Justice Delivered. Now What?

Warner’s Justice League arrives to mixed reviews and a lower than projected box office opening weekend. What now for the DC Expanded Universe?

(Boo! Spoilers!)

Going in I had low expectations for Justice League. Very low. Man of Steel, Batman vs Superman, and Suicide Squad all under-performed for Warner and D.C. and did a lot to establish the meme that neither could do a super hero film as good as Marvel Studios could. Wonder Woman, with its big box office haul, did a lot to give hope to the future of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). But even that film I found to be only 3/4 of a great film — the climax was incapable of delivering the kind of payoff the audience deserved after that excellent, meticulous build up. Once the villain revealed himself and the pyrotechnics ensued, the film faltered.

I was not a fan of the approach Warner and DC had decided to take with Justice League which basically unveiled three new characters and team members to the audience with no back story. Marvel had put every member of the Avengers on film and exposed them to the audience prior to that film’s debut. Warner and DC decided to “rush” Justice League out, by comparison, films for The Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg will not appear until after.

All of which lead to a sense of fatalism surrounding Justice League prior to its release. This was not mitigated at all by what happened during the production of the film. Those who wanted director Zack Snyder removed from any further involvement in the DC universe, such as myself, were nonplussed to see him still at the controls. However, even we got thrown for a loop when Snyder bowed out 3/4 of the way through production because of the death of his daughter…leaving Avengers veteran Joss Whedon to see the film out with re-writes, re-shoots, and scene deletions galore. Then there were the reshoots themselves which, due to a conflict with the filming of Paramount’s Mission Impossible 6, forced Warner to have to (very expensively) digitally wipe out Henry Cavill’s contractually obligated Mission Impossible beard.

So I wasn’t expecting much. And I was surprised by how much my expectations were surpassed.

Justice League is far from perfect. Parts of it are downright disappointing. But, overall, the film held my interest and the character performances (for the heroes at least) saved the film from being the disaster a lot of us expected and a lot of critics are unfairly tagging it as.

In some respects Justice League is what you would expect from a film with big reshoots and two writers and two directors. Even though Snyder is the official director, this film is nearly as much Whedon’s vision as it is Snyder’s. You can spot the Snyder touches (complex, but not quite believable, CGI action shot dissolving into a real character as he gets closer to the screen — something that was all over Batman vs. Superman) and you can spot the Whedon touches (the trials of the Russian family trapped in their house…periodically checking in on a specific set of civilians is something Whedon has done before in both Avengers films).

If you saw the trailers you could count a lot of shots that got cut from this film…probably all of them Snyder’s since Whedon hadn’t taken the reins by the time those trailers came out. Word is leaking out about deleted scenes and how much of Cyborg’s and Aquaman’s backstories got expunged (including all of Willem Dafoe’s Atlantian role). Justice League clocks in at a very un-Snyderish 120 minutes whereas Man of Steel was 143 minutes and Batman vs. Superman was 151 minutes. Already there have been clamorings in some corners of the internet for Warner to release a Snyder director’s cut which ignores the obvious; Snyder never completed the film so any Snyder re-cut wouldn’t be purely a Snyder film.

The reshoots weigh heavily on this film for both good and ill. I think Whedon is probably more responsible for the way the final film comes across than Snyder but his additions do not fit in as seamlessly as they probably needed to. I suspect that several of the Affleck/Gadot back-and-forths, especially the one in the “bat cave”, were reshoots because of the way only Affleck and Gadot were seen going at it even though everyone else on the team were present. Other reshoots were a bit more obvious…subtle changes in Affleck’s appearance and lighting from shot to shot even in the same scene (something eagle eyed viewers should have spotted in Thor: Ragnarok when Thor first encounters Stephen Strange with the refilling beer glass). And you could spot too many of Henry Cavill’s reshoots (some have postulated that most of Cavill’s scenes in JL were reshoot versions) which shows us that we may live in a digital world but there are limits to what we can accomplish digitally. Nobody knows how much Warner paid to digitally remove Cavill’s MI:6 beard but they did not get their money’s worth.

The reshoots more than anything underscores Justice League’s weakest link; it comes across not so much a start to finish complete film but rather a collection of scenes awkwardly stitched together. The narrative is jumpy. Explanatory transitions are few and far between.

And let’s not forget the CGI.

The CGI in Justice League is nowhere near as bad as it was in Batman vs. Superman but it’s still bad too much of the time. The green screen sky backgrounds in particular were embarrassingly bad, so fake looking that I found them distracting my attention from what was going on with the film.

Then there’s Steppenwolf. You can build a film around CGI characters, and films have done so, going back as far as Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and an all CGI Yoda. But they need to be of high enough quality otherwise the film starts to unravel. Steppenwolf fails that CGI test in one very critical area…lip-synching. Making CGI characters talk is hard and selling it effectively is tough to do under any circumstance. Tron 2 failed to make a CGI Jeff Bridges talk believably. Other characters’ CGI talking has been pulled off better.

It was bad enough that Steppenwolf is a very boring one dimensional villain…one that would make Marvel Studios proud (yeah, that’s a cheap shot but it’s an obvious-to-take cheap shot). He’s so bad even director Whedon couldn’t hold back from indirectly commenting on it, and caused a big shitstorm in the process.

