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
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