At the end of 2017 when the theatrical cut of Justice League, credited solely to Zack Snyder but very largely reshot by Joss Whedon at Warner Bros.’ insistence, was released, I finished off my review with a note that we might hopefully, eventually see Snyder’s version, something I expected might appear one day like Paul Schrader’s dumped Exorcist movie. I didn’t expect that hope to become one of the major causes celebre of current pop culture, but it did. Some took umbrage at the fierceness of Snyder fans’ demands that helped to get it realised, whilst others saw it as a triumph for the involved over the disdain of both studios and commentators. Certainly, this year’s Oscar nominees can only wish they’d stirred so much interest and passion. Ironically, with Whedon’s stock now at a dread ebb thanks to reports about his rotten behaviour many are now far more receptive to what Snyder tried to do with his take on the DC Comics universe, which always split the difference between the authentically ambitious and the bombastic, as well as sympathetic to the personal tragedy that helped enforce his sidelining from the project.
I didn’t deeply dislike the theatrical version, but certainly felt it was a compromised and confused rump of a movie, a flaky attempt to make a new The Avengers (2012) out what should have been the appropriately majestic apotheosis of the trilogy started with Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice(2016). Clocking in at just a hair over four hours, the version put together for HBO Max by Snyder, is by any measure one big hunk of movie. The story is more or less the same, only augmented with some new asides, dimensions, and consequences. Demonic alien middle-manager Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciaran Hinds), attracted to Earth after Superman’s death at the end of Dawn of Justice, arrives on the behest of all-powerful conqueror Darkseid (Ray Porter) to reclaim three pieces of ancient and incalculably powerful technology called the Mother Boxes, which when combined can unleashed immense terraforming and matter-arranging capacities.
Steppenwolf steals one kept by the Amazons on Themiskyra, leaving Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) in the dust, and a second from the Atlanteans in their submerged kingdom, bashing his way past loyal retainers Vulko (Willem Dafoe) and Mera (Amber Heard). Aware of the new potential for terrifying alien threats without Superman’s protection, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is already busy trying to forge a team of defenders, with Diana ‘Wonder Woman’ Prince (Gal Gadot) already on board: Wayne tries to talk the embittered and rigidly independent Arthur ‘Aquaman’ Curry (Jason Momoa) into lending a hand, but seems to fail, and so turns to two recently-forged “metahumans” in the form of Barry ‘The Flash’ Allan (Ezra Miller), imbued with astounding capacities of speed but still guiltily clinging to the hope of getting his imprisoned father (Billy Crudup) out of jail, and Victor ‘Cyborg’ Stone (Ray Fisher), a fatally injured college football star reborn as a vastly powerful fusion of man and machine when his scientist father Silas (Joe Morton) experimented with a mysterious artefact, an artefact which is of course the third, long-missing Mother Box. Outfought by Steppenwolf and his army of Parademons, ugly flying aliens, the heroes eventually decide to try and use the one Mother Box left to them to revive Superman (Henry Cavill).
One irony of Snyder’s career thus far is that almost all his movies have been drastically improved in their extended home viewing releases, particularly Sucker Punch (2011) and Dawn of Justice, which emerged as more complete, measured, intelligible works. Snyder tries to purvey movies on the scale of Lang and Gance and Lean in modern popcorn movie drag, but his relatively shaky box office touch despite his strong following seems to have limited his ability to impose it. In that regard Snyder oddly joins company with Ridley Scott, who’s also long become a master of rescuing his visions that way, and the reedit is on one level simply a fairly regular event in his career. The opening scenes of Zack Snyder’s Justice League strike radically different notes to its precursor in allowing Snyder’s more momentous and import-stacked concepts to sound. Superman’s death is a moment that literally vibrates through the fabric of the universe, a loss that’s both a symbolic and practical disaster, leaving the Earth without a truly intimidating defender. Bruce’s appeal to Arthur, in an Icelandic fishing village which harbours the exiled and embittered merman, concludes with the village women singing a lament as Arthur swims out to see, making clear that the villagers regard him as something close to a beneficent local deity.
