The theatrical release of Justice League did not remain very fondly in my memory – it actually barely remained in my memory at all. There was this joke about Batman being rich, Superman coming back to life and the assembled team fighting an army of CGI monsters to prevent a doomsday machine. This was all pretty generic comic book stuff. Ben Affleck as Batman, Jason Momoa as Aquaman and Ezra Miller as The Flash looked interesting on the surface but didn’t do anything memorable in the whole movie. The main reason being that their characters’ usefulness just paled in comparison to Superman. ‘Let’s watch this team of heroes struggle for 2h until Superman swoops in and saves the day with ease’ was simply not a very enticing plotline.
A couple of years later, Zack Snyder was able to release his original vision of the Justice League movie. His ‘Do Over’ released on HBO Max in a 4:3 aspect ratio. You have to be prepared for some thick black bars on your left and right of your TV screen. The movie is divided into 7 parts including an epilogue and has a runtime of almost 4h. It starts off with a personal message from Zack Snyder thanking his fans that made this release possible. It is, generally speaking, the same movie but with some extra time spent on fleshing out the characters. The movie made me actually curious about the Flash and the main antagonist Steppenwolf. Unfortunately we also get a lot of bland CGI battle scenes that do not bring anything new to the table although they were noticeably more violent. I also never cared for this whole Amazonian world-building that they did in the Wonder Woman movies and unfortunately we get a lot of that in the first part of Justice League as well. I actually ended up hating the first third of the movie. The rest of the movie was better – significantly better. The characters had something to do. Each and every one of them contributed to the plot. Well, except Louis Lane who was just there to make us feel sad about Superman’s demise. The assembled team was interesting to watch but it was never really explained what the individual characters could and could not do. This led to some ‘I guess they can do that now’ moments. Despite the team being way more useful than before, the movie still felt a lot like Superman just showing up at the end to save the day. The end of the movie with its whole epilogue chapter overstayed its welcome, despite having good scenes with the next antagonist Doomsday and another very intriguing dream sequence that was set in the previously seen dystopian future where earth seemed lost.
Overall, the theatrical cut of Justice League failed where Zack Snyder’s cut succeeded. The new version made me curious. I actually want to see more. I want to see a standalone Flash movie and I want to see Batman fighting alongside Jared Leto as the Joker against the army of Doomsday and an evil Superman. That might be fun, right?
3/5 – Hope that helps.
