Is the 4-hour ‘Justice League’ the lockdown movie we deserve?
The advantage of a director’s cut is it gives the director permission to dictate his/her own pace. While a million editing choices have to be made to release something for commercial audiences, a director’s cut gets to put the brakes on.
Zack Snyder’s recut of the DC epic Justice League definitely puts the brakes on. And it just may be the superhero movie we deserve in this long-slogging, never-ending COVID lockdown.
Opening with a slo-mo expression of agony (one of Snyder’s trademarks, from 300 onwards) from Superman as he dies from a Kryptonite spear, it heads straight into darker, ruminative waters for most of its 242-minute length.
While four hours is nothing like the rumination levels of a typical Lav Diaz film, it does instill the proper drip-drip-drip mood for steeping in Snyder’s vision.
Of course, watching the Snyder Cut necessitates comparing it to the 2017 Joss Whedon-completed version, which I’d never actually seen until last week, and which snipped away much of the extraneous length after Snyder left during postproduction. (Warner Bros. was reportedly unhappy about Snyder’s dark take, and wanted a more commercial final product.) So this means I spent more time watching DC superhero movies last week — six hours — than I’d ever spent watching all previous DC movies combined.
The verdict: Snyder’s version is something to bask in, brood over, and pick a few bones with. Shot in the desaturated grays and pale blues that this director loves to decorate his moody skies with, the reduced palette actually works well for the story. To arrive at the mood board of Snyder’s Justice League, start with the air of self-importance that overhangs any Avengers movie, subtract all the bright colors, and drain it of most of the humor. You are now in Zack Snyder’s headspace. And aren’t we all in that headspace? Approaching Holy Week with yet another lockdown directive hanging above our heads, it’s pretty hard to think of resurrection and Easter bunnies. We are still in the slog, trapped in the “travel bubble,” and the Snyder Cut is just the entertainment we so richly deserve.
Broken up into six discrete parts (convenient for pee breaks), the new version opens with Superman’s dying cry unleashing emanations worldwide — most importantly, rattling a trio of Mother Boxes which are key to the efforts of alien Steppenwolf and his parademons to incinerate earth and terraform it into a fiery hellscape (which they’d prefer).
Thus Bruce Wayne/Batman (Ben Affleck) and Diana Prince/ Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) travel the globe seeking new members for their superhero club, including Atlantean Arthur Curry/Aquaman (Jason Momoa) in Iceland, a reluctant Victor Is Zack Snyder’s...