In league with Mad Max
Justice League, the 2017 superhero blockbuster which frustrated fans, is returning in a powerhouse, four-hour director’s cut.
Scratch the surface of the pantheon of heroes in the Justice League – Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman – and you can see very quickly the creative debt they owe to comic book literature and classic mythology. Less immediately obvious is the debt they owe to one of Australia’s cinematic icons, Mad Max.
Film-maker Zack Snyder, who has returned to his 2017 film Justice League to produce Zack Snyder’s Justice League, cites the Mad Max sequel, titled The Road Warrior in the United States, and the Arthurian legend masterpiece Excalibur as deeply influential to his work. Both feel very present in what has been dubbed the ‘‘Snyder cut’’ of the film.
‘‘The scales are pretty balanced on the influences of those things, in the sense that you would imagine it would be much more weighted on the side of, say, comics and comic mythology,’’ Snyder says.
‘‘But I’m a big lover of mythology in general, and I’m a big lover of cinema. And of those two movies in particular.
‘‘Excalibur has its mythological roots in what I would consider the creating of a league. And there’s a lot of parallels if you want to say that Superman is Arthur, and so on. You can assign them pretty quickly.
‘‘And The Road Warrior, of course, it’s just awesome, post-apocalyptic insanity at that most premium scale, and always an inspiration when you’re dealing with any kind of broken world.’’
The original Justice League starred Ben Affleck as Batman, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Henry Cavill as Superman, and introduced two heroes from the pages of DC Comics: The Flash, played by Ezra Miller, and Cyborg, played by Ray Fisher. But the film drew the ire of critics for its patchy plot and overuse of CGI special effects.
‘‘Superhero fans are a ridiculously powerful market; they deserve better than this,’’ wrote The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg.
Behind the scenes, the fate of the original film was shaped by a confluence of factors, catalysed by the death of Snyder and producer Deborah Snyder’s daughter, Autumn. Snyder left the film during post-production and was replaced by Joss Whedon, who then rewrote parts of the script and directed two months of reshoots in London and Los Angeles.
Whedon’s treatment of the cast, particularly Fisher, later blew up into its own scandal, when Fisher said Whedon’s treatment of the cast and crew was ‘‘gross, abusive, unprofessional and completely unacceptable’’.
His co-stars Jason Momoa and Gal Gadot concurred. Gadot said her experience with Whedon ‘‘wasn’t the best one’’.
The final edit of Whedon’s film came in under two hours running time and played to a largely conventional superhero format: a set of fast-paced action pieces. Snyder’s DC Extended Universe (DCEU) was controversially dark but Whedon’s spin on it was seen as too fast and loose.
Snyder has not seen the Whedon edit but the film’s cinematographer Fabian Wagner estimates it uses only about 10 per cent of the footage shot by Snyder.
After its release in 2017, the fans, expecting a final chapter to Snyder’s earlier films Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), began campaigning for the studio to #Release TheSnyderCut, the original planned edit of the film.
Then two final pieces of the jigsaw fell into place: the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave new value to a film that could be recut from existing footage, and the launch of the studio’s contenthungry streamer, HBO Max.
The movement also won the support of cast members, including Momoa and Fisher, cinematographer Wagner, and other high-profile Hollywood figures, such as director Kevin Smith and comic book writer and television producer Robert Kirkman.
In an effort to prove to the studio how serious they were, the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement also bought two billboards over New York’s Times Square.
‘‘Is this a new world where the fans decide what movies [a studio gets to] make?’’ asks Snyder.
‘‘I’m not saying it’s not that, but I don’t know that that is the end game here, except that I do think streaming services, and having a platform like HBO Max, really does give an option to an otherwise impossible release scenario.’’
The new cut did involve reshoots, which were challenged by the fact Covid-19 travel restrictions essentially stranded everyone where they were. Miller, for example, was in London shooting the third Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them chapter, so that film’s crew actually shot Miller’s new scenes, with Snyder directing the action via Zoom.
Smaller scenes that were cut from the original film, but will have immense appeal to DC Comics fans – such as those featuring Deathstroke (Joe Manganiello), Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), S.T.A.R. Labs scientist Ryan Choi (Ryan Zheng), Aquaman comics character Nuidis Vulko (Willem Dafoe) and The Flash’s Iris West (Kiersey Clemons) – have been reinstated.
Another new sequence features the iconic Batman villain the Joker (Jared Leto), who had previously appeared in David Ayer’s 2016 film Suicide Squad but never shared the DCEU screen with Batman.
‘‘Whatever you want to call it, the DCEU, the DC Universe, Batman exists in that world and Joker exists in that world, and they’ve never met. It seemed cathartic and important to have those guys who defined each other in such a giant way come into conflict and us to get a little scene with the two of them,’’ Snyder says.
The film in its new four-hour format is ‘‘a cut that I finished right away, right when we got back [and] was the first version of the movie that I completed,’’ Snyder says.
‘‘So it’s the freshest and most optimistic. I love these actors and I love this material. So I put my head down and soldiered on as best I can.’’
Which of the two films – Whedon’s 2017 cinema release or the new Snyder Cut – prevails in canon is, to some extent, a decision the fans will have to make, says Snyder.
But the prevailing wind is leaning to the latter. Momoa has said publicly he considers ‘‘his’’ Aquaman to be the Snyder version of the character, and Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins has said her film is in sync with the Snyder Cut.
‘‘I hope that in the end, I will convince you that my idea was right to begin with, and then [the studio] should have just let me do it that way from the start,’’ Snyder says. ‘‘That got me in trouble, I admit. But I think in the end, look, we’re here. And that’s the good news.’’
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is available on Neon.