JUSTICE LEAGUE
A League Of His Own
We #Reviewthesnydercut.
RELEASED OUT NOW! 2021 | 15 | VOD
Director Zack Snyder
Cast Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot,
Ray Fischer, Jason Momoa
“You have the blood of the old gods in you,” says Steppenwolf at one point in these four hours of superhuman apocalypse. For Zack Snyder, you imagine, there could be no higher compliment.
Willed into existence by a grassroots fan campaign – not to mention a streaming giant’s need for subscriber-luring content – this redux of 2017’s Justice League arrives as an uncompromised vision, committed to exorcising the ungainly patch-up of Joss Whedon’s original theatrical release – and risking denting its myth as the golden cut the world was never privileged to see.
And Snyder’s all about the mythic. While the Marvel movies lean in to the cute and the quippy – traits that Whedon tried to bolt on to the Wagnerian material he inherited – Snyder’s always seen superheroes as brawling Olympians, modern gods, framed on screen with reverence. “I need warriors,” says Bruce Wayne, assembling Earth’s frontline of defence. Warriors.
Alternately sombre and operatic, it’s all deeply Snyder – past the point of self-parody, to become something you can’t help but respect as a singular artistic vision. Skies are grey, songs are sad, raindrops are lovingly captured dripping from an umbrella. Moments of wry humour appear like sparks in the gloom. Action scenes, meanwhile, achieve a kind of steroidal poetry, heavy on slo-mo, favouring frozen moments of comic book composition (it’s all presented in 4:3 ratio, as if authentic comic panels are straining to contain their own wild energies). Epic scenes of massed historical battle recall Snyder’s work on 300.
At a challenging four hours there’s room for subplots chopped from the theatrical release. For once they feel utterly essential. The backstories of Flash and Cyborg are deepened, explored, given genuine emotional weight that gifts the film a heart. Even rent-a-threat antagonist
Steppenwolf – spikier and blingier than in the Whedon version – has real resonance now. Snyder also unveils the Big Bad behind his curtailed multi-film saga: Darkseid, one of the great Jack Kirby creations, who prowls the outskirts of the plot with glowing eyes and heavy menace.
A nightmarish coda indulges Snyder’s less appealing instincts, complete with an F-bombing Batman and demonic Superman. But it barely matters: the multiverse is almost upon us, and suddenly there’s room for everyone and every take imaginable. Even Snyder is happy to call this a “little Elseworld experiment”, freed from the pressure of shaping DC’S cinematic future.
A vindication and a redemption, Zack Snyder’s Justice League very nearly lives up to its own impossible myth. Nick Setchfield
Look for a truck with the name of Gardner Fox on the side – the comics writer who created the Justice League of America.
Deeply Snyder, past the point of self-parody