This depiction of tremulous fear and anxiety stirred in ordinary people by the appearance of immensely powerful beings in their midst has been the consistently interesting aspect of Snyder’s understanding of the material which he correlates insistently with a politically destabilised and questioning age. Where most superhero tales place us in the shoes of the heroes, Snyder views them as inherently abnormal and intimidating. That’s one reason Zack Snyder’s Justice League, like Dawn of Justice before it, smartly uses Bruce, an ordinary man distinguished by genius and resolve rather than fanciful powers, as the interlocutor in his experience of feelings of both duty and impotence. This theme is taken up in a different form when some nihilistic terrorists try to blow up themselves and London’s Old Bailey, with Diana intervening in dynamic fashion in what is certainly one of the best-filmed pieces of superhero action yet seen. Diana here is called upon to serve directly in the function superheroes have by and large been resurrected from pop cultural dust in the past 20 years since 9/11 to serve more allusively: protecting the innocent from fanatical murderers invoking quasi-religious motives. Similarly well-done is the introduction for Barry, first glimpsed trying to get a job as a dog-walker, who speeds to the rescue of a girl who canonically speaking will become his great love, Iris West (Kiersey Clemons): Snyder here does something he generally resisted doing in his earlier films in offering a straightforward depiction of a superhero doing their basic business, an impressive unit of visual effects used to weave a quality of dreamlike romanticism.
Snyder’s attempts to dig into the mythopoeic aspects of superhero stories are always bound to split an audience down the middle between those who find it gilding the cute power fantasy lily and those who find it stirring and interesting. I’m evidently amongst the latter, although it can certainly be pushed too far, as Snyder does at points with his clunky correlation between Superman and Jesus, resumed here as the revived Superman forms a cruciform as he drinks in the empowering light of the sun. But the key quality of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, given time to breathe and properly resolve in this version, is that it emerges more fully realised as the thematic sequel to Dawn of Justice as a portrait in dealing with loss and beholding rebirth, a violation of the natural state that can have ominous as well as awe-inspiring aspects. Snyder gives over time to Lois Lane (Amy Adams) in her state of grief, going through the motions of a morning ritual that involves buying coffee for a cop pal and visiting the memorial to Superman in downtown Metropolis. Steppenwolf, a very standard-issue villain in the theatrical cut, here emerges as a kind of intergalactic Uriah Heep, desperate to get back into Darkseid’s good books after some lapse. Hinds actually manages to elicit a note of sympathy for him in his simultaneously slavish and tyrannous streaks. He’s considerably better visualised too, his armour consisting of slatted metal mail that can become deadly spikes and blades.
It feels almost superfluous to note that a version of a film that’s nearly two hours longer than the theatrical release version is a much richer, far more nuanced experience. Snyder’s choice of splitting the film up into chapters announced with title cards, and his approach to organising the story with these, does much to give it a novelistic cohesion and layering in the unfolding. But it’s also a lumpy one that confirms the limitations of Snyder’s approach as well as its potencies. Some unvarnished pleasures include the complete, boomingly grandiose depiction of Darkseid’s first attack on Earth, fought off by a crazy coalition of heroic defenders including Greek gods, Amazons, Atlanteans, and Green Lanterns, a genuinely glorious bit of pseudo-mythological spectacle. There's much more screen time for Jeremy Irons’ wonderful Alfred, indulging repartee with the rest of the team, and a tad more for J.K. Simmons’ Commissioner Gordon. But the flashback battle is marred by the awkward choice of using Gadot as narrator, and she’s often at her most wooden throughout the film. There’s a good scene where Martha Kent (Diane Lane), who’s lost her son and farm recently, visits Lois and tries to coach her through her grief. But the quality of this vignette, which adds immeasurably to the emotional texture of the whole, is perversely undercut when it’s revealed this is not Martha at all, but a shape-shifting alien watcher who later visits Bruce and reveals himself as the Martian Manhunter (Harry Lennix), who hitherto has been posing as General Swanwick, Superman’s uneasy military leash holder.
