[ed note: In 2017, I structured my review of Justice League as “a series of bullet points presented without any overall organizing principle.” Keeping with the spirit of form following function, this review of the Snyder Cut of Justice League will be presented as a much longer series of slightly more organized bullet points.]
- Close your eyes. Envision Superman. What color is his costume? Is it blue, with a red cape and yellow trim? Wrong. It’s black, with black highlights, like Batman.
- The S? Gray.
- In 2017, when the original Justice League was in post-production, director Zack Snyder had just turned in a cut of the film he called “90% done” when his daughter Autumn died. Snyder took a leave of absence, and Avengers director Joss Whedon stepped in to finish the film. Following the orders of Warner Bros. execs who called the Snyder Cut “unwatchable,” Whedon rewrote the script and did some reshoots to bring it in under two hours. The resulting film grossed $657 million, and yet is considered a box office bomb.
- Last week, a Baltimore businessman offered to buy Tribune Publishing, the nation’s third largest newspaper chain, for $650 million.
- Disappointed that the film starring Batman (Ben Affleck), Superman (Henry Cavill), The Flash (Ezra Miller) , Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) grossed only enough money to run the entire United States government from 1790-1836, DC comics fans on Reddit started a campaign to “release the Snyder Cut!”
- Historical budget numbers are readily available online, proving that the internet is a glorious wonder for which we should all be thankful.
- The villain of the original Justice League is Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds), an utterly forgettable soldier in the army of the planet Apokolips. His master Darkseid (Ray Porter) is a new addition in the Snyder Cut. His inclusion helps the plot make slightly more sense.
- Darkseid, the biggest big bad in the DC universe, bears a striking resemblance to Thanos, the biggest big bad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
- Maybe it’s the other way around.
- The character design tends to be both super busy and dull at the same time. It’s actually kind of impressive.
- After a pressure campaign lasting years, the online Snyder Cut agitators got their way. Warner Bros. greenlit a restoration project, which eventually consumed an estimated $70 million, proving once and for all that the internet was a mistake.
- The running time for Zack Snyder’s Justice League is four hours and two minutes. Other films that break the four hour mark include Shoah, the 1985 Holocaust documentary that runs 9 hours, 26 minutes; OJ: Made in America, the seven-hour ESPN documentary series which had a limited theatrical run in 2016; Carlos, the 2010 biopic of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, which clocked in at 5 hours, 39 minutes; the 1927 silent epic Napoleon which takes 5 hours, 32 minutes to meet its Waterloo; and Sleep, which is just footage of Andy Warhol’s boyfriend sleeping for 5 hours, 21 minutes.
- You think I won’t keep wasting your time with random facts I found on the internet? Well, I sat through the damn Snyder Cut, so buckle up, motherfuckers!
- The record for the longest film ever made is held by Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson. The sole pubic screening of their film Logistics at the House of Culture in Stockholm lasted from December 1, 2012 to January 6, 2013.
- What sets Justice League apart from those other extremely long films is that, as we enter hour four, we learn that Bruce Wayne was traumatized by witnessing the death of his parents, which later caused him to dress like a bat and fight crime. These stunning facts have never before been revealed in a film, with the exception of Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Batman v. Superman: The Dawn Of Justice (2016).
- The revelation about Batman’s parents comes via a conversation with The Joker (Jared Leto) during a dream sequence epilogue which has nothing to do Steppenwolf, Darkseid, or anything, really. I have no idea why it’s there, except to give Jared Leto cocaine money.
- Here is a partial list of scenes shot in slow motion during this four-hour, two-minute movie:
- A close up of Bruce Wayne’s razor while he’s shaving
- Aquaman drinking whiskey on a pier
- A man digging a hole.
- A woman looking at The Flash.
- The Flash moving super-fast.
- The Flash staring at a girl.
- The Flash staring at a hot dog.
- Cyborg playing football. (There’s quite a bit of this.)
- Cyborg looking sad because his father isn’t there to watch him play football.
- Steppenwolf picking up a handful of dirt.
- Superman going super-fast
- A Humvee flying through the air
- Cyborg’s father (Joe Morton) disintegrating. (This one worked.)
- A shell being ejected from the Batmobile’s guns.
- The heroes riding into the final battle with Steppenwolf. (This one kinda worked, too, even if we’ve seen it many times before, such as in Joss Whedon’s Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron.)
- The Batmobile exploding.
- The Superfriends just kind of standing there, not looking particularly happy, or sad, or anything, really, despite the fact that they’ve just won the final battle and saved the world. (The film still has more than 30 minutes to go at this point.)
- Snyder’s direction of actors is indifferent, at best. Everyone seems to be instructed to glower grimly as if every trip to the Gotham DMV is the Battle of Gettysburg. In other words, he tells everyone to be more like Batman. This is another example of Creeping Batmanization. Wonder Woman? Girl Batman. Cyborg? Black robot Batman. Aquaman? Moist Batman. Superman? Super-Batman. The only character who doesn’t act like Batman is The Flash, and he is constantly shamed for it.
- I don’t know if Jared Leto does cocaine.
