Justice League (2D)

But really, honestly, truly, I did like Justice League. Unlike most of the Zack Snyder DC movies, Justice League is so watchable. I did not feel tortured by the painful strain of watching like I usually do. This time, the story is very straight forward. It’s told in an old-fashioned, linear fashion, and the pacing clearly makes a push to be even (though it doesn’t quite make it).

It just feels different from Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It’s less tortured and more fun, less choppy and more focused, less plodding and more antic. Of course, it’s hard not to wonder how much Joss Whedon’s involvement contributed to these changes.

This morning, I noticed that some fans are petitioning the studio to release Zack Snyder’s original version of the film. (It was my understanding that Snyder didn’t have a version of the film. I thought that after principal photography was completed, Snyder stepped away to spend time with his family while he processed his daughter’s recent suicide. Then the studio brought Joss Whedon on to finish the editing, and Whedon, not surprisingly, cut out a bunch of stuff and did some rewrites that required reshoots. If all that’s true, Snyder would actually have to return to the project and complete his version of the film before fans could see it.  That sounds expensive.)

Whedon seems like the obvious person to ask to take over a multi-superhero comic book movie at the last minute since he’s already proven himself up to the challenge with The Avengers. Of course, the DC films are tonally different from the Marvel ones (and, after this latest, tonally different from each other as well).  As I watched, I found myself wondering how much of what I saw had Whedon’s fingerprints on it. It’s really impossible to tell. I mean, we know he didn’t reshoot the entire movie, so surely the major plot points are left intact. There may even be things that seem Whedonesque that are actually Snyder’s doing. (It’s easy to watch any comic book adaptation and think of Buffy since Whedon was so inspired by comics in the first place.)

To be honest, even though I almost never like watching Snyder’s movies, even I have a bit of regret that I can’t see his version of the film. (To be clear, I don’t dislike Snyder as a person. I even respect his work. I just don’t appreciate it. Synder and I are just not in sync. I usually find his stuff uncomfortably onerous to watch.)

I’m sure I like the version of Justice League we got much better than I would have enjoyed a Snyder-only version of the movie. Still, it’s impossible to deny that Zack Snyder on his own would have delivered a very different product. It’s kind of sad we never got that version, for the sake of continuity of the series if nothing else.

Justice League is much better than I expected, though. I’m glad I went.

The Good:
After the movie, I gushed to my husband, “I’m so glad we saw this! It will be so easy to write about!” (This might make it sound like Justice League is a bad movie. Actually, I just have a lot to say.)

Justice League’s two biggest problems work in tandem. It is both over-hyped and over-panned. Neither of these things is something the movie itself can affect in any way. It’s no secret that DC has not had the commercial and critical success that Marvel has (in its recent screen efforts, I mean). At this point, the bad reviews of DC properties have started to snowball. There’s no way this movie could ever be good enough to counterbalance the weight of all that bad press. Sympathetic audiences expected The Avengers to be awesome. They hoped (against hope) that Justice League wouldn’t be as bad as they feared.

It’s really kind of sad for DC, especially because a number of fans (not critics, fans) have truly enjoyed the DC movies and stuck by them with unwavering loyalty. And then it’s almost cruel to give a film that nobody thinks is going to be all that good so much publicity.

Justice League is not a masterpiece, but it’s also not a bad movie. Calling it a bad movie is not only unkind, it’s dishonest. I think if you’re an average film goer with an interest in seeing Justice League, you should see it, and you will enjoy it. At no point did I stop enjoying the movie, zone out, or wish I were watching something else. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfectly watchable and feels like a good start. I hope they do continue to build the universe and make future Justice League movies. (Now that they’ve got Wonder Woman, I’m sure they will.)

The movie has a quick pace (I thought), action enough, and more humor than I expected. What really surprised me was the compelling emotional story. So many of the characters have a lot of interior drama going on, and we see so much of it hashed out in their on-screen interactions. I did like that. I actually think Snyder’s films have always focused on the emotional journeys of the characters. It’s just that his presentation style is usually so off-putting to me.

