The Snyder Cut — Review Thread

Neverending Doomsday PG Cooper

Barry Allan saving Iris West.

Garbage.

I just got off work bruh. I've been there since 4 AM.

And my shitty internet isn't helping either.

By that time we'll have Patty Jenkins' 8 hour WW84 cut.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2017/2021)
Man, what a difference five years makes. When it was announced that Zack Snyder was replaced from the movie Justice League by Joss Whedon it kind of felt like a repudiation of him and his entire approach to superhero movies… but now in 2021 Joss Whedon has become the bad guy and Zack Snyder has at least in some ways had his vision vindicated by the release of the fabled Snyder Cut. I’ll spare everyone involved the story of how this thing came to be but needless to say I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was one of the few defenders of Snyder when he made Man of Steel, but I absolutely hated Batman V. Superman, a movie whose failure Snyder can mostly only blame himself for and I never even bothered to see the 2017 cut of that movie in theaters I had lost so much interest in the whole affair. When I did catch up with that thing on blu-ray I thought it was the most forgettable mediocrity imaginable, and in many ways that was its biggest sin: it was a movie about the assemblage of the Justice League and it just did not even come close to being an event befitting what it was supposed to be. And now along comes the Snyder Cut and, well, whatever you want to say about it it sure doesn’t have that problem.

Running over four hours long, sporting an R-rating, and even making the rather unusual decision to be presented in the Academy Ratio (which Snyder apparently composed it for hoping for optimal IMAX presentation), this is unquestionable the work of someone who hasn’t been constrained. The basic plot of the 120 minute 2017 film is still here but it been greatly expanded and the six characters have something closer to even screen time. Making a Justice League movie without having established several characters in solo movies was and is a bad idea but at least this version seems to have made some effort to tackle that problem. Cyborg and The Flash both get a lot more screentime and while I can’t say that I loved what they did with either character they at least seem like they have a reason to be here this time. The movie also certainly isn’t able to turn the film’s villain, Steppenwolf, into anything resembling a great character but it does kind of make more sense why he is that way because the film’s only occasionally onscreen villain of Darkseid is more present and that contextualized Steppenwolf as more of a henchman than a villain. Beyond that his scheme is still some nonsense about magic boxes that I could only half follow, but the movie sold the threat more effectively and that goes a long way.

I don’t think this movie is going to win over any of the people who didn’t see any kind of promise in Snyder’s earlier DC movies. It’s still roughly in the wheelhouse of that vision, though I will say that things have softened a bit, something I’d previously attributed to Whedon’s interference but it does seem like Snyder was indeed trying to make this feel a little bit more optimistic and comic bookish. I certainly think he’s handling Batman better; in fact it kind of reframes that movie as having shown Batman when he was at something of a low point and that his experiences here are sort of re-invigorating him and giving him new purpose and he generally feels like less of a jerk. I still don’t much care for the Ezra Miller Flash though and I don’t think the movie handles the near immediate resurrection of Superman terribly well and while I liked getting more of a backstory for Cyborg and liked him as a character I don’t know that his powers were terribly clear in the action scenes. I also didn’t care too much about the background material we got about Aquaman, which was probably better handled in his solo movie (again, it was never a good idea to make this thing without solo movies first). Wonder Woman is in pretty good form here though and my memory of the original cut is hazy it sure feels like the action scenes here are generally much bigger and more elaborate.

Of course I do think Snyder bears some responsibility for the rather bizarre lifespan this movie has had. If he thought that all four hours of this thing was ever going to be released into theaters back in 2017 he was delusional and I suspect the original plan was to have this split into two movies with the scene of the tunnel collapsing as a finale to part one. If not… I have no idea what his plan was. Running the entirety of four hours the pacing on this is a bit questionable and were this thing not being released natively to streaming rather than to theaters I’m not sure I would have had the patience with it that I did. Particularly odd is the section of the film labeled “epilogue,” which takes up almost half an hour of this film’s running time and seemingly only exists to tease future movies that are probably never going to be made. We get a stinger that was clearly meant to set up a solo Ben Affleck Batman movie we’re never going to see and there’s a return to the strange nightmare alternate future from BvS very late in the movie which also feels like a tease for some future film that’s never going to exist and seems to have only still been included out of a stubborn desire to give us exactly what Snyder’s original vision was without even the most common sense of compromises. Then there’s also a very late return to the nightmare alternate future sequence form BvS. It’s an interesting scene but it makes even less sense here and serves no purpose unless the plan was to keep teasing this over the course of several DC movies going forward and considering this (unlike the aforementioned Batman tease) was newly shot for this cut it really just feels self-indulgent.

Presenting the film in the Academy ratio also seemed like kind of a nutty indulgence when I first heard they were going to do it given that the film was composed that way with IMAX screens in mind and 95% of this film’s audience won’t be seeing it like that, but I do see a certain logic to composing it that way in the first place and I ended up kind of digging seeing a modern blockbuster of this size and scope being composed that way. It was interesting if nothing else. And that’s kind of how I feel about this whole thing. If nothing else it pretty much makes that theatrical version obsolete as that is pretty much a compromised movie for nobody and seeing the full cut makes a lot of the strange decisions in that movie make more sense when given the fuller picture and I’m pretty glad to finally have that fuller picture. If nothing else this would seem to send a pretty clear message to studios: don’t hire Zack Snyder unless you’re willing to go all the way down the rabbit hole with him because with him the excess is the style and when you try to cut down the excess you kind of lose whatever was special there in the first place.
***1/2 out of Five

I'm just saying I dont think it was salvaged

I gotta admit, I was more excited to see a JL sequel with Legion of Doom more than anything. I'm burnt out on super teams fighting alien armies.

Don't forget that the RT score is based on someone at RT making the call on a review being either positive or negative.  A lot of the reviews that are going into the positive column no doubt had plenty of problems with the movie, but someone decided that the positive statements outweighed the negative ones.  It's why RT is so unreliable.

This flashback is a ton of exposition for Wonder Woman to learn from hieroglyphs.

Oh my god! "You smell good." "Did I not before?" was a Snyder line!

I don't know why this shocks me, but it seemed like a hasty reshoot to me. I'm cringing to think it was always supposed to be in this movie.

I actually prefer most of the Snyder dialogue. The one good Whedon change/addition was the “save one life” moment between Batman and the Flash.