Zack Snyder's Justice League

Snyder can check off the final box, his League is better overall than the original, but it certainly won't be for everyone. It's more layered, more plot-driven, with more emphasis on all the main characters. It portrays them better, it focuses on their motivations and values better, so the overall emotional impact is stronger, and the same is true for the villains, especially Steppenwolf. But I can't shake the feeling that while the film is a patchwork of beautiful, sometimes darkly gothic, sometimes Sin City-like overstyled scenes, with plain cool shots here and there, that works with good story material, but it's ultimately merely an adaptation of a concept that didn't work then and still doesn’t fully work after the facelift. At times, the whole thing feels too artificial and over-artistic, and I couldn't shake the feeling that Superman was just like a sore thumb and he wasn't the Superman from Man of Steel anymore, as if Cavill wasn't Cavill anymore. And ironically, the most memorable and emotionally powerful scenes are those when Affleck climbs mountains to an impressive musical score, or when Zimmer's Man of Steel theme plays. 3.5 stars at most. (14/04/2021)

Ineffective, poorly coherent, long but sparsely motivated, hollow in terms of the plot, and psychologically ridiculous. Basically, four hours of futile attempts to give the impression of something fateful by staring into the void, overusing slow motion, and commenting music. But there's no such thing here. The characters have no relationships with each other, and everything Snyder has added here versus the awful Whedon version is more masturbatory fanboy filler than any kind of substantial and creative storytelling. The DC universe feels like an epic sculpture, but once you kick it you realize it's not made of steel but plaster. It's a good thing there are legions of fanboys whose standards have been so dulled by a series of cinematic disasters that they bow down even to this false idol. Back to Marvel. (25/03/2021)

Not impressed. It's undeniable that this is in line with Snyder's vision from the Ultimate Cut of Batman vs Superman, but whether it is for the better, that’s another question. It doesn't feel like a complete film with a four-hour arc, but like an episodic miniseries (and it is divided in chapters), where for every passable action set-piece there are a few minutes of interchangeable mind-numbing CGI mess, and for every successful scene like "Diana bantering with Alfred over the tea-making process" there's one WTF scene (though nothing in the style of “Martha”). At times it's light, at times it's in the spirit of heavy Wagnerian opulence "about gods and people (only without people)" and at times it's completely different. At times it's very spectacular and at times it looks like filmed in a soundstage with unfinished visual effects. You will be convinced that Affleck is a great Bruce but a mediocre Batman, and the same can be said about the rest. Basically, it’s full of contradictions. What saves a lot is that Aquaman and Wonder Woman have already had their movies in the meantime, so there's time for Cyborg (which sort of works) and The Flash (which doesn't work that well). The advantage is that it feels like a team effort, where everyone plays an important role, something that couldn't be said about the cinematic version. The villains are again punishingly bland (but at least with motivation). There is no justification for the four-hour runtime, it could have easily fit in three. Sure, Snyder does have a vision, and it’s clear he’s had it all along, but a vision a film doesn’t make, and his looks better on paper than in practice. It is still not a good film, it's a film with more than one good to memorable scene and moment, but as a whole it's an uninteresting hodgepodge of everything and nothing. At least compared to Whedon's cut, it's a watchable, uninteresting hodgepodge of everything and nothing. (18/03/2021)

Snyder's comic book dark vision! I honestly didn't believe Zack Snyder could do it, but after Justice League, he's definitely repaired his reputation. I'm not going to lie, I wasn't looking forward to it and I suspected I would slag it, but in the end it's surprisingly good and the thing I feared the most (the fact that I would have to sit through two hours I already knew and didn't care much about) was proven wrong, and I found myself wondering quite often whether a scene was new or an old one, which is probably a plus. At first I was bothered by the 4:3 format because I’m not quite used to it, let along for four hours, so in that respect the film is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, there are four epic climaxes every hour, so the time passes very quickly, the characters get more space (Flash is excellent with his jokes and slow motion reminiscent of the best of Quicksilver), the action is epic and pleasantly brutal. I really liked the first new featuring Zeus and Ares appeared, that one had balls. I was a a little disappointed by the entrance of Superman, somewhere after three hours and he probably had the least amount of space of all of the characters, and at times I wondered where Batman was at all 😃 But overall it’s more sweeping and compact, the story and the characters fit together better, and thanks to the decent action and awesome music it's a solid dark comic book movie that I won't be repeating, but I had an unexpectedly great experience. 8/10. (18/03/2021)

I was curious and I was hoping it would turn out well. It is probably impossible to say that I had 100% faith in it. But the result exceeded all expectations, because Zack Snyder's Justice League is a completely different film, much better in every way. It doesn’t build on the fateful atmosphere of Batman vs Superman only at the beginning, but instead does it for four hours thanks to a lot of added runtime that has given many characters more space and meaning, also thanks to a lot of scenes (and especially the bad dialogues in them) that have disappeared. Indeed, everything that made me pause in the original film, which was illogical, concise and unexplained, abbreviated or inappropriate, is now either complete, reworked and explained to satisfaction, or removed. The worst attempts at adolescent humor have disappeared, the unsuitable color atmosphere has disappeared, the villain has motivation, the Justice League is no longer a hastily convened gang that has childish arguments... The change to the awakening of Superman is nicely visible, which was something inevitable in the original film that were waiting for from the beginning (and still it was bad, and I'm not even talking about barren scenes with Lois saying things like "You smell good", or “that itches"), while here it is the saving grace of an already functioning League, which is born logically, gradually, and whose realization and meaning feel different. Better. All this is supported and amplified by Holkenborg's music, which gives the preserved scenes a completely different dimension (nothing against Danny Elfman, because his music was again one of the best components last time), and in the end I was extremely sorry that the DC film universe has already unfortunately most likely been written off, and that we will probably only return to it in Flash's film, because after Zack Snyder's Justice League there remains great potential and plenty of ways to go. An amazing superhero film.___P.S. I didn't quite understand the 4:3 picture format at all, but it didn't take long for me to forget about it. (19/03/2021)