To my shock, I discovered that I really love Batman as he’s presented in this film. Maybe because I didn’t see Batman v Superman in the theater (because of my baby), I still have a difficult time wrapping my mind around the idea that Ben Affleck is Batman. I actually really like his interpretation of the character though. Watching it, I thought increasingly, “Wow, this version of Batman is crazy!”   

Obviously in any version of the story, Bruce Wayne has issues, but he really seems damaged here. It’s like Justice League forces us to step back and say, “You’ve always taken all this for granted about Batman, but when you think about it, the guy’s kind of nuts, right?” He definitely needs therapy. But he’s so brave! I mean, he is amazingly, insanely brave.

The movie makes a joke about it over and over again, but seriously (in all seriousness) this guy’s got no powers. At all. And yet when the evil “new god” alien monsters show up, and all the people who actually have powers hang back, whining, “I’m afraid,” Bruce Wayne is all, “I’m Batman.” And then he just runs in there even though he has no powers. (I mean, in that suit, he barely has a neck!) He is somehow the leader of the good metahumans, and he’s not even a metahuman. He’s right to yell at Wonder Woman to step up. He’s so brave. It actually makes him really likable.

I also love how aware he is of his own issues. I love what he says to Alfred about Superman, and I love his interactions with Diana. It doesn’t seem like romance could really blossom there, but you do get the vibe that they get each other in a way that the others can’t understand. 

All of the characters in this film are actually pretty terrific. I don’t even need to say anything about Gal Gadot. Her Wonder Woman is the best, and she’ll probably always be the best in these DC movies. She’s just as good here as she is in her stand-alone movie, and she keeps the character totally consistent. I love her, and she’s awesome.

But the newcomers are really good, too. I’ve been a fan of Ezra Miller’s acting for a long time. It’s amazing how different his Barry Allen is from the eerily confident sociopath he plays We Need to Talk About Kevin. Talk about a versatile actor! Miller’s character is basically the comic relief, but he’s still a useful and likable addition to the team.

I love Khal Drogo (I secretly wish I were Khal Drogo), so by extension, I have to love Jason Momoa. (His version of Conan the Barbarian didn’t do so well, but I liked that, too.) Momoa makes Aquaman shockingly cool. Since the movie’s earliest previews, I’ve thought it was a great decision to portray Aquaman (oft mocked for his less than amazing talking-to-fish powers) the coolest guy on the team.

Before this, I was totally unfamiliar with Ray Fisher. (I see now that his character appeared in Batman v Superman, but I watched that film at home, and my son was being very distracting, so apparently he made no impression on me. I need to watch that again.) Anyway, Fisher is fantastic, and Cyborg (the member of the Justice League I’m least familiar with) has perhaps the best character and storyline of all. My eight-year-old daughter, who (as I learned only yesterday) read about his adventures in a cereal serial (i.e. tiny comic books in Cheerios) announced after the movie that Cyborg was her favorite character.

I really loved him, too. Honestly before seeing the movie, I thought they were just cramming him in there to include another hero (since Green Lantern didn’t pan out, and they need a league), but not only is Cyborg integral to the plot, he’s also just a really fascinating guy, well drawn and superbly acted by Fisher. I hope he gets a stand-alone film. His scenes with Wonder Woman are fantastic.  (Of course, she’s in them, so that helps.)

Best Scene:
My favorite is the opening scene, the footage of the children’s interview with Superman. I love the final question and the non-response that is itself an answer to the question. I love it for many reasons.

1.) Superman can’t answer the question. But why? Is there nothing, or are there too many things to put into words? (Is this going to be a bleak, gloomy movie….or not?)

2.) It invites us to consider this question as we watch the film (and in our lives).

3.) It shows us that as the movie starts, Superman is not finished. (We stop looking, but he still hasn’t finished.)

4.) It shows us that no matter how unfocused and childish the questions being thrown at him are, Superman will take them very seriously and do his best to give helpful answers.

Also, it just felt cool to me, on a visceral level. I slouched down into my chair and munched my popcorn and thought, “Wow! This movie is cool!”

