Affleck and Cavill are as insipid as
ever but this new cut adds operatic colour to vapid original – and a bold new
ending. It started as a hashtag : a cheekily insurgent social-media campaign
against big media corporations who presume to tell superhero devotees what’s
good for them. Enraged by DC’s lacklustre Justice League movie in 2017, which
director Zack Snyder had to abandon during postproduction after a family
tragedy, and which an uncredited Joss Whedon re-shot and re-edited, the fans took to Twitter demanding that DC
Films #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. Like the GameStop share price, hopes soared. But so
did cynical suspicions that a pristine “cut” would eventually be fabricated to
cash in on customer excitement. The Welles cut of The Magnificent Ambersons and
the Von Stroheim cut of Greed are still not with us, but the Snyder cut of
Justice League is, with a new chiaroscuro look, new backstories, new minor
characters and a new, disturbing ending. Its sheer colossal size, its
sepulchral feeling of doom and its trance-like sense of its own mythic grandeur
make it weirdly entertaining, although the familiar superhero-movie MacGuffins
are there, and the film needs to absorb the slightly uncharismatic performance
of Henry Cavill, an actor who perhaps does not soar to the standards of
superness, and is better off playing a character called, simply, Man, with an M
on his chest and who has to walk everywhere. Did Snyder really intend the
original film to last four hours ? Well, this one does : an epic so splurgingly
huge that you can see how it might have been purposed as four streaming
episodes. Yet its dramatic and theological craziness only really come across
when you consume it all at once.
As the film begins, the whole world
is in mourning after Superman’s death, and humanity is now menaced by the
intergalactically evil Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds), who is after three
“mother boxes” that are somewhere on Earth, three occult crucibles of cosmic
power which together give their owner complete universal control, left behind,
apparently, from a previous incursion. So plutocrat Bruce Wayne wishes to
assemble a crack crew of superheroes, the Justice League, to defend the planet
in Superman’s memory. They will be the disciples of Superman, and Diane Lane
and Amy Adams play Superman’s mum, Martha, and girlfriend, Lois Lane,
respectively the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene of the Superman story. Wayne
is played by Ben Affleck with stubble, a perennial expression of lantern-jawed
discontent and a voice that drops to a growly lowness when he’s in character as
Batman (even though everyone around him knows perfectly well who he is). Gal
Gadot is the stylish, creamy-browed Wonder Woman, while Jason Momoa is Aquaman,
who is in civvy street as Iceland’s answer to Crocodile Dundee, hanging out
with bearded, jumper-wearing Nordic fisherfolk in the pub until the time comes
for him to embrace his superheroic destiny.
Ray Fisher is the troubled bionic
teen Victor Stone, or Cyborg, and Ezra Miller has the quirky and smart-alecky
role of Barry Allen, the Flash, whose job is to supply the ironic
self-awareness. There are some nice supporting performances, most notably from
Willem Dafoe, who somehow confers actorly dignity on the role of Nuidis Vulko,
an undersea personage of Atlantis. Jeremy Irons is Wayne’s manservant (one
might almost say his batman) Alfred, who is reimagined as a silver-fox hipster
and gadget specialist, waspish of tongue and fussing over the tea served to the
Justice League, but who will keep saying “Master Wayne”. (“Master Bruce”,
surely?) You can see from a mile away where it is all going, or rather from
three hours and 55 minutes away, and for me, the Justice League still does not
have the colour, flair, snap and zap of the Avengers in the MCU; it comes to
life most in the regular cityscape settings that it seems keen to avoid. But
there is something absorbing about this operatically strange
twilight-of-the-superhero-gods that might yet turn out to be daybreak. The film
has something preposterous but surreal, and there is a disturbing epilogue in
which Wayne is confronted by his personal demons. Snyder’s film may be
exhausting but it is engaging. Justice is served.
Source : Peter Bradshaw, https://www.theguardian.com/
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