It is difficult to admit that you are wrong. We like to be right and we like to prove that we are right. It is time for us to admit, however. We can just go out and say that and nobody is going to be upset with us because nobody really believed it would happen: we were all wrong about Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
(Note: when I say we they were all wrong, I realize that there all I thought this way. It is hyperbolic. Did you know that all the time? Incredible.)
It took me two full hours to admit it. Two hours straight watching Zack Snyder from Zack Snyder throughout my HBO Max subscription before admitting that I was enjoying myself and that my months of mocking the man and the belief that this cut would be a disaster were totally incorrect. Around two o’clock in this four-hour movie, I finally gave up and admitted that I was enjoying it, that Snyder had something here, and that this cut was better than the theatrical one, which I admit I also liked in the first screening.
I was also not alone in this change in attitude. The general consensus on Zack Snyder’s Justice League is that if it’s not exactly good, it’s definitely fun. Even people who have come out of it less than happy can discover good things about it. Many of us tuned in to a multimillion dollar train accident and received something that worked. Snyder somehow proved that we were all wrong.
We shouldn’t feel bad about being wrong, however. Snyder did not make it easy to believe that his exaggerated cut of the film would somehow deliver something pleasant. For years, Zack Snyder was ostensibly the villain. He was the man who took the DC Extended Universe to the ground, first when delivering a Superman movie where no one liked Superman in Steel man and after that with the almost universally despised Batman x Superman.
And although, yes, Snyder’s director’s version of the last film helped in some way, at the time Justice League production went on, no one really wanted him to play DC superheroes, including the studio itself. Let’s remember that when Snyder left, partly due to his daughter’s tragic death, most people at the time considered it a good thing for the film itself.
Then, the theatrical cut of Justice League disappointed in terms of box office and fan reaction. At the time, there was very little information about which parts were from Whedon and which were from Snyder, and although we knew that Whedon had done reshoots, his involvement in the film was still being singled out as someone who came in and finished, not a new director who oversaw a complete remake of the film itself.
This made the audience assume that many of the depressing and terrible aspects of the film, including an increasingly dark opening sequence and Batman battling the whole thing, were Snyder’s choices. That would mean that his four-hour version of the film would be even worse.
A lot of digital ink was spilled on how we got to the point where Zack Snyder was allowed to make a four-hour Justice League movie with almost no supervision, but suffice it to say that it took a conflagration of events that included a global pandemic, an o director somehow stole all of his movie files, the rise of streaming, a dedicated fan base and some scattered miracles. None of this incredible return, however, earned Snyder or the film more credit for being good. In fact, all the promotion and exaggeration that led to the film made it even more unbearable.
First, there was the news that the film would be four hours long, the fact that it was basically a giant publicity stunt for HBO Max, that Snyder needed $ 70 million more dollars, that he would do some reshoots, that the proportion it was going to be built for IMAX, despite the film landing on a streaming service. Everything pointed to a film that was already a mess turning into an even bigger mess.
Then the all-black and white trailer with Zack Snyder’s name bigger than the movie title fell, and it was hard to believe that Snyder would do anything but drag us through four hours of superhero hell while taking too much seriously. As we started to see and hear more about the film, it all felt like the pretentious shit that Snyder had fed us in his two previous DC films. From slow motion shots with sad songs, to Jared Leto’s reworking as the Joker for a new epilogue to the film, with every interview with Snyder sounding like the movie was the second coming, it looked like Snyder was just playing everything I could in a blender and playing on the screen with as much anguish as I could.
In general, it can be assumed that the film would be an excessively long, exaggerated and somber mess.
But it was not.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League it is a coherent, elaborate film, relatively well paced and focused on the characters. There are many reasons for this change adopted across the Internet (including my own analysis): Open humor is replaced by natural jokes. The fragmented structure makes the four hours work. Cyborg is transformed from a rejected symbol into the central character of the film. Flash is a real character, not a walking phrase. The Batman / Superman relationship is second to the team. Batman is not a severe idiot. Superman is not a severe idiot. Wonder Woman is not a severe and exaggerated idiot. Steppenwolf receives a surprisingly good backstory and character development. There is also no mustache removal, stronger themes of unity and actors who really seem to want to be there.
The list goes on to discuss the many ways in which this is actually a cut above the theatrical release and Snyder’s previous films. However, the biggest reason the film works is that it lowers all Snyder-ness. Not the slow motion or the loud talk about emotions or the hyper-dramatic moments – these are all there in abundance, to be sure – but your courage, Miss, Martha-ness is absent in most of the film.
These emo parts of the theatrical cut? Most seem to be from Whedon, not from Snyder. That depressing opening with Sigrid singing “Everybody Knows” that looked so much like Snyder? All Whedon. Zack Snyder’s Justice League it’s actually a surprisingly hopeful film about redemption, teamwork and family. Yes, this is Snyder at most Snyder, but it is also him reeling in his desire to make everything look like a 14 year old boy on the back of his school notebook. It is a Snyder that many assumed simply did not exist.
The real assumption that we were all wrong was that Zack Snyder was the problem with the original film, that he couldn’t change it, and that what we saw in theaters was more or less what we would get this time, with just two more hours. But considering that almost all of the content of Snyder’s cut has already been filmed, it means that this better film was in fact his plan all along. He was turning his vision on the DCEU and trying to create a really intriguing universe, very different from Marvel, that wasn’t just heroes standing in the rain.
The assumption was that his creative freedom with the film would make things worse. That’s why Warner Bros. sent people to watch it first and brought Joss Whedon. The great irony is that by removing their freedom in an attempt to make the film better, they clearly made it worse.
Although, there is a caveat to all of this. Zack Snyder’s Justice League never would have released in theaters in this state. The total creative freedom that was given to him for this cut would not have happened even in more perfect conditions, and there is no way for the studio to allow a four-hour cut of a film in theaters. In addition, Snyder had the benefit of three years of hindsight, and although he claims this is the cut of his dreams as he would have launched it, it is hard to believe that he did not make any changes with that in mind.
If Zack Snyder had managed to finish Justice League, we wouldn’t have gotten that version of HBO Max from him and it wouldn’t have been so good. Time course. Part of the success of his cut is the ability to develop large amounts of character development because he has time to do so. Whedon may be an idiot and he clearly made many terrible decisions when rewriting the film, but he was also turning a film already made into a time crisis. So yes, we were all wrong about Zack Snyder’s Justice League, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we were wrong about the Justice League.
Look, we probably shouldn’t be celebrating the fact that Zack Snyder’s Justice League Work. It is not a good cinema. It is full of all the biggest flaws and problems of Zack Snyder and he desperately needs an editor. There are many things that should be eliminated as unnecessary, including the film’s epilogue and Martian Manhunter. But, in general, it works, it’s fun, it has characters and functions and those are things that we – the internet, society – don’t think the film would do. We were all wrong and the world is … well, it’s not better, but it’s definitely not worse, and that’s something. Right?