Justice League - Review Thread

I like this one best:

They get no sympathy from me.  I still haven't seen it.

Somebody else is paying for my ticket.  If I had given it any serious thought, I would have used the pair of free movie passes the Alamo gave me recently.  As it is, we're going on $5 Tuesday, so WB won't be getting much out of it.

If you had told me at eight years old that there would one day be a live-action Justice League movie and that I wouldn't give the slightest shit I don't think I'd believe you. I grew up loving the DC Animated universe and the Justice League TV show was definitely a favourite. My disinterest is now is rooted less is having grown out of superhero stories and is born much more from the fact that Justice League was clearly a rushed product built to capitalize on Marvel's success. All signs pointed to a clusterfuck, and the utter disorganization of Batman v. Superman only aided this feeling. I might not have even bothered seeing the film in the theater, but I promised my brother I'd go with him and so, here we are.

The plot of the film is simple; the ancient alien Steppenwolf (voided by Ciaran Hinds) has come to earth seeking the mystical power of the Mother Boxes (a type of energy) so he can conquer the planet. In preparation, Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) seek to form a team to defend the Earth. Such a simple, cartoony plot is completely lacking in substance and is a very thinly veiled excuse to just throw together a bunch of superheroes and action. You could arguably make a similar criticism of The Avengers, but that film at least had some plot details (however thin), character beats, and humour to hold on to. These details are lacking in Justice League. A clear effort has been made to lighten things up, but the writing isn't sharp enough and it also clashes from Zack Snyder's core aesthetic. The simplistic plot does prove to be somewhat of a benefit though. Technically speaking this thing is just as overbloated and messy as Batman v. Superman, but the story is so simple that it's impossible to get lost. Bad guy wants to make Earth go boom; Justice League stop him. Got it.

Given the simplicity of the story, Justice League relies entirely on its character interactions and action scenes. To the film's credit, it does a better job of establishing its new characters than I would have expected. You quickly get a sense of what Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg are about as well as their roles on the team. The trade off is that most of their characters are built on superficial details and cliches. I more or less got their roles in the film, but I didn't feel I knew them as people and as such seeing them come together or their arcs get resolved didn't mean much to me. There are some hints of interest with Wonder Woman having been largely dormant since the events of her solo film and Batman dwelling on his own guilt regarding Superman's death, but these too are lost in the sheer spectacle of the rest of the film. The action scenes are the typical battles against endless CGI armies which mean nothing, though the climax does at least do a pretty decent job giving everyone a role. There's also a brief stand-off between heroes which is genuinely pretty tense, but this only lasts a few minutes.

Coming out of Justice League, I felt it was a modest improvement over Batman v. Superman. The film is certainly more coherent, there are a handful of decent moments, and the film passes the time. But the more a reflect on the film, the less value I see in it. The film is just completely lacking in any real substance. Say what you will about Batman v. Superman, but at least it had some interesting ideas at its core. Ideas that were pretty poorly handled, but I can at least see a potentially good film buried in there. That film also had Zack Snyder's visual style, which is still present in Justice League, but is also largely diluted in an effort to make a more fun, Marvel style movie. And that of course, is the greater issue. In their efforts to chase Marvel's success, DC has completely squandered their many characters, culminating in this bloated mess of a movie which doesn't really know what it wants to be. All told, the film isn't terrible. There are enough solid little moments - whether action or character based - which work, and the film certainly has the production value of a major superhero movie. However at the end of the day, there's just very little here and at this point, being able to make a movie where a bunch of superheroes engage in action spectacle is not nearly enough to stand out.

D+

Just got home from watching this shit show.  I really tried to go in with an open mind, for all the good it did.  This was actually worse than I ever imagined it would be.  I really thought it could at least be passable.  WB has once again proven that they are completely incapable of learning from their mistakes.  I'm not sure which is worse, Justice League or Green Lantern.  At least Green Lantern only squandered one superhero, so I suppose Justice League is the worst.  I'd honestly rather watch Superman IV: The Quest for Peace again than re-watch Justice League.  

I hope this is true! It's kind of obvious there is an extended edition of this movie somewhere!

www.bleedingcool.com/2017/12/06/rumor-warner-bros-considering-joss-whedon-extended-cut-justice-league/

Why did Superman's face look weird? Is it just me?

The Kryptonite Botox didn't agree with him.

WB called in some favors to get Justice League into 114 additional theaters over the New Year weekend in a sad attempt to squeeze out the last bit of cash they could.  All they managed was $1.5 million, even so.  Not all of the numbers from the foreign box office are in yet, but it looks like JL is going to top out at about $654 million.  With a production budget of $300 million, with another $100 million on marketing, their losses are going to cancel out the gains from Wonder Woman.

Hopefully, the fact that Aquaman isn't being released until December of 2018 will mean that enough distance will have been put between it and Justice League that the film will be able to stand on it's own merits, the way Wonder Woman did after BvS.

Da fuq did I just watch