Zack Snyder’s Justice League

After the 3 and a half hour Batman V Superman, I’m now tackling this four hour monster. The IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes reviews are strong, so the question is – are the reviews good because the movie is good, or is it that most of the viewers were just Snyder fanboys and fangirls?

This movie is so long that I’m going to do some sanity checks throughout my watch.

The first 30 minutes of this movie was tremendously painful. There are ten minutes of credits slash recap slash nothing, and the next twenty minutes might somehow be worse. One quote that stood out – a little girl asks Wonder Woman if she can be like her when she grows up, and Wonder Woman says “You can be anything you want to be!” which apparently includes being an actual goddess. Who is this for?

I guess the next 90 minutes were better, but still awful. It’s amazing how long it can take to slowly establish an Infinity Stone ripoff and do a lazy whirlwind tour of introducing the Justice League members’ backstories. There are still some incredible writing lowlights, such as one hero asking another if he is a part of the conspiracy to destroy all life on Earth. Who would do this? Other than pretty much every DC villain, apparently. I’m beyond bored with the DC villain’s goal being to just destroy everything, always, and rarely for any clear, personal benefit. Also, we learn that Cyborg is set up like Superman, where his powers are doing anything he wants with computers, because his dad is real smart and made him part machine. This quickly turns into being able to speak to machines as well, because that’s close enough.

The writing is just horrendous. Every line is a throwaway exposition, often that a character would have no way of knowing. “It’s clean now because his base sucks up the radiation”, or “they must have killed hundreds of thousands of worlds”, or whatever random thing that they decide matters to this fairly simple plot. It’s just a B movie version of Avengers – Infinity War. The other lines are equally bad – “I don’t care how many hundreds of thousands of worlds they’ve killed – they never faced us!” and so on.

I am unclear on how this could possibly be better than the 2017 version of the movie. Other than a few scenes with Diane Lane and/or Amy Adams, just about every scene could be cut. I gave it a 1 because it is dreadful. This movie sucks, DC comics seem to suck, I hate that I’m going to keep watching these things because I set a random goal and it is blowing up in my face so badly. At least I’ve still got the Dark Knight trilogy for later.