Review of Justice League (2017) by Player2-Water — 29 Dec 2018

E-Value: 4.

Acting: 8.

Plot: 4 After the huge success of Disney and Marvel Comics’ The Avengers on the big screen in 2012, Warner Bros. and DC Comics make their own team superhero movie for the fifth instalment in DC Extended UniverseE-Value: 4.

Acting: 8.

Plot: 4.

After the huge success of Disney and Marvel Comics’ The Avengers on the big screen in 2012, Warner Bros. and DC Comics make their own team superhero movie for the fifth instalment in DC Extended Universe featuring iconic DC Comics superheroes teaming up together for the first time on the big screen.

After the events of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the world still mourns Superman’s death and humanity now fear something bad will happen soon now that their saviour is gone for good. They are correct. Steppenwolf (Hinds) and his army of Parademons from Apokolips have begun their invasion of Earth and successfully retrieve one of the three Mother Boxes guarded by the Amazons in Themyscira.

After learning that Steppenwolf have return to Earth from the Amazons, Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gadot) meets up with Bruce Wayne/Batman (Affleck) about his recent invasion and told him the history of Steppenwolf’s first invasion of Earth and his first defeat at the hands of humans, Amazons and Atlanteans. After his first defeat, the three Mother Boxes which originally belong to him were left behind and each was guarded by three factions. Batman himself has encountered a Parademon back in Gotham City.

Not powerful enough to stop Steppenwolf and his Parademons from retrieving the remaining Mother Boxes, they recruit three metahumans with superpowers which consists of Arthur Curry/Aquaman, Victor Stone/Cyborg and Barry Allen/Flash. With five of them together as a team, they must stop Steppenwolf at all cost before it is too late.

To be honest, I was kind of disappointed how the movie turned out to be. First of all, many scenes which were shown in the trailers were not in the movie at all. There are some exact same scenes from the trailers but they were replaced with different dialogues in the movie which I find it very ridiculous. Reshooting the exact same scenes just to replace with different dialogues is really wasting time, money and efforts. Those scenes from the trailers should have kept in the final cut.

The movie runtime, 120 minutes, is totally not enough time for team superhero movie. If it is a solo movie, that is acceptable but not a team movie. With that amount of runtime, there were not enough time for character developments especially for Aquaman, Cyborg and Flash since they lacked their own solo movies. With no backstories for them, they become uninteresting characters. Even Steppenwolf lacked character development for a villain, which made him the weakest villain in the franchise.

It is also fine for the movie going for a lighter tone since the previous instalments were darker tone but it also caused some inconsistency for the movie. Despite being directed by Zack Snyder, this is not exactly Zack’s movie because the tones are not exactly matched his directing style and it is more to Joss Whedon’s movie, who directed the reshoots after Zack left production due to personal tragedy. I felt that the movie should have been delayed instead of finding another director to finish the movie.

Some of the CGIs in the movie were really terrible especially for Henry Cavill. The actor has grown a moustache for his other movie role with another movie studio and was contracted to keep the moustache. Due to his contract, he was unable to shave and was forced to digitally remove the moustache which ended up much worse than I thought. It was really disgusting and odd when he smiles in the movie. It was also another reason why the movie should have been delayed.

The performances of the cast are great especially for Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa and Gal Gadot but their performance are not enough to save the quality of this movie. In addition to the quality, replacing Junkie XL with Danny Elfman as composer by Joss Whedon is a totally bad move because Elfman ended up not composing any memorable scores for the movie. If you are hoping for Director’s Cut, you might as well forget about it. In case if you are still interested, stay back for a mid-credits scene and a post-credits scene.