- The big revelation in Superman v Batman: The Dawn of Justice is that both Superman and Batman’s mothers were named Martha. In the Snyder Cut, we find that Martha Kent was actually J’onn J’onzz, aka the Martian Manhunter, who was my favorite character in the 2001 animated TV series Justice League, which is superior to both cuts of this film in every conceivable way.
- GOAT Batman movie? Mask of the Phantasm.
- The excessive length of the film is a plus for HBO Max, the streaming service which debuted the Snyder Cut. Streamers value continued engagement above all other metrics, so the longer the better, as far as they’re concerned.
- In the time it takes to watch the Snyder Cut once, you could watch Mask of the Phantasm, which is also on HBO Max, 3.16 times.
- Instead of a standard HD 16:9 aspect ratio, or a widescreen 2.76:1 aspect ratio, the Snyder Cut is presented in an old-fashioned, square 4:3 aspect ratio. This is just pointless and pretentious enough that I like it. So, kudos to you, Zack Snyder.
- $370 million, the total amount of money spent on the original Justice League and the Snyder Cut, is greater than the 2020 budget of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, combined.
- In my original review of Justice League, I wrote: “The high-functioning sociopaths running the Hollywood studios are uniquely unsuited to making good superhero movies, because they fundamentally cannot grasp what is appealing about a character motivated by pure altruism.” This remains true.
- Snyder and writer Chris Terrio simply do not understand Superman. He is an avatar of the benevolent protector, and a fundamentally nice guy. It’s not edgy or insightful to point out that an invulnerable, super-strong alien who can fly and shoot freakin’ heat rays from his eyes would eventually come to view the humans it was supposed to protect as puny, flawed, contemptible things. That’s the purpose of Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, which Snyder adapted for the big screen in 2009. There is a moral dimension to Superman. He is so powerful, he will always win any fight. So the key to writing a good Superman story is to put him in the horns of a moral dilemma. He must choose the lesser of two evils, or sacrifice Lois Lane to save Metropolis, or something like that. Superman’s purpose is not to be a badass, it’s to explore the nature of “goodness.”
- Henry Cavill remains the worst actor to ever play Superman. Give me drunk, chubby George Reeves any day.
- Don’t get me started on Lois Lane (Amy Adams). What have they done to you?
- Watchmen was the last Zack Snyder film I enjoyed. I even bought the Blu-Ray.
- Ben Affleck, who got all swole to play Batman, portrayed George Reeves in the 2006 film Hollywoodland. He was good in that film. He sucks as Batman.
- Remember that commercial for the video game Gears of War where the soldier dressed all in black is running through a dark, ruined city and fighting monsters, which are also black, set to a slow, romantic cover of Tears for Fears “Mad World”? Imagine watching that at half speed on a loop for half a work day.
- The Snyder Cut might make a good screensaver, except the blank stripes on either side of the screen due to the 4:3 aspect ratio would eventually lead to visible burn-in lines on your monitor. So it fails at that, too.
- When the Superfriends gather in Superman’s spaceship to use Kryptonian technology and a little Flash razzmatazz to bring Clark Kent back from the dead, the spaceship’s A.I. begs them to stop. In that moment, I felt kinship with the Kryptonian A.I.
- The Wonder Twins, shapeshifting aliens from the 1970s Superfriends cartoon, are, sadly, nowhere to be seen. Come on, Zack! I want to see an eight-armed Arcturian space platypus solve a problem with a jackhammer made of ice, which is actually her brother!
- RELEASE THE WONDER TWINS CUT!
- Writer Chris Terrio, who penned Batman v Superman, Justice League, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, is the greatest living example of the mediocre white guy who keeps failing up.
- Here’s a short list of scenes Justice League rips off from other films:
- Joker’s bank heist from The Dark Knight.
- The lighting of the warning beacons of Gondor from Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
- The cavalry charge from the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. Twice.
- The climax of the 1978 Superman, where Supes flies faster than the speed of light to travel backwards in time and change history to save the world. (The Flash does it.)
- Let’s say you’re a film director, and you want to portray The Flash traveling at superhuman speed. You would show The Flash operating at normal speed, while the world around him is moving in slow motion, because that’s how things would look to The Flash, right? WRONG. The correct answer is that The Fastest Man Alive is depicted in slow motion, while the rest of the world is at, like, super slow motion. That’s why Zack Snyder is worshipped as a genius on the internet, and you are not.
- The boneheaded choice of casting Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Man of Steel still haunts us a decade later.
- I’m not sure how he does it, but Snyder manages to ruin the sole good scene in the original Justice League, where Cyborg and The Flash dig up Clark Kent’s dead body in the middle of the night.
- At one point, Cyborg’s father is hassled by agents of the Office of Secret Intelligence from The Venture Bros.
- I’d watch a Cyborg movie starring Ray Fisher—provided it was less than two hours long.
- After four years and $370 million, Aquaman’s trident STILL. HAS. FIVE. POINTS. Not three points, which is what differentiates a trident from a pitchfork. Five (5). All hail Aquaman, who rules as rightful King of Atlantis with the symbol of the seas, his mighty PITCHFORK!
- Credit where credit is due: the executives at Warner Bros. who called the Snyder Cut “unwatchable” were absolutely right.
