Review of Justice League (2017) by Vishwanath V — 21 Nov 2017

++[SPOILER-FREE, aside from a vague plot summary]++.

Okay. So I saw Justice League yesterday.

It's.....pretty bad. Not terrible.

Not nearly as bad as Batman v Superman, but really just SUUUUUUPER pointless.

The villain and his minions were a whole mountain of nothing.

How much of nothing?

This is the ONLY thing I have to say about them.

The story almost doesn't exist.

It's literally "Sudden villains show up for no reason, heroes form a team to stop villains, resurrect Superman, briefly fight angry Superman who wanders off, fail to stop villain, fight villain, Superman shows up briefly to save the day, The End.".

- Batfleck was meh. Almost didn't need to be there. Not very useful. The movie has to work to give Batman reasons to exist.

Also, arguably, he's kind of a reckless idiot. He continues his "If there's even the smallest chance of X, we HAVE TO do Y!" bullshit.

A proper Batman is meticulous, cautious, triple checks his math, and doesn't go into stuff half-cocked. That's how Batman stays alive.

Not Batfleck.....

- Aquaman alternated annoying, fun, pointless, and forced.

He could be cool if he was written differently. The way he's written COULD work if it wasn't JUST dumb dudebro surfer nonsense. Aquaman is more useful than Batman, but the movie goes OBVIOUSLY out of its way to give Aquaman chances to use his powers.

- Cyborg has interesting powers, but is dull as hell.

And, man, do I mean DULL.

He's treated as being mysterious, except that anyone who saw BvS or knows about Cyborg knows that there's no mystery to him.

Hell, this movie itself EXPLAINS him BEFORE it treats him as mysterious. It's weird.

He's got some interesting quirks to his powers that COULD HAVE been interesting to the plot, but they were barely used.

They could've scrapped Batman and Cyborg would've made quite a bit more sense doing the ONE thing that Batman actually contributes to the plot.

- Flash is....fun-ish. A lot of untapped potential. A lot funner than Aquaman, and slightly more interesting, but all easy jokes and "oh gee wiz" stuff. He has some deeper background character stuff that's briefly touched on, but it never impacts the portrayal of the character.

- Superman was barely in it, but he was good, I guess? Aside from a badly CGI-ed non mustache, he's a HUUUUGE improvement, and could make a great Superman in the future, probably.

- And yet, Wonder Woman was....great.

She honestly was great through the whole movie, and even has the best scene, best fights, and best gag in the whole thing.

Her intro scene, her explaining some history, her fighting, and a gag with her lasso. All pretty great compared to the movie around her. *shrug*.

I don't even understand how THAT happened.

She accounted for most of the stuff that occasionally entertained me.

MOSTLY you can't really tell what was Zack Snyder's work & what was Joss Whedon's, because it was all so bland and generic, but then random moments here and there are BLATANTLY Snyder's gloomy shit, & others are BLATANTLY Whedon's snappy writing.

It's not so obvious that you'd necessarily notice if you weren't aware that the movie had swapped directors late in the game, and maybe you'd glaze over some of it while watching it even if you DID know.

But you can easily stop, think about the movie for a second, and go "Oh, yea, THAT part had to be Snyder, and that OTHER thing had to be Whedon.".

All the other stuff they say about this movie is true too.

Bad CGI in general, Cyborg is REAL bad CGI, bad CGI non-mustache, some of the costumes are clearly not made to look good in the lighting/color grading that they edited into the movie at the last minute, etc etc...

This movie feels half-baked.

It's a little offensive that they thought maybe people would be okay with this.

It boggles my mind that they chose to release this movie in this state after spending SO MUCH MONEY, instead of just delaying it like 4 months to do the work it CLEARLY needed to make it good.

I don't think I've seen ANY criticism of Justice League that I'd call unfair...

It's not QUITE as bad as the ratings would imply.

It makes paper thin sense, & it's technically functional.

It's MOSTLY a movie.

That's WAAAAAAY more than I can say about BvS.

BvS was dumb and incoherent in ways that actually made me mad.

Justice League ISN'T dumb or incoherent.

It's just...

It's like opening a can of chicken noodle soup and finding there are only like 5 noodles and one bit of chicken.

Loads of broth.

It's TECHNICALLY soup.

There's definitely always STUFF happening, but most of it you don't care about. It's the type of stuff you wouldn't be offended if you hadn't seen it, and some exposition character just told you about it instead.

If you've seen all the trailers, you've basically seen all there is to this movie, and you could've PROBABLY accurately guess how it all roughly fits together even BEFORE I gave you the vague plot summary. The ONE exception being Superman's part, which the trailers haven't touched at all.

It's not so much that the trailers gave away too much, but more just that there's not much going on in this movie.

The Justice League movie's biggest offense was that I was just BORED for 85% of the time, and actively waiting for it to end...

I looked at the time and saw I was 47 minutes into the movie, and by that point I think I had been entertained for a grand total of maybe 3 minutes.

...ALL of it due to Wonder Woman.

So hey, at least they're getting her right?

*shrug*.