Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a movie that would never have existed without Covid-19. Just as the pandemic has, on occasion, given the rest of us time to pause and reflect on our place in the world, it gave Snyder time and space (thanks to the rise of streaming) to produce a film he probably never would have made the first time around. And it is better – much, much better – than we had any right to expect.
Compared with the 2017 theatrical release, directed by Joss Whedon after Snyder felt compelled to step away from the project after the death of his daughter, the new Justice League is a sombre yet operatic affair, reflecting the sheer breadth and impact of the events on display. Yet it only occasionally feels bloated and overblown.
Character arcs, particularly that of Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, are given depth and weight thanks to a reported $40m in reshoots. The enormous, spectacular diversity of Snyder’s vision of the DC superhero universe – from the underwater world of Atlantis to the Amazonian island of Themyscira, given time and space to properly manifest. We get a better backstory for what villain Steppenwolf is doing trying to conquer Earth in the first place, as well as our first glimpse of his boss Darkseid. There’s a bravura Lord of the Rings-style flashback to an earlier time thousands of years ago, when Earth’s contemporary heroes last fended off the same nefarious invaders against all the odds.
Much of Whedon’s movie naturally remains. But Ben Affleck no longer cracks sad jokes and we lose the awful fratboy-pleasing moment from the theatrical cut in which Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is accidentally leapt on by Ezra Miller’s The Flash. The vision here of Diana is much closer to the one realised by Patty Jenkins in the Amazonian princess’s standalone movies.
Snyder’s DC movies have often felt ruined by a determination to add fiery, noggin-mashing endgames that take us out of the real world and into a hellish, whirling maelstrom of death and pixels. But the near four-hour (up from two) running time of the new version means the balance between dialogue, exposition and action is suddenly serene in a way it rarely has been in any of the American director’s DC movies. Did the shift to the small screen help the film-maker realise that the crash, bang, wallop approach to superhero movies only works in noisy multiplexes? Or is watching somebody else take over your movie and render it in a way you found distasteful like having a supercharged storyboard, allowing any mistakes that were made to be excised for the new final cut? Either way, this is his best film since Watchmen.
Snyder has always had a knack for visual splendour, and on occasion there are moments here that genuinely feel as if a living, breathing, comic book has been magically rendered in live action, like the photographs and paintings in Harry Potter books that suddenly shift into three dimensions. Yes, there is a Wagnerian pomposity to the whole affair that looks deeply silly at times when compared with the much-breezier Marvel universe, but the idiocy of trying to bring Whedon in to retrospectively add comedy moments to a universe that Snyder always imagined as doom-laden and heavy-metal intense becomes even more apparent when you see what the original vision was meant to be – as if Katy Perry had been brought in to re-record Led Zeppelin IV after somebody lost the master tapes.
Snyder’s improved Justice League cannot make up for the final third of Man of Steel, nor compensate for the marketing-driven mess that was sequel Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But it does at least round off the trilogy with a suitably epic finale that might, if it had been released in 2017, have sent the DC extended universe off in a very different direction. Instead, Warner Bros decided that creating the studio’s own tapestry of interlinked superhero flicks to rival Marvel’s successful model was an impossibility and plumped for a template based on standalone, director-led episodes instead.
Fisher, who has led a determined campaign to highlight Whedon’s allegedly abusive behaviour on set, will surely be delighted at the restoration of Cyborg to centre stage, and perhaps, of his career. But the fact that it took a four-hour movie that would never have been made for the multiplexes to give him decent screen time begs the question why so much storyline was ever going to be crammed into one movie. If DC had had the nous to follow Marvel’s model and introduce each new superhero in their own film before finally teaming them up for a grand ensemble hurrah, they might not have got themselves into this mess in the first place.
Without wishing to give too much away, Snyder can’t resist a couple of prologues that hint at more episodes. One even features Jared Leto’s Joker, finally getting to share an extended scene with Batfleck, in what turns out to be yet another Knightmare-style dream sequence. Another introduces us to the Martian Manhunter. It is clear that Darkseid is still out there and planning a fresh invasion of Earth.
Given Robert Pattinson now plays Batman and the DC extended universe is all but dead, it remains to be seen if Snyder ever gets to realise his dream. But credit where credit’s due: Justice League is no masterpiece, yet it stands alongside Wonder Woman as one of the better DC entries and genuinely, surprisingly begs the question whether this episode marks the beginning or end of the story. It is quite simply a better, more fully realised movie than the one we got to see at the cinema.
