Review - Justice League

           So I found myself in the most unfortunate of circumstances several days ago. I was in a pretty ugly car wreck and ended up flipping may car into a ditch on the side of the freeway. Through sheer serendipity (and a sturdy seatbelt), I was able to crawl out of the wreckage more or less unscathed, but, needless to say, my car was in a rather sad shape. While the relevant parties continue to evaluate whether or not it can be salvaged, I have been left without an easy means of getting to and from the movie theater, so I wasn’t really able to catch Murder on the Orient Express like I said I would. However, I have spent the past couple of days studying bus routes and transit maps meticulously, and I think I have finally been able to calculate the precise routes and number of transfers needed to make it to and from the closest theater. The downside to my newfound understanding of public transit, though, is that I am now yet again enabled to go see Justice League, a film that I have been looking forward to for all the wrong reasons.
          Yes, I had been planning to see Justice League, but only because I was expecting it to be really bad. Anyone who is familiar with my previous work will know that I have reviewed Warner Bros.’ attempts at superhero movies in the past, and that, each time, they have never failed to disappoint me in a myriad of ways. While Man of Steel was released before I started writing reviews for the blog, I can say that that it is ipso facto uninteresting by virtue of the fact that Superman is an inherently overpowered, unrelatable, uninteresting character. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice was bad insofar as it introduced us to one of the silliest iterations of Batman since George Clooney’s portrayal of the Caped Crusader in Batman and Robin, featured the overpowered Superman fighting an equally overpowered and uninteresting Doomsday, and hinted at the prospect of a cinematic installment of Justice League before ever even introducing the rest of the Justice League. And, despite its superficial success among a very superficial American audience, Wonder Woman was bad insofar as it was built on a foundation of very tiresome clichés, like situating the villains amongst the generic stock of WWI/WWII German baddies, presenting us with a female protagonist meant to shirk the gender norms of today while simultaneously conforming to some of those very same gender norms, and ultimately devolving into the same boring CGI punch-up that we saw at the end of Batman vs. Superman. Despite missing the mark so widely in its previous attempts at establishing a solid superhero universe, Warner Bros. seems determined not to be bested by Disney and Marvel and is now giving us Justice League, foregoing the formal introduction of Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg, and skipping straight to the inevitable CGI clusterfuck punch-up that has come to do define virtually every other superhero movie that is overcrowded with superheroes. And yes, after having now seen it, I can confirm that many of my predictions about Justice League’s performance were accurate - it’s plot is just as silly as Batman vs Superman, the characters are still painfully one-dimensional (with perhaps one, maybe two, notable exceptions), and it overdoses on CGI harder than any Marvel film so far, and arguably even harder than Batman vs Superman. I suppose the upside to Justice League’s failure is that I now have a lot of cannon fodder to speak to for the remainder of this review, but this is also to the even greater detriment of Justice League - I feel like I haven’t really had this much to say since my review of The 5th Wave, which, if you recall, won my award for the worst movie of 2016.
          But with so much to comment on, where do I start? Well, we can start right at the beginning. Justice League picks up not long after the events of Batman vs Superman, with Clark Kent dead and buried, a fact that the film is quick to remind us of with a close-up shot of a newspaper headline reading “SUPERMAN IS DEAD” within the first two minutes of the film. The remainder of the opening montage is then dedicated to illustrating just how much the world has gone to shit in the absence of Superman. We are served clips of scruffy-looking thugs trashing a fruit stand, police overwhelmed by the surge of rampant crime, and militant groups again empowered to terrorize a world without its beacon of hope and purity, Superman. *Presses the pause button*. Now hold on a second - I feel inclined to point out that this is an exceedingly bleak view of the world. Not that I am always the most ardent optimist - in fact, there are times when I think the world would be better served by a healthy dose of nihilism - but this almost appears self-serving. The logic here appears to be built upon the conditional statement that “If Superman dies, then society as we know it falls apart”. Looking at it a little differently, Justice League seems to make the assumption that humans are actually incapable of growing and thriving on their own, and in fact need an overpowered, infallible paragon of clichéd virtues to look up to in order to succeed (inadvertently necessitating the return of Superman later on). Such an assumption would be insulting were it not for the fact that it’s so misplaced in Justice League that it couldn’t even be construed as a passive criticism of modern society. The world in which the League operates is an unbelievable world, a world that exists in its own parallel dimension that poorly attempts to mimic our own. There’s nothing relatable about it - actual human societies have persevered through hardships and tragedies before, and while numerous symbols and monuments may have collapsed or been destroyed in the past, such events have never led to the inevitable downfall of mankind. If you further contrast the world Justice League gives us with the world that we are presented with in the Marvel films, a world much more like our own, where humans attempt to continue on with their daily lives despite the extraordinary adversity that may befall it, one may begin to see why Warner Bros. lags behind Disney in the superhero department - the DC Extended Universe presents us with an unbelievable world that faces extraordinary circumstances, where the Marvel Cinematic Universe presents us with a much more relatable world that faces extraordinary circumstances. And while I have confessed to not being the biggest fan of superhero movies at all, I can at least acknowledge that only one of these fictional worlds does a better job at creating the suspension of disbelief necessary for quality science fiction (and it’s not the DCEU).
