(IMAGE: HBO MAX.)
Warner Bros. 2021. Drama. 243 minutes.
RATING: 3 1/2 angels
I owe Zack Snyder an apology.
For that reason, this review is going to be a bit unorthodox. I don’t typically write in the first person, either, but this is also a necessary exception. Ten years ago, on the web series I co-hosted with fellow CineGod Mark Keizer — “Stupid for Movies” — I channeled years of pent-up rage at overproduced, overpriced, CGI-laden, brain-dead studio tentpoles into a rant over Snyder’s nonsensical faux feminist fantasia Sucker Punch. I take back absolutely nothing I said that day — I still loathe Sucker Punch like the medieval plague that it is — but I was wrong about Snyder. There’s more there than meets the eye — and may always have been. This week’s HBO Max release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League is more than simply a chance to revisit and re-evaluate the much-maligned 2017 Justice League which still bears his name (but shouldn’t) — it’s a window into both Snyder as a person (and possibly a misunderstood auteur) as well as the potentially treacherous machinations of motion picture studio politics.
But first — a disclaimer: SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW.
Do not read the remainder of this review if you have any intention of actually watching the film when it drops on HBO Max on March 18. Otherwise… carry on.
The original 2017 release cut of Justice League clocked in at precisely two hours. The “Snyder Cut” (as it has been called by those clamoring for it for these past three years) is more than twice that length, just a few minutes over four hours. This puts it in rare territory — roughly the same length as Kevin Costner’s director’s cut of Dances With Wolves, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America and legendary 1939 Oscar-winner Gone with the Wind. That makes it longer than such iconic Oscar-winning epics as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (3h 48m), William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (3h 44m) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (3h 40m). Ergo, there is simply no conceivable way to be coy and circumspect in any comparison of the two cuts and not go into extensive detail as to what shows up in that additional two hours (actually closer to three-and-a-half, but I’ll explain that later). Which means, once again, SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. So stop reading now if you want your full fanboy high.
So. How did we get here? A four-hour director’s cut of a movie nobody liked the first time around? We can probably credit the mythical grudge match between Marvel Comics and D.C. Comics which has been part of the culture for so many decades now, it rivals the great modern myths on which the two publishing empires were built. A rivalry once fought chiefly on the pages of comic books for a mostly male audience of comic aficionados is today fought on the largest of corporate stages as legendary studios Warner Bros. (a division of AT&T- owned Warner Media which owns D.C.) and Walt Disney Studios (a division of The Walt Disney Company which owns Marvel) have elected to make their respective comics “universes” the centerpiece of their brands. While Warner Bros. and D.C. enjoyed supremacy in the early phase of this rivalry (1978’s Richard Donner-directed Superman and 1989’s Tim Burton-directed Batman), Marvel finally came on strong after the ascent of lifelong Marvel devotee Kevin Feige to president of Disney’s Marvel Studios in 2007. Seeking to replicate the same interconnectivity between characters and storylines that made the comics so compelling for generations of fans, Feige introduced the MCU — the Marvel Cinematic Universe — with 2008’s Iron Man, culminating 23 films later in 2019 with the historic release of Avengers: Endgame.
Despite prior Warner successes, notably Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins in 2005 and its 2008 followup The Dark Knight, the MCU caught Warner Bros. flat-footed. Lacking a Kevin Feige of their own, the Warner bureaucracy struggled to play catch-up in creating its own “universe,” starting with the epic failure of 2011’s Green Lantern (scripted, ironically, by Greg Berlanti, who would successfully launch D.C.’s television “universe” — the seven-series-and-counting Arrowverse — the following year). In 2013, a second attempt was initiated and the DCEU — D.C. Extended Universe — was born with Man of Steel, directed with typical bombast by 300 and Watchmen director Zack Snyder. Coinciding with the ascent of a new Warner CEO in Kevin Tsujihara, the release of Man of Steel didn’t achieve Marvel-sized box office, but it was successful enough that Snyder received a vote of confidence to proceed with building the nascent DCEU as he saw fit.
