Justice League

I spent the past week in New York on vacation, surrounding myself with fine films and Broadway theater.  Coming home to watch Justice League is like a cold, hard slap in the face.  This is a big, dumb lumbering dinosaur of a movie that is as soulless as a blockbuster can get.  Nobody wanted to make this, outside of contractual obligations.  It's a lifeless, dreary experience designed to trick bored teenagers into thinking they're watching something worthwhile.  If the comics that inspired this movie were as bad as this, characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman wouldn't have lasted nearly 70 or 80 years.

It's hard to know where to start when talking about a movie this awful, but I think the visual style is a good place as any.  To put it bluntly, this movie is hideous.  It's drab, out of focus, and filled with so much quick CG action, the mind often cannot keep up with what it is looking at.  The movie unites Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and then gives them nothing to do but fight an army of CG bug people for almost 2 hours.  You don't put heroes like these, and stick them in a nothing plot like this.  Not even the return of Superman (Henry Cavill), who comes back from the dead for this, can muster any excitement.  That's because the movie doesn't give a damn about these heroes, or their histories in the comics.  They are just generic action types here with little personality to show.  When you consider the shared histories these characters have had over the decades in the pages of comic books, and the best thing this movie can think of having them say to each other is "booyah", you know something is wrong.

There is a slight resemblance of a plot to fool audiences into thinking this actually means something.  It involves an alien named Steppenwolf (voice by Ciaran Hinds), who has come back to Earth after being gone for centuries.  He comes with an army of the previously mentioned CG bug people, who look and act like targets in a video game, and seem spectacularly easy to kill.  His goal is to find three Mother Boxes, which apparently will give him the power to (say it with me) Rule the World.  I'm kind of murky on the details, because the movie provides as little as possible.  All you need to know is that he's the bad guy, and he's gotta be stopped.  Batman and Wonder Woman travel the globe, looking for others to join their fight.  The Flash joins up immediately, so there's really no tension there.  Aquaman doesn't seem interested, until Steppenwolf attacks his aquatic kingdom.  As for Cyborg, he's in the brooding "why have I been cursed with these powers" phase of his superhero career, and needs a lot of coaxing.  His story is that he used to be a college football star, until he got in an accident, and his genius scientist father gave him a robotic body to save his life.  For reasons unexplained, the father gave his son rocket boots and hidden arm cannons to go with the new robot body.  I guess dear old dad knew in advance that his son was going to be called to join a superhero team one day.

Anyone who has dreamed of seeing these characters sharing the screen will be sorely disappointed to learn that they spend little time interacting with each other.  Sure, they occasionally team up to smack down one of the bug monsters, but that's about it.  There's a nice scene where Batman and Wonder Woman share a drink together that hints at what the movie was supposed to be - Seeing these heroes as individuals, rather than just faceless inhabitants of endless and chaotic CG battles.  There's also a good scene where Lois Lane (a sorely underused Amy Adams) and Martha Kent (Diane Lane, also underused), Superman's adopted Earth mom, have a conversation.  It was these rare moments that made me sit up and take notice of just what a misfire this movie was.  Here is a movie that calls out for emotion, wonder and adventure.  And all it mostly supplies us with is a total and incoherent assault on the senses, with common sense being the main victim.  It's nonstop noise and gimmicks, and you eventually want it to stop and, I don't know, maybe throw in a scene where the heroes wonder if they could be doing more with their lives.

Justice League has been plagued with reports of a troubled production and massive reshoots, and it really shows.  You have scenes where the characters talk about things that never happened, because it's clearly been edited out of the final cut.  You have a plot that is barely there, character interactions that are largely missing, and an overall sense that a majority of the film wound up on the cutting room floor.  Not that I wanted more of this movie, mind you.  It's just so blatantly obvious, you wonder if director Zack Snyder (who was replaced during the post-production process by writer Joss Whedon due to a family emergency) even cared in the first place.  This is a production that has been micromanaged within an inch of its life by Hollywood executives who were obviously frightened by the dismal response to the dark and gloomy Batman v. Superman last year, and so they tried to throw in as much action as possible here.  By doing so, they have cost the movie any sense of coherency.

After seeing Justice League, I wonder if the DC Cinematic Universe should even continue.  Even if I enjoyed Wonder Woman, that is starting to look more and more like a lucky fluke for the studio.  Anyone who thinks Marvel Studios has something to fear from what's being offered by DC is kidding themselves.  Even the slight but still fun Thor: Ragnarok was better than this, and that was pretty inconsequential as far as superhero movies go.  I know these movies will go on, and I truly wish them the best of luck.  They can only go up from here.

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