Rating: 2.5 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
Remember Justice League? It’s back! And it’s longer than ever! In fact, it’s literally twice as long. One might even describe its length as interminable. I had to watch it over multiple days to get through it. That is not to say it’s terrible, because it’s not terrible, but making it this long sort of feels like a prank? Or like that thing from the old Donald Duck cartoon where he thinks his nephews are smoking cigars so he makes them smoke all the cigars until they’re miserable. Like, you want the #SnyderCut, do ya? Well, here you go, take it all!
Batman, guilt-ridden over Superman’s death and convinced greater threats are coming to Earth, uses Lex Luthor’s metahuman files to track down other extraordinary beings to join him to defend the planet. Initially, most of them rebuff his entreaties, but eventually each sees evidence of the planetary invasion and decides they must help. An old mural Wonder Woman finds in Greece gives them the intel on their opponents, and they realize that Steppenwolf has come to Earth with an army of parademons to seek out the three Mother Boxes, because if you push them all together, they turn the planet into a hellscape. Why do they do that? Because they just love to change things, good or bad. If you took the Mother Boxes to a hellscape planet, maybe pushing them together would make it really nice? We can’t say for sure, as no one has ever tried this.
Even with all of Earth’s champions (except Martian Manhunter, who is much too busy convincing people in mourning they should go back to work), they don’t think they’ll be enough to stop Steppenwolf. This despite the fact that Earth had successfully repelled Steppenwolf’s boss, Darkseid, once before, and this was thousands of years ago before, you know, tanks were invented. Since the Mother Box can change anything into anything else, the League decides to take the one they still have and bring Superman back to life. Though Superman is briefly insane and effortlessly beats up all the heroes (which, I guess, proves they were right that he’s much better than them and they do need him), fortunately Lois Lane is kinda hanging around in the area and is able to bring him back to his senses.
At this point, Superman is AWOL and time is running out, so the League dusts themselves off and heads off to somewhere in Russia to face Steppenwolf and try to stop him. They actually do pretty well, and it seems like they might pull it off, but in the end Steppenwolf is too powerful and keeps them away from the Mother Boxes. Then Superman finally shows up, and again effortlessly takes Steppenwolf completely apart (like, literally, Superman uses heat vision to maim him), and soon everyone has a good old time killing Steppenwolf and throwing his body parts through a portal into Darkseid’s throne room. Yay! And the parademon army, I assume, also goes away.
Then we have like 11 different epilogues. Seriously like 30 minutes of this movie is just epilogues.
Best Parts:
It definitely looks better than the last time they attempted this. The special effects are better, and the overall visual composition and scene flow is better. It may not sound like a big deal but it goes a long way into keeping you engaged in each scene.
The action scenes are more exciting in this version. The final battle does a much better job of showing the Justice League working together as a team, and gives each member a chance to contribute and be useful in a believable way.
Worst Parts:
Every scene feels like an extended version of scene from a DVD extra that you watch and then say, “Yeah I get why they decided to cut a lot of this.” There’s no way this same story couldn’t be told, more effectively, in 2 1/2 hours. There are two different scenes of Aquaman in a small seaside village that end up with him pulling off his shirt and going back into the ocean. The first of those scenes goes on for an extra minute so we can watch the village women singing and smelling his discarded sweater.
There might be some comic book fan thrill out of seeing Darkseid in “live action”, but he’s sort of a joke here. He’s supposed to be an almost existential threat, but in this movie he’s defeated by Earth’s combined forces in 3,000 BC. He’s defeated so hard that he literally forgets where the battle took place and that he’d seen the anti-life equation there. They suggest he’s been searching for it fruitlessly ever since. Let me say that again: in 3,000 BC Darkseid’s ass was kicked so hard by the armies of Earth — riding high off of just having invented writing — that he couldn’t even remember having gone there. Making it Steppenwolf who was defeated instead of Darkseid, and dropping the silly idea of the anti-life equation being some giant geoglyph on the Earth’s surface that you have to conquer the planet to obtain, was an improvement in the theatrical cut.
Cyborg learning about his “talking to computers” powers has a laughable scene of him envisioning his potential control over the world’s financial markets as a giant bear statue fighting a giant bull statue.
I mentioned it earlier but Martian Manhunter pretending to be Martha Kent so he can convince Lois Lane to get back to work is possibly the stupidest part of this movie. Did he also go to the Daily Planet and pick up Clark’s old stuff from there like he said Martha did? Or did Martha really do that and he’d just been following her around and taking notes? What if Lois one day says to Martha, hey thanks for coming by to see me when you were in town!
Oh God the epilogues. Just pick maybe two and cut the rest please. And if you pick the “Knightmare” future to keep, cut it down by at least half. The conversation between Batman and the Joker is really, really too long and also it sucks. You can just show the Joker, and people will be like, “What? The Joker is working with Batman? But that’s crazy!” and then cut it there. Sometimes less is more.
Actually, that should be this whole review: SOMETIMES LESS IS MORE.
Say what you will about mankind, but burying their Mother Box in a shallow grave is still better than putting it in a giant theater-in-the-round up on a special pedestal and having armed guards stare at it for thousands of years, which both the Amazons and the Atlanteans came up with independently. Before the League decided to resurrect Superman with it, mankind’s Mother Box was mostly sitting in someone’s closet, and that was still a better hiding spot than the other two, which Steppenwolf found and obtained easily. If they’d just left it in that closet he might never have gotten his hands on it!
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