While the MCU chugged along minting money, the DCEU continued to limp — Snyder’s 2016 followup, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, was widely panned and seen as a disappointment. David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, released the same year, fared even worse. For a moment in mid-2017, Patty Jenkins’ hugely popular 2017 Wonder Woman seemed to have breathed new life into the DCEU, but the absolutely disastrous release of Justice League just five months later appeared to seal its fate. Future DCEU installments would be evaluated on an individual basis and released as stand-alone films minus the overarching connectivity audiences had come to expect from the MCU. Aquaman and Shazam!, released in 2018 and 2019, respectively, being key examples, as well as the anticipated 2022 releases of The Flash and Aquaman 2, among others. Justice League, however, and the hope for an Avengers-style saga that might bring more great D.C. characters into the fold, would end at one film.
The circumstances contributing to the failure of Justice League, of course, were considered no great secret — while working to finish the film, Zack Snyder and his wife, producer Deborah Snyder, lost their 20-year-old daughter Autumn to suicide after a long struggle with depression. Understandably choosing family over film, the Snyders walked away, and Warner Bros. entrusted the film’s completion to co-screenwriter Joss Whedon — writer/director of the first two Marvel Avengers pictures.
When Justice League tanked, the prevailing narrative was that Whedon — presumably hand-picked by Snyder — did his level best to fulfill Snyder’s vision, but simply couldn’t salvage a silk purse from the sow’s ear the misbegotten picture had been from the beginning. That might have remained the official line if not for relentless clamoring by Snyder’s fans for the release of #theSnyderCut, which grew into such a viral rallying cry that Warner Bros. finally decided to turn it into a marketing opportunity. After all, the “Ultimate Edition” of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a longer three-hour cut of the original 152-minute film released to digital and 4k UHD Blu-ray just months after the theatrical release, had been favorably received. As a marketing tool to bolster flagging HBO Max subscriptions, especially in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, #theSnyderCut of Justice League proved just the ticket. So in May, 2020, word of #theSnyderCut was made official. Not only would Snyder finally be delivering “his cut” of the film, but new footage — including a rumored cameo by Jared Leto reprising his Joker from Suicide Squad — would be shot in October of 2020 for HBO Max premiere in March of 2021.
Enter Ray Fisher. The acclaimed stage actor who had played Cyborg in Batman v. Superman and Justice League took to Twitter just a few months after #theSnyderCut announcement to rake Joss Whedon over the coals for “bad behavior” on set. While Fisher didn’t initially furnish details, the Tweet lit a fuse which continued to metastasize throughout 2020 and right into early 2021 as a growing chorus of actors, actresses and other former collaborators finally felt emboldened to declare that Whedon’s cruelty and sadism had been a career-long practice dating all the way back to television’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fisher eventually named more names — Warner executives Geoff Johns (presently producer of television’s Stargirl) and John Berg, whom he accused of enabling Whedon’s bad behavior, as well as D.C. Films President Walter Hamada. Others soon corroborated Fisher’s sentiments and a new narrative emerged: what if Whedon was the problem with Justice League and not Snyder?
(Ray Fisher as Cyborg. Photo credit: HBO Max)
Enter Vanity Fair. In a lengthy February 22, 2021 piece by Anthony Breznican, a complete picture finally took shape: Warner Bros. never saw eye to eye with Snyder, so Berg and Johns were assigned as babysitters and Whedon brought in by the studio — not Snyder — to reshape, not merely complete the film. The Vanity Fair piece contains a wealth of stunning revelations, the most significant of which is that Whedon reshot 75% of the movie. Even if that’s just a raw approximation, it’s a damning one. It makes the original Justice League a Joss Whedon movie, not a Zack Snyder movie completed by Joss Whedon. Those who panned the picture could easily pick out the Whedon reshoots which Superman/Clark Kent actor Henry Cavill was forced to juggle with his Paramount schedule shooting Mission: Impossible – Fallout, in which he wore a mustache. Paramount refused to allow the mustache to be shaved, resulting in embarrassingly substandard digital erasure of the mustache in Justice League. This flagged the reshot Superman sequences like a Bat-signal. No one, however, imagined that Whedon had practically reshot the entire movie, much less reconfigured the script. As the March release of #theSnyderCut drew closer, that revelation — along with trickling rumors of plot points and other never-before-seen cameos — suggested that Zack Snyder’s Justice League would be much more than simply an “added footage” director’s cut. It would be an entirely different movie. If Whedon’s 2-hour Justice League was 75% Whedon reshoots — then Snyder’s 4-hour cut would be about 88% previously-unseen material — roughly three-and-a-half hours of the four-hour running time.
