Can we start with the elephant in the room?
Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Zack Snyder, 2021) is a very easy film to ridicule. Indeed, it has endured pretty much every conceivable jab and jest under the sun over the past few years, but in truth the sheer fact that this film exists is, to my mind anyway, something to be celebrated.
For those who don’t know, Snyder had to depart midway through filming the original cut of Justice League (2017) due to a horrific family tragedy that saw his twenty-year-old daughter take her own life. The film was subsequently butchered by both executives and a vile little hobgoblin commonly referred to as ‘Joss Whedon’, leaving Snyder to take a considerable amount of flak when the film inevitably bombed at the box office. And, for a while, that seemed to be the end of it.
To the surprise of just about every last person on Earth however, Snyder’s devoted fans responded loudly and persistently, campaigning for three long years to persuade Warner Bros to let Snyder finish his film. In the process, they raised more than $600,000 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. And then, on June 23rd 2020, after three years of constant fighting, the powers that be finally caved and Snyder was rehired to finish his movie. The result is a four-hour behemoth of superhero punch-ups, excessively morose monologues and some of the most ludicrous deployments of slow-motion technology I have ever seen. Then, when the credits finally roll at the end of it all, two words appear on the screen:
“For Autumn.” His daughter.
So no, I’m not going to tear the colloquially named ‘Snyder Cut’ apart in this review. God knows I got that out of my system with Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020) last August. As has been stated by filmmakers infinitely more intelligent than myself, from the Russo Brothers to Barry Jenkins, this entire production journey is a triumph for personal filmmaking in a studio system, even if the product is a blockbuster and the man behind it… divisive, to say the least.
With all that out on the table, let’s get into it. Zack Snyder’s Justice League picks up in the direct aftermath of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016), literally opening with a four-minute shot of Superman (Henry Cavill) dying very, very slowly. As he falls, both figuratively and literally, his supersonic shout echoes across the Earth and beyond. Not a soul in the cosmos is left unsure of his fate, including the baddies.
Consequently, a deliriously cranky Batman (Ben Affleck) opts to travel across the globe in search of other people with extraordinary abilities, hoping to put together a team to defend the Earth in Superman’s absence. His targets include Aquaman (Jason Momoa), who cannot talk to fish but rather talks to the water which then talks to the fish for him, the Flash (Ezra Miller), who can run faster than his obnoxious personality can irk, Cyborg (Ray Fisher), an ex-football player badly mutilated and held together by a not-so-subtle exoskeleton, and of course Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who by all accounts is basically equal to Superman anyway, minus the male privilege that has afforded him six solo movies to her two.
The film is preposterously long and, given that the premise outlined above takes about two hours to come into place, could easily stand to be cut down quite a bit. That being said, the execution did genuinely surprise me at points, sometimes even for the better. The most immediately striking thing about the Snyder Cut is that it is extremely weird. The Marvel formula is undoubtedly a success and I’m as much a sucker for their output as the next nerd, but those films would never point a camera at an out of focus Jared Leto dressed as a hybrid of the Joker and a thorny-crowned Jesus Christ, before allowing him to attempt an incoherent Colonel Kurtz-esque monologue for a full five minutes uninterrupted. Now, I am not for one second saying that this is a good monologue or even impression, but I sure am glad it exists.
Though the plot never develops beyond ‘five superheroes come together to beat up a guy with ears made out of horns’, this is a film that I would wager will be remembered for its excesses and ambitions. As Matt Zoller-Seitz suggested, perhaps playfully, in his review of the film, the Snyder Cut is more or less what Martin Scorsese has been asking of the superhero genre. It is undoubtedly the brainchild of a single filmmaker, unafflicted by studio interference and, if we’re being honest, unmarketable to a general audience.
To put it plainly, this is not, as Scorsese phrased it, “content” designed only to please and to profit. Though it is undoubtedly filled to the brim with flaws, this is a film infinitely preferable to another Ant-Man 2 (Peyton Reed, 2018) or The Hobbit 3 (Peter Jackson, 2014). Superman dies in slow motion for four minutes. Batman drops the f-bomb. A baffled-looking Willem Dafoe sporadically shows up to offer grave warnings about things. Hell, there is a fifteen-minute battle sequence evoking the prologue to Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003), down to the pronouncement that the ‘Mother Boxes’ (rings, basically) are to be divided between the realms of man, Amazonian and Atlantean. And then, when the bad guys are finally beaten into the ground after a staggering two hundred and ten minutes, the film shamelessly transitions into a thirty-five minute epilogue featuring Jesse Eisenberg doing nefarious deeds on a boat for some reason. I don’t expect to ever find out why.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a difficult film to assess, because while it is an abject mess by any critical standards, it is equally the sort of bizarre, epic and off-kilter film that so rarely gets made on this scale anymore. It is worth mentioning that Owen Gleiberman at Variety has suggested that the film deserves to be placed alongside Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004), The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) and Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018) in the pantheon of great, thoughtful comic book films that somehow fluked it past the studio system. I’m not sure I can go quite that far in my rating of the film, but I do think that the sentiment is worth repeating. This is a film that objectively should not exist, both due to the mechanisms of modern Hollywood and the heartbreaking personal tragedy which affected Snyder and his family more than I can possibly imagine only a few years ago. And yet, thanks to the passion and charity of fans who made their voices loud enough to become a demographic worth targeting, the Snyder Cut is here to stay.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is available to stream on Sky Cinema/NOW TV.
Image credit: © 2021 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved TM & © DC.