Another scene I love is the simple face-to-face, heart-to-heart chat between Martha Kent and Lois Lane. (This is probably partially because I love Amy Adams.  So much.  With all my love.) This well-acted moment feels very sincere, and it’s important that we see enough of Lois to make her feel like a real presence. (I keep wondering if part or all of the scene was a Joss Whedon reshoot, mainly because of the “thirsty” joke. Maybe not.)

Best Action Sequence:
The best action sequence is one I can’t talk about much because I don’t want to mention spoilers. My husband called out this sequence in the car on the way home, noting particularly the look in someone’s eye, and he’s right, it’s awesome. (Even though from a practical point of view, it’s hard to believe they really made this decision because of reasons that several of them mention out loud.)

There’s also a lovely moment involving Flash giving Wonder Woman a bit of an assist that I thought was really awesome.

Best Scene Visually:
Even though I thought this film could do better with action, its tableaux are to die for!

I absolutely loved the first look we get at Batman. I slouched down even deeper in my seat and munched even more popcorn and thought, “That’s right! I knew this movie was cool!”

I also love the scene when Bruce and Diana walk along the lake. The color scheme is arresting, and the peek at another person nearby is thrilling.

I also love the image that results when the Amazons send a warning to the world of men. That, “She will [know]” bit appealed to the five-year-old Wonder Woman fan in me, but I also thought that the Amazons’ concern about people getting it made the news coverage of their sign even funnier.

Funniest Scene:
Aquaman and the golden lariat. I’ll say no more.

Most Distracting Use of Amber Heard:
As soon as I saw Heard’s name in the opening credits, I thought, “It’s funny how every time I see her name, I think of how Johnny Depp allegedly abused her, but I don’t think of her at all when I see him.”

Then in her only scene, the first line that’s said to her is something like, “You got beat up,” or, “You got hit.” And then she just stands there with a conspicuous wound on her head for the rest of the scene.

Since that’s the only scene she’s in, it’s hard not to wonder, “Is this some kind of meta call for justice?” But it may just be a huge coincidence. A standalone Aquaman film is in the works, so I’m sure the character will become more important later on.

The Negatives:
Finally, a movie that dares to answer the provocative question, “Does Wonder Woman have a butt?”

You probably didn’t know for sure. You were probably dying of suspense. Maybe you thought she was only fully human from the front, and from behind she was just one of those stand-up, life-sized cut outs. Well, don’t worry. Justice League will lay all your fears about Wonder Woman’s lack of butt cheeks to rest. She’s got them, all right. And they’re right above her legs where you would expect.

My husband and I actually talked about this extensively on the way to Starbucks just now.

“I wondered if you had noticed that,” he commented. “I was so disappointed. I was upset on a…not a moral level, what’s the word I’m looking for?” 

“An aesthetic level?” I suggested. But we quickly realized that was certainly not what he meant. How could anyone complain about aesthetics? She’s beautiful. All of the zoomed in, upside down shots of her butt look great in terms of aesthetics.

I mean, if you’re going to have butt cheeks, try to have Gal Gadot’s butt cheeks. You pretty much can’t go wrong emulating any aspect of Gadot, and 3D renderings of her physique should probably be beamed out to potential aliens as the archetypal example of the human form.

But really male filmmakers, did you learn nothing from the reception of Wonder Woman? Come on guys, not all men need to sexualize every woman at every moment. You’re doing a very poor job of showing the world that Wonder Woman wasn’t so good at presenting the character in a non-sexed up way simply because director Patty Jenkins is a woman. After seeing this, it’s really hard not to think that what made the difference was the director’s lack of a male gaze.

My husband said what really bothered him was that the shots were so deliberate. You certainly don’t need to shoot people entering from beneath or zoom in on somebody’s crotch area. That’s always a deliberate choice. That’s nobody’s default camera angle. I, personally, just thought it was frustrating that in one shot though we see all of the heroes from the butt cheeks up, only Wonder Woman’s flesh is exposed. They’re shown from an odd angle. She’s salaciously offered to us and seems to be the reason for the odd angle.