          And all of that can be concluded just by watching the opening montage in the first few minutes of the film. Once that segment ends and we are adequately introduced to the unbelievable world the Justice League operate in, the film then wastes no time jumping into the action overloaded punch-up. One of the aforementioned terrorist groups du jour barges into a bank, takes a few dozen people hostage, and tries to blow up four square blocks of Metropolis/Gotham City/wherever the fuck they are in an attempt to make some kind of generic political statement. Enter Wonder Woman, who proceeds to dramatically come crashing through a thick wooden door (as opposed to just opening it) and deflect an entire clip of rounds fired from a fully automatic rifle using just her wrist guards with seemingly godlike precision and lightning speed, all while roundhouse kicking some of the other terrorist henchmen in the face. Later that evening, Metropolis/Gotham City/Generictown is still under attack, but this time, our perpetrators are not some disgruntled ruffians from off the streets or another nameless terrorist group, but the interesting combination of a burglar running across rooftops and an alien-bug-man-thing from outer space, at which point Batman promptly shows up and does battle with the alien-bug-man-thing while tying up our burglar on the rooftops. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away on an unseen-but-totally-present island in the middle of the ocean, the Amazon tribe that Wonder Woman hails from is called to the chamber of an ancient cube-shaped artifact housed on the island for safe keeping. Almost as if on cue, not long after Queen Hippolyta enters the chamber, our primary antagonist, Steppenwolf, teleports into the fray with his army of alien-bug-men-things (subsequently referred to as 'parademons') and proceeds to do battle with the Amazons in an apparent contest to see which team has the better CGI.
          Steppenwolf. Yes, the villain’s name is fucking Steppenwolf. I personally found it hard to take the remainder of the film seriously after this revelation, and I legitimately wondered how, say, Ben Affleck or Gal Gadot was able to discuss saving the world from its impending destruction with a straight face. The villain’s name sounds like the name of a some kind of dance, and so every time the discussion of how to save the world from Steppenwolf came up, I always imagined that, somewhere in the obscure corners of the world, like maybe a barn in some unheard of town in North Dakota, there was some kind of a hoedown going on where a group of nefarious individuals was doing the Steppenwolf in order to bring about the End of Days, in which the world would suddenly explode, Death Star-style, unless they were promptly stopped. Speaking of poorly designed characters, Justice League uses this opportunity to introduce us to Cyborg, a CGI supersoldier that looks as if he walked fresh off of the set of the most recent Transformers film. I find myself surprised that, in a world in which Star Wars has recently demonstrated that even the most ambitious of sci-fi titles can still use practical effects, puppetry, and motion capture to construct its universe beautifully, Warner Bros. stubbornly insists on going the Michael Bay route and just CGI-ing its characters to cartoonish proportions. Granted, I would certainly expect something more advanced than the clunky (though iconic) Robocop outfit from the 80s, but Cyborg seems to go off the deep end in the opposite direction, more or less scrubbing out Ray Fisher and replacing him with the newest Decepticon.