Granted, this helps signal the eventual filling-out of the classic Justice League line-up and makes new sense of what Swanwick was about all along, but adds nothing to the film overall. There are many points where it seems plain that the optimal cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League would probably be located somewhere between the two versions. This one seems to include almost everything Snyder was able to complete to a satisfying degree, a great, teetering feast, but it could have been shaped better, because I wished that Miller’s Flash, still the chief source of comic relief in this version but much less obtrusively, had been introduced earlier to inject some humour into the stone-faced early passages. The coda scenes in particular feel like a grab-bag of leftover footage, including a lengthy scene, one of the recurring dream-cum-prophecies Bruce has involving a frighteningly imminent future where a grief-crazed Superman has joined forces with the conquering Darkseid. This scene is interesting, particularly as it depicts Bruce being forced to join forces with Jared Leto’s Joker in a post-apocalyptic warzone. But it’s also long and serves little real purpose here except to say on Snyder’s behalf, look, see what you could have been getting next but won’t?
For a movie that despite its pretences belongs squarely in a fun fantasy-adventure genre, the film takes a hell of a long time to get to the point where the fledgling team finally come up against Steppenwolf in their first, awkward battle, and then not again until the climax, although again both versions of these scenes are far more coherent and vivid, and at least this time Aquaman doesn’t shout “Booyah!” like he’s from the trailer park side of Atlantis (Victor does say it, but it makes sense for him as a footballer). Few modern directors seem capable of making stand-around-and-make-plans exposition bits work, and Snyder’s approach, simply having them all stand in a circle around a glowing TV-table thing, feels almost satiric in its stiffness. Truth be told I actually missed some aspects of the theatrical version. I felt the absence of its opening credits with Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”, which offered an appropriate revision of the title sequence of Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). I missed Danny Elfman’s score which paid tribute to the disparate legacies of the various characters, although I admit Thomas ‘Junkie XL’ Holkenborg’s new score is impressively propulsive. I missed the sharp and punchy version of the Amazons’ battle to keep their Mother Box out of Steppenwolf’s hands, although Snyder’s full version of the sequence is impressive in its own way. I even missed a couple of the jokes, like Bruce’s rueful answer to Arthur’s question about him usually working alone. Minor losses, I suppose.
Undoubtedly the character who benefits most from the new version is Victor, whose presence felt distressingly random in the theatrical version and here emerges in all his Frankensteinian angst, furious at his father for his distracted workaholism and perverting act of paternal love. Morton, excellent as ever, is also better served, particularly as the climax of Silas’ tale in a self-sacrificing gesture is restored and allowed to register. Cavill’s pitch-perfect Superman returns again is this time laced with aspects of misgiving and anxiety in what it augurs for the future, but Snyder also lets his intervention in the finale register as more purely titanic and cheer-along. The final battle is a general blast as the heroes assault Steppenwolf’s sealed-off base set up in a don’t-call-it-Chernobyl Russian reactor meltdown site, this time actually giving Barry something to do. His attempt to outrun time itself to reverse what seems to be Darkseid and Steppenwolf’s victory is damn near as good as the similar turn-back-time scene in Richard Donner’s foundational Superman(1978), before the others work together to almost literally hand back Steppenwolf’s head on a plate to Darkseid. It’s imperfect, certainly, but Zack Snyder’s Justice League actually manages to prove that the current superhero movie craze can aspire to be something more than mild entertainment, and emerging as it has after Avengers: Endgame (2019) revealed the ultimate facetiousness behind the rival Marvel brand, it’s ironic that it teases somewhere interesting for the genre to go, but won’t.
0 Yorumlar