This lengthy back story is essential to appreciate what Zack Snyder’s Justice League is and isn’t — as well as to inform fans on whom they should blame for the catastrophic missteps that have plagued the DCEU thus far — and what, if anything, popular sentiment can do to salvage it.
The broad strokes of the original Justice League story — credited to Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon — felt like a second-tier replica of the Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame saga. Where the Marvel heroes had to stop intergalactic madman Thanos from acquiring the ancient Infinity Stones that would complete the Infinity Gauntlet with which he intended to obliterate much of the known universe, the D.C. heroes — Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Flash (Ezra Miller) and a predictably resurrected Superman (Henry Cavill) — were tasked with stopping intergalactic madman Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) from acquiring three ancient “mother boxes” which would complete the “unity” by which he would conquer much of the known universe. Naturally, they stop him and… end of story.
Not so fast. Yes, #theSnyderCut has mother boxes and Steppenwolf — but that’s not the crux of the story. Just as the preceding isn’t really an accurate description of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. As it happens, both the Avengers saga and Zack Snyder’s Justice League are about the same thing: family. Indeed, while it’s indisputable that Avengers: Endgame is the better overall movie, and a more satisfying one as the culmination of a 23-film saga that spanned more than a decade, it is not an exaggeration to say that Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the more ambitious and emotionally resonant one. Gone is the ridiculous open of the Whedon cut — pointless cell phone footage of Superman and a weirdly nonsensical rooftop battle between Batman and a thief (Mindhunter star Holt McCallany). In its place, #theSnyderCut begins right where Batman v. Superman left off, a moment of apocalyptic despair and uncertain future over the death of Superman. Yes, an intergalactic lunatic named Steppenwolf shows up (albeit in much fancier armor) looking for the aforementioned mother boxes — but he is not the piece’s real villain. Steppenwolf is an emissary, a fallen figure seeking redemption from his nephew, Darkseid (Ray Porter), the imperious ruler of the planet Apokalips. Here it is actually Darkseid — D.C.’s answer to Thanos — seeking galactic domination. The three mother boxes — guarded for centuries by Amazons, Atlanteans and humans — are a maguffin, a distraction. While they are central to Darkseid’s plan to dominate Earth — one of the few planets he failed to conquer after being repelled thousands of years earlier by an alliance between humans, gods, Atlanteans and Amazons — it is the so-called “anti-life equation” that is central to the greater plan to dominate all of existence, everywhere. It is purely dumb luck (or is it?) that Steppenwolf, while seeking out the mother boxes, discovers the location of the elusive anti-life equation… right here on Mother Earth.
(Ray Porter as Darkseid. Photo credit: HBO Max)
Where Whedon’s cut is basically a brisk, two-hour cartoon in which Batman puts together a team to stop a crusty, axe-bearing alien lunatic, #theSnyderCut is a brooding (and occasionally cartoonish) character study of extraordinary individuals wrestling with the deep wounds of shattered families — rising to the call to achieve extraordinary things not because they are innately extraordinary themselves (meta-humans, in D.C. vernacular) but because it is the only way to honor those they have lost.
In light of the fact that the Snyders exited the film in a moment of grief over the death of their daughter, only to return and dedicate it to her memory — “For Autumn” — this is no small deviation. It is the heart and soul of the film — a heart and soul which Whedon did not, and could not, deliver.
