League would be a better experience. He was very wrong.

After watching Joss Whedon’s version of that film, Terrio was so disgusted that he explored taking his name off the movie. Especially galling to him was the sidelining of Ray Fisher’s tragic hero, Cyborg, whose arc the actor himself had helped craft.

Fisher has been outspoken for months about his experience making Justice League, following years of silence. Now Terrio is doing the same. He said he bottled up his feelings about the theatrical cuts to avoid hurting their casts and crews. Now that Snyder and Terrio’s preferred versions of the films are available to the public, the screenwriter is finally opening up about how it all went wrong in the first place.

Chris Terrio: I am so happy and relieved that all these thousands of artists and craftspeople all over the world finally can have their work seen by the public, and all the work that Zack and the actors put into this can now be seen. It’s sort of a gift that we got from HBO Max, because it wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.

Can you point at something specific that you are glad gets a showcase in the new version?

Willem Dafoe’s performance in the Aquaman story. Obviously the character Iris West [played by Kiersey Clemons in the Flash rescue sequence] and, most centrally, Ray Fisher’s performance as Cyborg. It was always the heart of the film to me, and just meant so much to me personally, because so much of my heart and life were put into that story. That is the thing about this version of Justice League, that none of it was done cynically or as a money grab, or an attempt to sell Happy Meal toys. It really was personal for me and for Zack and for many of the actors.

Is it true you were banned from the Justice League set?

I wouldn’t say that I was banned. [The studio] attitude was: “We’ll take it from here.” I was frankly shocked when I saw the Snyder Cut and saw how much of the original script was shot. With some small revisions, they shot the script, and I understand that sometimes that was a battle for Zack.

How did you feel about the version that Joss Whedon assembled after Zack left the project?

When those personal touches were removed from the film in the 2017 version, I was silent because I couldn’t really say anything, but of course it hurt. All that remained was a dinosaur skeleton of what had been a great, lumbering beast. It might’ve been a big, unruly beast, and obviously it’s four hours and the movie is maximalist and it’s operatic and, sure, it’s a little crazy, but I think the movie is crazy in the best way.

What was your relationship with Zack?

Good. I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about Zack. He has a skill set that I don’t have, as a visualist. And he has a contagious excitement—that when you describe a scene, he almost can’t contain himself and he just wants to go draw it or paint it. Zack never for a second turned his back on me or doubted my work.

After Batman/Superman, many of my Hollywood friends just stopped talking to me because they sort of thought that somehow I was complicit in this very public failure of a studio film. You learn pretty quickly who your real friends are and who your air-kiss Hollywood friends are. Zack could not have been more supportive and never stopped believing that together, we were going to create this big, epic DC world.

When the Snyders left the project, that was effectively the end of your involvement. Is that right?

That’s right. I would only hear occasional reports about the reshoot. I didn’t realize how much of the film was going to be changed—or vandalized, in my opinion. It became clear as I spoke to various actors that it was a wholesale dismantling of what had been there before. I did not hear from anyone who said it was a pleasant experience.