          And my comments on Cyborg are perhaps a good segue into another one of the most glaring problems with Justice League: its unrelenting blast of CGI. If I may yet again invoke my CGI drug addict analogy, Justice League is the dead body left to rot in the warm back room - while many entries in the Marvel universe may be sprawled out across the dirty mattress or bathroom floor, tweaked out of their minds on CGI with used needles scattered about, Justice League overdosed and died one week ago, but his friends didn’t know what to do with the body, so they just dragged the carcass into the back room with a boarded up window and left it there. Clearly, Warner Bros. has completely abandoned the concept of the “suspension of disbelief”. This is perhaps most evident in the ending fight scene where Steppenwolf has begun terraforming Earth into some kind of apocalyptic alien hellscape. You see, one of the advantages of Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is that it seemed very real - we were presented with a Gotham City struggling against varying levels of organized crime, much like a handful of certain American cities today, to which a rich military contractor gets creative with his company’s technology and pursues his own breed of vigilante justice. With Justice League, this effect is totally lost when the Batmobile is mounted with a railgun blasting alien-bug-men-things while speeding through what essentially amounts to a cross between Neverland and the planet Pandora from Avatar. Likewise, one can’t help but feel a degree of weird anachronism when Aquaman single-handedly engages a platoon of laser-wielding alien-bug-men-things armed only with a trident from the depths of Atlantis. It’s just a very poor use of CGI and world-building, and is reminiscent of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, where its over-reliance on CGI morphed it into something cartoonish and uninteresting.
          To be fair, there are a couple of things that Justice League does well that should probably be called out here. For example, while Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen/Flash is not the most unique character I have ever seen (he reminded me a lot of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in the most recent iteration of Spider-Man), he certainly had more depth and complexity than Affleck’s Batman, Gadot’s Wonder Woman, and Cavill’s Superman, being forced into a situation where he has to reconcile his juvenile, semi-pacifist propensity for mischief with a newfound obligation to save his fellow man from impending doom. A similar observation can be made of Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, a character who wasn’t afraid to stray from the cliché “the world is in peril and it’s our job to save it” attitude exemplified by the aforementioned trio of Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman, instead preferring to be left alone in his Eskimo fishing village to ironically strut his tough-guy machismo for all 25 old people in the village to see. I think further praise can also be given to Danny Elfman’s musical score for the film. For those that know me, it is no secret that I have long been an admirer of most of Elfman’s work - I will confess that the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack still occasionally makes it onto my musical playlist - so I was very surprised to read that he was put in charge of the music during the opening credits. And it wasn’t particularly difficult to detect Elfman’s fingerprints on the score - during those scenes where Batman descends from the rooftops or the Batmobile bursts into action, the keen listener should have been able to pick up on the familiar tune of the Batman theme that he did for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman or the Emmy-winning animated series from the 90s. John Williams, perhaps one of the best composers in American history, gets his own homage as well, as the keen listener also should have been able to hear Elfman reference Williams’ Superman them during the scene in which Superman shows up to help the League in the final fight against Steppenwolf. Overall, it was nice to hear the throwback to the established themes that previous iterations of these characters have had - it provides a much-needed sense of continuity between the various DC IPs that notoriously have been plagued by reboots, reimaginings, and varying levels of success over the past several decades.
          Such pros, however, are not enough to redeem its cons, so in short, don’t bother with Justice League. It’s clear that Warner Bros. still doesn’t understand how the elements of fiction work, as all of my expectations that were set by previous installments of the DC Extended Universe were not ill-formed. From the shallow and silly characters to the even sillier plot to its virtual overdose on CGI, Justice League embodies everything that is wrong with superhero films today. As K. Austin Collins writes for The Ringer, I would seriously consider where my career is heading if I were Ben Affleck or Jeremy Irons or almost any other cast member in the film, as sticking with Warner Bros. is proving to be a sinking ship [1]. As I mentioned in my review of Batman vs Superman, there is the potential in the DC Extended Universe to explore and re-imagine many of those elements of these characters that have either never been explored before or have made an attempt at a silver-screen iteration in the past and have failed (such as an exploration of Batman’s more “sci-fi” villains). Instead of trying to tap into this potential though, Warner Bros. insists on trying to compete with Marvel head-on by creating it’s own version of the Avengers, but is, expectedly, being outdone at every corner. Perhaps one of these days, someone in the creative studio or marketing department at Warner Bros. will wise up to the fact that the DC Universe is falling apart around them and actually try to do something about it. It’s a pity because I have historically looked forward to the Fall and Winter movie season each year, as this is usually when the most impressive titles are released, but, this year, Justice League unfortunately leaves a sour taste in my mouth. But alas, there is a light at the end of this tunnel though, as there remains one important entry this season that will, hopefully, end this year with a bang: Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

[1] https://www.theringer.com/movies/2017/11/15/16656054/justice-league-film-review-zack-snyder-joss-whedon

Review - Thor: Ragnarok

          Yeah yeah, I know - I said that I would write a review for Blade Runner 2049 back when I wrote my review of It. Obviously, that plan didn't quite work out the way that I had intended. In my defense, though, I found myself more preoccupied with another, slightly more ambitious writing project that had been in development for months, a project which I was finally able to produce a completed draft of. That project has now moved on to the reviewing and editing phase and, depending on how subsequent drafts turn out after edits, it may actually see the light of day in the near future. At the very least, if I can’t get any publication to take interest in it, it will be another piece for the blog. But now that October has passed (somewhat uneventfully, as far as writing goes) and November is upon us, I once again look towards the movie calendar for the remainder of the year and am quickly reminded why November and December are typically my favorite months for movies - Thor: Ragnarok, Murder on the Orient Express, and Justice League (God help us) all come out this month, while the title that has piqued my personal interest the most, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is released in December. And so, after falling off of the airwaves for October, it's time to dive right back into the writing fray with Thor: Ragnarok.