Divided into six distinct parts roughly thirty to forty minutes apiece, followed by a harrowing and intriguing twenty-minute epilogue, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is that rarest of Hollywood indulgences, a four-hour movie that never drags. Much of this is technical — any contribution by Whedon is gone (Chris Terrio now gets sole screenplay credit while Will Beall now shares co-story credit with Terrio and Snyder) and two added editors are now credited. There’s also a new score by Thomas Holkenborg (aka JunkieXL), who came on board with Batman v. Superman, to mercifully replace the deeply unfortunate Danny Elfman score of the Whedon cut. There are also recognizable scenes from the Whedon cut — Bruce Wayne attempting to recruit Aquaman at a remote Icelandic fishing village, Wonder Woman rescuing a group of London schoolgirls from a terror attack, Steppenwolf and his winged minions (Parademons) recovering the mother boxes from Atlantis and Wonder Woman’s home island of Themyscira, Superman’s resurrection (following his death at the hands of the villain Doomsday in Batman v. Superman), the climactic battle in a remote Russian industrial city — but even these sequences have been so substantially re-edited, re-conceived and re-contextualized that they feel fresh and new. Crucial case in point — the London-based Wonder Woman/terrorist sequence is longer, more brutal, more suspenseful and includes a denouement of such devastating emotional honesty, it’s shocking that Whedon — creator of television’s feminist-themed Buffy — elected to cut it. After disposing of the chief terrorist, Wonder Woman turns her attention to the girls, one of whom appears shellshocked. “Are you okay, princess?” she asks. The girl nods. “Can I be like you, someday?” Wonder woman smiles back. “You can be anything that you want to be.” In this extraordinary, heartfelt moment of affirmation, the preceding carnage has meaning. Wonder Woman — the half-god heroine sired by a single mother — plays surrogate mother to a young woman whose life she has just saved, offering her a new future and a new hope.
Through this lens, the rest of the film takes shape — Batman/Bruce Wayne, the orphan who now plays father to a new team of heroes; Aquaman/Arthur Curry, abandoned by his mother and so determined to not abandon the weakest and most vulnerable; Flash/Barry Allen, an awkward, friend-less outcast desperate to restore some sense of family while his father (Billy Crudup) sits in prison, wrongly convicted for the murder of Barry’s mother; Cyborg/Victor Stone, arguably the most complex and compelling of the lot, a once promising athlete and scholar filled with rage at his scientist father (Joe Morton) over the accident that killed his mother and which should have killed him… if not for his father’s selfish decision to play Victor Frankenstein with the shattered remains of his son. And, of course, the most famous orphan/adoptee of them all — Kal-El, aka Superman aka Clark Kent, the Kryptonian Moses whose God-like power and Christ-like resurrection anchor the film’s broad theological concerns and underline its central filial concerns. It is particularly worth noting that this theme extends even into the antagonists — Steppenwolf has fallen from his nephew Darkseid’s good graces. His efforts, tyrannical as they are, are nonetheless motivated by a similar yearning, to be welcomed back in the family fold. None of this is necessarily new, and the story itself is largely adapted from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Saga from the early 1970s, but there is a unique interpolation here, close to Snyder’s heart and deeply connected to his own experience, which cannot be overlooked.
It has often been suggested that where the MCU pantheon consists of ordinary humans who rise to God-like stature in defense of the good, the DCEU pantheon consists of Gods struggling to reconcile their calling with their humanity in order to be able to defend the good. This oversimplifies the reality. Family and loss is at the heart of both Marvel and D.C. In #theSnyderCut, however, it’s not simply subtext or character development. It’s the whole point of the myth. None benefit more from Snyder’s telling than Flash and Cyborg. Characters who came across in Whedon’s cut as little more than caricatures — weird, quirky white boy and angry black man robot — are suddenly not just sympathetic but deeply compelling. A scene in which Flash saves a young woman from certain death in a horrible traffic accident ranks among the best in Ezra Miller’s career. Ill at ease among ordinary humans, he can be himself only when he is living at super-speed — invisible to the world, yet able to behold the world’s wonders in a kind of still life which only he can see. Cyborg, likewise, receives a vastly larger and more extensive treatment here — an expanded account of Victor Stone’s tragic origin story more than befitting Ray Fisher’s extraordinary range as an actor. For those who may have previously wondered why an actor with a Shakespearean pedigree as rich and deep as that of any living American or British stage actor would be relegated to playing a thankless stereotype — #theSnyderCut provides a welcome corrective.