The only reason this isn’t more annoying is that Gal Gadot salvages it. Her Wonder Woman has so much integrity (not to mention consistency). It’s not her fault if the camera is ogling her. She’s busy saving the world. She doesn’t have time even to acknowledge that nonsense.

Before the movie I’d heard lots of complaints about the skimpy (and, thus, ineffective) new armor Wonder Woman’s sister Amazons from Themyscira wear. Their new armor is ridiculous, but only some of them have exposed midriffs and not in every scene. I actually found this ridiculous obsession with Wonder Woman’s butt the more glaring example of the obnoxious male gaze running rampant.

Don’t get me wrong. Gal Gadot is gorgeous. She’s extremely attractive, but I don’t need awkward upside-down shots of her bare butt cheeks to know that. When you meet a beautiful woman in real life, do you immediately turn upside down and follow her for a few feet with a laser focus on her butt cheeks? No? (Not even I do that, and I have terrible social skills.) Surely the filmmakers would answer no, too. Then why does the camera do that? It’s weird and unnecessary. If you can’t get everything you need from looking at Gal Gadot from a normal angle, then you might as well start chasing attractive women down the street upside down because there is just no hope for you.

Despite the length of this rant, the butt cheeks thing did not bother me that much. It was a fleeting annoyance. I just think it’s a missed opportunity for male filmmakers to disprove stereotypes about them. But whatever.

I also find Batman’s costume quite distracting. As Bruce Wayne, Ben Affleck looks surprisingly attractive. (More attractive than I’ve ever seen him honestly. I’ve long been a fan of his work behind the camera, and I occasionally enjoy his acting, but I’ve never found him particularly handsome. Bruce Wayne is a good look on him.) But the Batsuit is just ridiculous. He has no neck. He looks like the newest attention to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (not chatting with Al Roker, not kicking along with the Rockettes. No, I mean up there flying with Snoopy). At best, he looks like Batman on steroids. My husband pointed out, “I think the idea is to emphasize that the bat suit is body armor.” That makes sense, but still, he looks like the Pillsbury Dough Boy exploded. It’s not great costume design, in my opinion. Maybe that’s why they keep showing us Wonder Woman’s butt cheeks, so we won’t notice that Batman looks like Maggie Simpson in her snowsuit.

(To my delight, at the end of my rant about this to my husband, our two-year-old piped up from the back seat, “Well I think Thor has a costume. Thor has the best costume. Thor has the most awesome costume ever.” Good thing he chose to be Thor to trick-or-treat with his sister Supergirl instead of his runner-up choice Batman.) 

Aside from all these minor complaints about butts and necks, I do have some more serious issues with the movie. 

Even though Justice League is highly watchable, it’s tonally uneven. Instead of going the Marvel route and being funny and serious at the same time, Justice League awkwardly veers back and forth between dark and silly. (It’s hard not to wonder if the Snyder-only version might not have been simply dark without the silly.) I like to laugh, so I don’t necessarily mind silly, but the film clearly wants to be taken seriously, so I’m not positive the silly element works as well as something less silly (but still lighter than despairingly gloomy) could. It’s like they wanted to lighten the tone but went all the way from pitch black to bubble gum pink. It would be like redecorating a funeral parlor so that parts of it look like a circus. No, you know what, actually I think that might have been the right tone for a DC movie featuring Batman. So forget the circus/funeral parlor. What we get here is an ice cream parlor/morgue. Well, anyway, it just doesn’t quite work.

During the movie, I tried to excuse this uneven tone by reminding myself, “But these heroes are from comic books. The DC universe is sometimes so dark that it contains the absolute good and evil we often only show to children. So maybe the extremity of the darkness makes the silliness inevitable.” But then I thought, “If that’s true, and it’s so hard to strike the proper tone with DC material, then how did The Killing Joke manage it?” We recently saw that animated Batman movie (with Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill) at home on TV. It was not one bit silly, and it was animated. The Christopher Nolan Batman movies aren’t silly, either. But then again, those incarnations of Batman never have to fight aliens. I am not sure how these Justice League movies are going to solve their tonal difficulties, but to be fair, what they’re doing here almost works. At least it’s not unpleasant to watch.