          Thor: Ragnarok is the third entry in the Thor series and the seventeenth installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a set of monumentally popular comic IPs, owned by Disney, that perhaps single-handedly made the superhero film genre what it is today. I confess myself somewhat ambivalent about the prolonged success of the MCU. On the one hand, I haven’t historically been the biggest fan of the superhero genre, as such films typically undermine a crucial element of science fiction and fantasy known as the “suspension of disbelief”, which in turn kills the overall level of immersion for the audience and has a tendency to render the films more silly than anything else. Still, on the other hand, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that there have been a number of occasions where the MCU has actually presented us with very relatable characters and compelling story elements, what some may perhaps consider the two most important things in any work of fiction. We saw this in the presentation of Ant-Man’s Scott Lang as your “average Joe” kind of guy, down on his luck, trying to earn the affection of his daughter and ex-wife, who just happens to find himself in a situation where the world is at stake, or in Doctor Strange, where the Doc is forced to reign in his arrogance and over-devotion to science as the very fabric of the cosmos unravels before him in the pages of Indian mysticism. Perhaps this is a sign that the superhero genre is actually starting to mature and understand that many of the over-the-top elements that it could get away with in comic books are held up to a higher level of scrutiny when such series are translated into film and presented to a broader audience, compelling film studios to realize that there is the potential for actual art when these series are critiqued from the perspective of traditional fiction. Thor: Ragnarok seems to more or less be aware of this, having come a long way since the days of the very uninteresting run-of-the-mill stories that constituted the early installments of the MCU. While still having its share of blunders, Ragnarok takes liberties with the series that other installments of the MCU have not, such as presenting us with a formidable female villain among other characters that don't quite fit the dry archetypes you find in, say, any Warner Brothers superhero production.
          Thor: Ragnarok presents us with the eponymous God of Thunder in search of the fabled Infinity Stones roughly two years after the events of Age of Ultron. His quest draws his attention away from his home of Asgard, where his mischievous brother Loki has masqueraded around as their father, Odin, and ruled over the kingdom with what can best be described as a laissez-faire approach to government. After defeating the great fire demon Surtur, Thor returns to Asgard, immediately recognizes Loki’s narcissistic vanity through the disguise and reveals him. Seeing the threat to Asgard in the absence of Odin, Thor demands that Loki take him to wherever he hid Odin. With the help of Doctor Strange, Thor and Loki find Odin on Earth, who reveals that he is dying and that his death will release his first-born child, Hela, the Goddess of Death, from her prison. After Odin dies and disintegrates into cosmic dust, almost as if on cue, Hela abruptly walks out of some kind of nether portal, defeats Loki and Thor, smashes Thor’s hammer, and casts them both off of the Bifrost bridge and into space as she launches an assault on Asgard. The remainder of film follows Thor’s quest to return to Asgard and save it from Hela. Along the way, Thor finds himself stranded on a mysterious planet, competing in some kind of gladiatorial event for the eccentric Grandmaster, crossing paths with the Hulk, and reluctantly enlisting his brother’s help in returning to Asgard and saving it from his evil sister.
