Zack Snyder's Justice League movie review (2021)
Some other time, perhaps, we can talk about the road that led to this moment, along with its implications for the major studio relationships to the more entitled or belligerent elements in fandom. My own feelings are summed up in the Clickhole headline, "The worst person you know just made a great point." Bottom line: I don't see how it's possible to put this version of the project next to the 2017 version and not recognize that it's superior in every way.
This four-hour cut is the kind of brazen auteurist vision that Martin Scorsese was calling for when he complained (rightly) that most modern superhero movies don't resemble cinema as he's understood and valued it. With its spread-out ensemble storytelling, its blend of poker-faced earnestness and grandiose tragedy, its fractured structure, and its often-glacial pacing — which marinates in moments at length, often for beauty's sake alone, displaying a serene faith in its own judgement rarely encountered outside of so-called "slow cinema" films — this cut makes demands on the audience that have never been made by a superhero picture produced at this budget level.
The backstory: "Justice League" was meant to be the third in a series of Zack Snyder superhero films after "Man of Steel" and "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice," but Snyder and his chief collaborator and wife, executive producer Deborah Snyder, stepped down during postproduction to grieve for their daughter, who had died unexpectedly. The releasing studio, Warner Bros., was already pressuring the Snyders to add humor, following the relative box-office disappointment of the figuratively and literally funereal "Batman v. Superman," which ended with Superman's death. Joss Whedon (writer/director of the first two "Avengers" films) was brought in to take the project over the finish line, contain the running time to two hours, and keep things light. Whedon ended up rewriting and reshooting most of the movie, Whedon-izing it with smart-alecky one-liners and shooting new action scenes that, while competent, lacked the turbocharged delirium Snyder is known for. According to some behind-the-scenes accounts, less than 20% of what ended up in the final release was directed by Snyder.
The recut—it feels more correct to call it a "restoration"—contains zero Whedon footage. It's broken into seven chapters with titles, each of which has a self-contained quality reminiscent of issues of a monthly comic (as well as old-fashioned episodic television; the Snyder Cut is as much of a medium-blurring, "Is it TV or is it a movie?" project as "WandaVision," "Small Axe," and season three of "Twin Peaks"). Only a sliver of what's onscreen is wholly new, notably a forward-looking "teaser" conversation between Batman and the Joker, perched awkwardly at the end of an otherwise gorgeously shaped three-plus-hour experience. But Snyder generated so much material during the original shoot—much of it shelved by Warner Bros. without being properly finished by visual effects artists—that the totality still feels like a new work.