I also think that the pacing is off. My husband and brother-in-law thought it was too slow at the beginning. I thought it was too fast at the end. But the upshot is the same. It’s inconsistent. To me, the slower, stagier opening really emphasizes the extremely high stakes. But then, the tension seems to lessen in the final act. The ending comes so quickly, and it all looks so easy. Just past the midpoint, the characters get so caught up in a scheme they concoct that they begin to fret more about the outcome of that. They focus less on anything that might come after. And the final showdown just feels really fast and inevitable. (At least, that was my experience.)

Now I will avoid giving any spoilers at all, even though one “surprise” is pretty easy to see coming. For instance, I myself knew it as soon as I watched Batman v Superman at home, and I wasn’t even playing close attention. (I really need to watch that again.) I honestly don’t think I’d be spoiling anything by revealing a plot twist so obvious (that the internet has already spoiled), but I’ll discuss it obliquely, nonetheless.

Let’s just say, I think their plan is very stupid—from a within-the-story point of view, I mean. Obviously from the point of view of the franchise, this plot element has to occur. It would be beyond stupid to make the Justice League without doing this (even more stupid not to do it but to leave certain other actors (who must make a decent salary) in the film.

But on the story level, it is a stupid, stupid plan, and what are they possibly thinking? I guess their desperation excuses the risk, but my big problem with their eleventh hour gambit is why aren’t they paying more attention to an asset they already have?

It would be like if Frodo tried to signal the Eagles by taking the One Ring, tying it to some fireworks, and launching it at random up into the air. These so-called heroes could avert so much destruction if they’d just keep better track of their stuff. (I suppose I can forgive them on the grounds that they are completely desperate and this version of Batman definitely enjoys taking risks.)

I mean, yes, their plan does work, but let’s be honest, that feels an awful lot like good luck.

Also, in general, I thought the action sequences were not great. (This is not a fair criticism, but there was too much lightning for me. Actually, that’s totally unfair. Maybe what I mean is, I didn’t like all the stagey hyper-reality.) In most of the Marvel movies, the special effects are better. But what Justice League does is probably a stylistic choice rather than a flaw. These scenes look hyper-real, like a video game. There is literally a scene when they all fall that reminded me exactly of what happens in just about every battle in the Playstation game Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe. But take my criticisms here with a grain of salt because I’m a very poor (and atypical) judge of action scenes.

The final action scene is especially weak because it’s over so soon that it felt almost anticlimactic to me. This is something that happens a lot with the DC characters I loved as a young child. For example, we all know the only way Superman loses is if he 1) isn’t trying or 2) isn’t there. Once he’s there and in his right mind, forget about stakes, this thing’s in the bag. What I really don’t understand is why are earthlings so weak? Are we supposed to believe that even our gods and our billionaires are weaker than some random alien?

And another thing, why do superhero ensemble movies have it in for Eastern European villagers lately? Are the producers trying to appeal to overseas markets because domestic movie attendance is down? What’s going on?

Overall:
You know, recently, my daughter read a lot of tiny Justice League comic books she fished out of Cheerios, and that’s what this movie felt like to me, a big screen version of scenes from tiny comics given to children as plastic-wrapped prizes in food.

I’m not trying to be harsh. I actually really liked the movie. But while the Marvel movies try to show how all their heroes fit into our actual reality, the DC heroes are presented as larger-than-life inhabitants of a hyper-reality that is meant for children. These heroes are more powerful than the Marvel heroes. The storylines are darker. And yet the jokes are very silly. We keep getting this advertising push that tries to tell us, “These movies are serious. They are not for children.” But they are for children. Or at least, they’re for the children in all of us adults, for the part of us that likes to see absolute good triumph over absolute evil but also enjoys the occasional silly joke. 

But don’t punish Justice League for what it’s not. Just take it for what it is. You like Wonder Woman and Batman and all those guys, don’t you? Come on. Justice League is a fun movie. Why not see it?