Just when you thought it was safe to head back into the Twittersphere, the ongoing war between Marvel and DC fanboys and girls is about to reignite. Why? Because the critics don’t really like new DC Extended Universe instalment, Justice League, much more than they did the operatically dark and muddled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, or the bombastically nonsensical Suicide Squad. That’s now three out of four movies in this new superhero cinematic realm that have failed to pass muster, with only Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman standing tall.
Meanwhile, most Marvel offerings are greeted with delight by critics, Taika Watiti’s hugely entertaining but surely somewhat overrated Thor: Ragnarok being just the latest example. It means comment sections for the next few weeks will be full of angry DC acolytes, screaming at the injustice of it all. “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded … everybody knows that the good guys lost”; the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows, dutifully rolled out in Justice League for a trademark Zack Snyder pop montage, suddenly seem to take on new meaning.
But what did you think of the movie? Did Ben Affleck’s Batman find redemption after the shoddy screenwriting of Dawn of Justice, or was the Oscar-winner even worse in the cape and cowl this time around? Is the DCEU back on track, or teetering on the edge of disaster? Here’s a chance to give your verdict on the movie’s key talking points.
Joss Whedon’s DCEU rescue act
Snyder may have been the film-maker who started Justice League, but it was Joss Whedon who finished it, overseeing extensive reshoots as well as writing the screenplay with Dawn of Justice’s Chris Terrio. It’s not always possible to see where one director’s style ends and the other’s begins, which is in some ways a positive, but also means we lose much of Snyder’s gift for stunning visuals without really gaining enough of the whip-smart dialogue that helped the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer become king of the Marvel universe for a short time. There certainly seems to be more Whedon than Snyder in Justice League, but the new episode suffers from a blandness that neither director has previously been known for. We may not be able to see the stitches required to knit together competing visions, but it is clear a malaise still hangs in the air.
The most apologetic Batman in big-screen history
Whatever you say about Dawn of Justice, Ben Affleck seemed to give everything in the role of Batman – it is hardly his fault that he was damned by poor screenwriting. Unfortunately Affleck in Justice League still seems to be suffering from the critical brickbats that met his first turn as a superhero, the equally execrable Daredevil more than a decade ago. Not only is Batman constantly really, really sorry about his actions last time out, which led directly to the death of Superman at the hands of Doomsday, but Affleck’s very performance seems to be an apology to audiences.
This is the Batfleck of last year’s unfortunate “Sad Affleck” meme. He is listless, uncertain, and entirely lacking in joy. It is a tentative and restrained turn, as if the actor is slowly trying to feel his way back into the role but hasn’t yet worked out how to do it.
Superman’s return
Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel is much, much better, perhaps partly because Justice League doesn’t cast him as the cause of all Dawn of Justice’s ills. There are spine-tingling moments when Superman returns to the fray, and Whedon even remembers to offset the CGI mega-battles (featuring Ciaran Hinds’ Steppenwolf) with a Richard Donner-esque segue in which Kal-El rescues some innocent bystanders. Cavill carries himself confidently and charismatically as the last son of Krypton, even if the digital work needed to remove a contractually required moustache for Mission Impossible 6 is occasionally distracting. Whatever we might think of the universe Superman is currently inhabiting, the world’s best known superhero ends the movie in a good place.
Is it time to abandon CGI supervillains in comic book movies?
But back to Steppenwolf. It beggars belief that superhero movies from both sides of the Marvel/DC divide continue to preside over such shoddy digitally rendered characters in an age when Hollywood can produce work as effective as that seen in the Planet of the Apes trilogy or Avatar. Justice League’s villain may not be quite so appallingly presented as Doomsday in Dawn of Justice, but he is not a whole lot better.
DC seems to be well aware its CGI supervillains look weird, because it keeps creating equally odd-looking video game-style landscapes for them to inhabit – as if audiences won’t notice poor work if everything else on screen looks artificial. This is not a solution, and perhaps it’s time for comic book films to start using villains who can be played by humans again, because the current approach is distracting and off-putting in the extreme.
Those mid-credits sequences and the future of the DCEU
Despite all its faults, would you agree that Justice League began the process of righting the DCEU’s wrongs? Give Whedon the sequel from the beginning, rather than asking him to patch up another Snyder mess, and the results ought to be far more impressive. The film’s first mid-credits scene, featuring Ezra Miller’s excellent Barry Allen/The Flash challenging Superman to a race, felt like a purer moment of Whedonesque silliness. The second sequence revealed that Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor is recruiting fellow villains (namely Deathstroke) for what we can only assume will be the DCEU’s version of the Injustice League from the comics. Perhaps Whedon can find a way for Eisenberg, who we know can be funny, to tone down the bizarrely intense reading of Luthor we saw in Dawn of Justice.
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