          When compared to Warner Brothers’ attempts at establishing a solid superhero franchise (Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman, and Wonder Woman), Thor: Ragnarok illustrates just how solid an understanding of the elements of fiction that Disney actually has. Ragnarok actually has characters with depth and personality, as opposed to the one-dimensional, superficial personas that constitute virtually every character in the aforementioned Warner Brothers films. Thor, for example, puts his bravado on full display in the first five minutes of the film when confronting Surtur, as he has no qualms telling a fiery demon lord to hold on a minute as he rotates in circles while dangling from a chain in the ceiling. This is in stark contrast to the blatantly scripted melodrama of, say, Batman vs. Superman, such as when Batman asks Superman if he bleeds while looking tough and menacing. Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster is easily one of the most complex and eccentric characters in the entirety of the MCU, a powerful being that presides as what can best be described as “Lord of the Trash Planet” who has orgies on spaceships, hosts battle arenas with space gladiators, wears a gold silk robe, and refuses to address any of his servants as slaves. Now, if one were to juxtapose this with, say, Wonder Woman, I would imagine that one would find the Grandmaster to be a much more interesting antagonist than the overused and boring evil Germans during World War I. And while we’re making Wonder Woman comparisons, it may also be worth pointing out that Ragnarok actually had the courage to have a profound female villain. Not only was Hela sadistic and brutal, but she actually proved to be a formidable foe for Thor and crew, having previously slaughtered the Valkyries and smashed Thor’s hammer. Hela was a far more dangerous antagonist to be reckoned with, as opposed to Wonder Woman’s Doctor Poison, a character that was quickly relegated to the role of sidekick and whose screen time consisted of a few brief moments of her throwing vials of toxic gas every so often.
          I wouldn’t say Thor: Ragnarok was perfect, however. The two biggest things that I had a problem with are perhaps the two biggest criticisms I’ve leveled at almost every installment of the MCU since Age of Ultron: the over-reliance on CGI and the tendency of much of the action to devolve into one big, incoherent punch-up. I have, on numerous occasions, compared the superhero films of today to a drug addict sprawled out on a dirty mattress after having overdosed on CGI, and it’s clear that Ragnarok didn’t make any effort to sober up since The Dark World or Age of Ultron. I thought this was the most evident during the scene where Hela first arrives on Asgard and single-handedly destroys an entire battalion of Odin’s best soldiers without even breaking a sweat. There’s something very weird about watching a CGI version of Cate Blanchett spin around and do backflips with daggers while chaining together roundhouse kicks and conjuring an unending supply of weapons out of the aether - it’s like the very unbelievable CGI version of Christopher Lee in Revenge of the Sith, and it kills the suspension of disbelief. I’ve also found that one of the virtues that the MCU has over any Warner Brothers production is its slightly campy and light-hearted nature, as opposed to the poorly-executed doom and gloom of Batman vs. Superman, for example. But while the ending fight scene of Ragnarok can be applauded for its attempts at self-parody, it might have gone a little too overboard and crossed the line into utter silliness - Thor summons lightning bolts while the Hulk is fighting a giant wolf in the ocean while the Asgardian Skurge leaps from a spaceship dual-wielding M16s while Surtur is resurrected and destroys Odin’s palace while Hela is still doing backflips and roundhouse kicks while Loki is fighting skeletal zombie warriors. It’s a lot to take in to say the least, and is very reminiscent of the brawl at the end of Age of Ultron, which is to say that it might as well be illustrated with a cartoon-esque dust cloud and the occasional “KAPOW” flashing across it.
          Still, the pros of Thor: Ragnarok outweigh its cons, and I think it’s safe to say that Disney and Marvel Studios have started to perfect their craft with regard to superhero films, something I saw traces of in Ant-Man and Doctor Strange. It’s going to be interesting to see just how well Justice League performs later this month, coming on the heels of Ragnarok and attempting to carry on the success of Wonder Woman. If it’s anything like Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman, or Wonder Woman, it’s not going to be very good, yet still get at least a moderate turn out, as the typical American movie-goer can be entertained by virtually anything these days. And, like Batman vs. Superman and Wonder Woman, I intend to write something about Justice League as well, likely comparing its performance to that of Ragnarok. But that is not for another few weeks, and I have Murder on the Orient Express to look forward to before that.