It’s not clear who ran away from the Batman vs. Superman setup of an impending Darkseid arrival; with Steppenwolf being the advance man so to speak. Was it Warner? Snyder? Whedon? Some combination of the three? Regardless of who it was, run away Justice League has. By running away, the film robs Steppenwolf of a strong motivating factor for being here in the first place. The “substitute reason” that was cobbled together; hunting down the three Mother boxes, doesn’t hold up to simple narrative scrutiny when you start thinking about it. But this is hardly a problem confined to the DCEU as one could easily see if one looked at how Marvel treated the Infinity Stones before they were originally revealed to be Infinity Stones and how Thanos gave up one to Loki so that the Asgardian…uh…could wind up with two more than Thanos now had (0)? It makes no narrative sense whatsoever. But I digress.

So the reshoots left the film uneven, the main bad guy is unimpressive, the CGI leaves a lot to be desired, and yet I still left Justice League with an overall favorable rating, albeit using a diminished scale. The main reason is the performances of Gal Gadot, Ben Affleck, Jason Moma, and Ezra Miller.

Being a good actor means you have the ability to rise above the material you are handed and make something out of nothing. As she did in Batman vs. Superman, Gadot dominates every scene she’s in and that’s no mean feat when you have an Alpha male like Ben Affleck in your crew. After the success of Wonder Woman there were stories that Justice League got tweaked to feature Gadot more prominently. As that old sports anecdote goes, you ride the hot hand and, like it or not, Gadot is the best thing the DCEU has going for it right now.

Though I liked what Affleck did here, I actually preferred Affleck’s performance in Batman vs. Superman to this one. Batman is supposed to be the dour one on the team. On Justice League the script saddled the character (and Affleck) with this inexplicable-given-his-character reverence for the Man of Steel which echoed a different caped crusader’s feelings for a pre Two-Face Harvey Dent 12 years ago. The viewer got beat over the head with this one way bromance far too often in this film. At one point, I half expected Affleck to channel Gary Oldman and blurt out “We have to save Clark. I have to save Clark!”

I’m having a tougher time with Moma and Miller’s performances. I liked both of their performances but have issues with how their characters have been drawn up. It’s one thing for Aquaman to be this boiserous man-stud; an amphibious Wolverine if you will, minus the homicidal tendencies. It makes for an interesting contrast to the rest of the League. But there were a few too many times when he came across as just too over the top when a little more restraint would have served the character better. That, apparently, a lot of the character’s original arc got cut out of the film, I guess explains why I’m having trouble getting my head around the character on the screen.

That is not something I’m having trouble with as far as Miller’s character is concerned. The Flash’s character comes across crystal clear and that is the problem because as good as Miller is at conveying the character, it’s one I’ve seen before. All through the film I kept having flashbacks to, of all things, Justin Long’s character in Live Free or Die Hard. It’s a little scary how many personality traits both characters share. Miller even looks a lot like Long which makes the allusion all the worse.

I don’t find fault with either Henry Cavill or Ray Fisher’s performances but I have to give both incompletes. Cavill is not on the screen for very long and isn’t given too much to do except beat the crap out of Steppenwolf. Fisher’s problem is really his character’s arc. Cyborg is being played so subdued, and apparently a good chunk of the character’s arc got cut from the film, that I don’t feel like I’ve seen enough of it to get my head around it.

Reviews have come in and come in pretty mixed. I can’t disagree with most of the assessments while at the same time I don’t think they sink the film because of the performances of its stars. Opening weekend box office was under projections which of course means this film is being called a bomb already. This is somewhat expected given it was the tentpole film; Warner’s response to Marvel’s Avengers. And if the estimates are anywhere close to accurate it cost Warner closer to $300,000,000 than $200,000,000 to put out…and that price tag is before publicity and marketing costs kick in. So the stakes are very high and anything that comes up short of expectations is fair game for the bomb label.

But it’s still premature to go there just after opening weekend. This films may or may not have legs. It really depends on whether all the negative buzz keeps audiences away or word of mouth from people like me who liked the film, warts and all, will bring people in.

But it’s not premature to question the long term viability of the DCEU, as it is currently constituted, and Warner’s commitment to it. By my accounting four out of the fvie DCEU movies that have been made were disappointments. A 20% success rate is a lousy success rate. Regardless of how Justice League does in the box office there is little argument that it is far and away the most structurally flawed, haphazardly slapped together film the DCEU has put out up to now. We have reached a point where it is more than fair to question everyone involved from Warner’s team to D.C.’s to, yes, Zack Snyder.

Unfortunately the future looks neither bright nor certain for the DCEU. There is just one film coming out in the next 17 months; Aquaman. One. Film. And even that one is 13 months away. How could Warner and DC allow this momentum sapping movie scheduling to occur?

Furthermore, not every member of the League has a film officially on the schedule. Instead we have other franchises like Shazam and The Green Lantern Corps with firm release dates and other films like Black Adam, Flashpoint, Batgirl, and the looking more speculative by the day Ben Affleck Batman film on the horizon at some point. Maybe.

There’s just no ignoring the obvious; Marvel Studios has a set game plan and follows it with a dogged precision. Warner and DC’s strategy appears to be more along the lines of “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.” They can talk with confidence and pride about how they’re committed to the DCEU but when you see the state of things and what’s officially green lit and what’s still in the planning stages, the available evidence doesn’t match the rhetoric.

Don’t believe me? All you have to do is look at the closing credits scene from Justice League where Lex Luthor talks to Deathstroke about forming their own team of baddies. Warner’s current DCEU schedule through 2020 pretty much guarantees this plotline won’t be realized much if at all for years.