Film: Zack Snyder's Justice League
Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill, Ciaran Hinds, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Amy Adams
Director: Zack Snyder
Us fanboys are incorrigible. We have an exaggerated notion of our importance, influence and independence. We feel our voices are the loudest and the truest. We truly believe we can change things for the better. All it takes is faith, dude. Faith.
Zack Snyder is a divisive filmmaker. Much less divisive than his fanboys would like to think, though. He landed in the major league in 2006 with 300, an adaptation of Frank Miller's famous, yet hilariously masochist, pseudo-history graphic novel. That movie introduced us to a certain Gerard Butler and "This is Sparta" became the phrase of the year.
That success and the fact that Snyder was a hard-core comic fan led to multiple movies in the DC pantheon, each worse than the previous. In 2017, while working on Justice League, DC's answer to the Avengers, Snyder lost his daughter and stepped away from the movie. In came Joss Whedon, the man behind The Avengers - the best of the Marvel movies.
Slam dunk? Not quite. Other than being polar opposites in filmmaking styles, Whedon also inherited a movie that was already in post-production. A movie that he didn't believe in. With some reshoots and massive editing, he came out with Justice League in November 2017. There were many adjectives used to describe the film, but 'terrible' was one of the kindest.
Warner, despite completely owning all DC characters, couldn't mount a challenge to the Marvel juggernaut. The execs couldn't fathom what went wrong and blamed fate.
A couple of years later the internet started seeing traffic around whispers of a mysterious Snyder cut of Justice League. This was supposed to finally bring to the screen the true vision of a certain Zack Snyder. The gentleman himself fanned the flames. The cast and crew stepped in at intervals too well-coordinated to be a coincidence. Emboldened fanboys went to town. Publicity that didn't cost a penny.
Lo and behold, in a few months, Warner confirmed the news and later made it a must-see event on their new streaming platform HBO Max.
The original Justice League was such a turkey that I didn't realise how much I had forgotten about the plot. Other than it didn't make much sense.
The Snyder version does make more sense to some of the bewildering aspects of the earlier version. It elaborates on the stories of Flash (Miller) and Cyborg (Fisher), it makes Steppenwolf (Hinds) an unlikely mascot for lower management, and it plays to the fans. They are even acknowledged in the credits!
The first thing you notice is the movie is not in a widescreen format. It is in 4:3 aspect ratio and looks like screen within your screen with black bands throughout. This was apparently to "preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder's creative vision." This is so ridiculous for a big-budget movie that Warner had to put in that message before the movie lest us fanboys made a stink.
Zack Snyder hates colours. Or so his movies declare. They are all at one depressing part of the colour spectrum, that every scene seems stolen from a post-apocalyptic movie. The darkness is evident in how muted Wonder Woman' (Gadot) costume was. And Superman wears black.
At over four hours, the Snyder cut will probably be played at every decent editor's wake. It seems like the entire footage shot was included in the final cut. It is helpfully split into six chapters so that one can take care of one's eyes and bladder. The chapters are inconsistent and seems to be just randomly split. The titles of the chapters serve no purpose other than foretell an upcoming dialogue.
I don't want to compare the Snyder Cut with the Whedon cut. All I recall from the earlier movie is that I didn't want to see it again. On its own, Zack Snyder's Justice League is a drag. I probably had more fun sitting through a Transformers movie. The Epilogue, DC's version of post-credits sinks all hope that we might have a half-decent DC Cinematic Universe.
Fanboys may rejoice that they achieved the impossible. They don't realise that they were manipulated. Because they were embraced as partners in bringing down the Corporation, they can't complain when the movie turns out to be a disaster. In YouTube, search for 'Warp Zone Batman Snyder' and watch the first clip. Those guys did a far better job explaining what happened than I could.
Fanboys are not unbiased appreciators. They have a fixed notion and rarely change their opinion. They are also too few in number. They didn't will the Snyder Cut into existence. They just allowed a corporation to use them to make money out of a bomb of a movie. That is the real tragedy.