None of this is to say that the film is by any means without its flaws — Snyder’s stylistic excesses are still naggingly present. There is far too much melodramatic slow motion, voluminous amounts of bad CGI (especially in the flashback depicting Darkseid’s first ancient attempt at merging the mother boxes into the “unity” against the unified armies of Earth), copious plot holes and contrivances, Snyder’s trademark de-saturated color palette and a climax which — though infinitely superior to Whedon’s mutilation and mercifully devoid of his misplaced jokes — still cannot account for why Aquaman has anything of value to contribute in a landlocked fight. If that sounds like praising with faint damnation, perhaps it is — these are shortcomings we’ve all grown accustomed to expecting in Snyder’s work, and it may be that a kind of Snyder fatigue has set in where viewers now simply accept his excesses as the price of getting to something more substantial. It’s only when the films lack anything of greater substance that the excesses become unduly magnified and audiences (and critics) resort to rants like mine.
Suddenly recognizing the depth of which Snyder is capable, however, is no small realization. Especially when coupled with the improvement that was the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition. Had my exposure to Snyder’s saga never consisted of anything but the theatrical release cuts of Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman and Justice League, I would have gone to my grave cursing Snyder as one of the most unimaginative, superficially stilted filmmakers in Hollywood. But re-watching the series with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition and Zack Snyder’s Justice League in place of the theatrical cuts is nothing short of a revelation. With the corroboration of the Vanity Fair article, which rightly humanizes Snyder and vilifies Whedon, a more complex but more atypically Hollywood story emerges — of a stylist with deeply artistic yearnings stifled by a studio that wants too much of the former and none of the latter, a studio which may well have served to sabotage his intended saga (for which there were reportedly planned two more installments) by bringing in an assassin (Whedon) to strip the film of anything but relentless action while also erasing any possibility that it might stoke audiences to want more. That Warner and D.C. lack a central visionary the likes of Feige surely has not helped matters — nor did the tumult that has shaken Warner Bros. since 2016, when the AT&T merger was announced, followed by the 2019 resignation of Kevin Tsujihara amid a sex scandal with the same actress — Charlotte Kirk — responsible for bringing down Universal’s Ron Meyer a year later.
(Zack Snyder directs Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot. Photo credit: HBO Max)
Current management, on the other hand, clearly has no problem taking such a risk — and therein fans should take heart. COVID-19 and HBO Max have forced a great deal of reflection all across the entertainment landscape, and it may turn out that #theSnyderCut reinvigorates the DCEU and gives Snyder new capital to pursue the concluding chapters to his saga which, just three years ago, appeared dead and buried. In addition to the restoration of the film’s central antagonist in Darkseid, #theSnyderCut tantalizes with a haunting, apocalyptic vision — the so-called “Knightmare,” experienced by multiple characters — the meaning of which would be addressed in future installments. It also teases the DCEU introduction of villain Deathstroke (Joe Manganiello), plants a seed for the re-introduction of Green Lantern and delivers one of the great, all-time reveals in any superhero movie with Harry Lennix’s General Swanwick — a key figure in both Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman — unmasked as J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter.
If the Whedon cut of Justice League left me thinking, “Kill it with fire. Please end it here,” #theSnyderCut left me desperately hoping, yearning, praying that Warner Bros. reconciles with Snyder and his cast and allows them to complete the saga as planned — this time without intervention.
It may be reading too much into the opening credits, but credits often tell their own story, and a comparison of the opening credits between the two Justice League cuts furnishes a few clues which could give fans some real hope that this is where the winds are blowing. First is the fact that Ray Fisher and Ezra Miller have traded places in the billing order — Fisher now preceding Jason Momoa and Miller following. That, combined with the excising of Geoff Johns and John Berg — singled out by Fisher for “enabling” Whedon’s “bad behavior” — from the producer credits may indicate an attempt to patch things up with Fisher in anticipation of luring him back for another go at Cyborg. There’s also a reshuffling of other producer credits which would seem to suggest a re-prioritizing of voices in the relevant hierarchy of influence and approvals. Lastly, there’s the fact that Snyder has released his cut in full-frame for anticipated IMAX theatrical release — which unfortunately means home viewers will not have the benefit of full widescreen, though it’s unlikely anyone will seriously notice or care. Such speculation may be fueling false hopes, but in light of the accomplishment and Warner’s clear intent to profit from it, false hopes are better than no hopes.
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