Under any other circumstances, I might begin by saying it's good to be back; as we all know however the very fact I'm here means there's some invective that needs spitting. It has been a while since I last posted for a host of reasons ranging from my terrible outlook on life in the middle of a pandemic to my long held belief that nobody really gives much of a shit about this other than me and if I wasn't bothered who else would be? I know, I know, boo hoo, woe is me, tell it to Myspace Emo kid. Truth is that I burnt out and now I've applied some lotion I'm ready to start being unreasonably salty about things all over again. I can feel your tears of elated horror, they sustain me.
I had toyed with using this blog as a platform to voice my ever increasing litany of annoyances with the world but thankfully I decided better of it and still intend to limit it to cinematic grievances. What then might have roused me suitably to dust the old Man Suit off, repair the moth eaten bits and don it afresh for another round of pithy diatribes?
Justice League: The Snyder Cut.
But of course, what else? My Justice League post is around here somewhere (I'll link it at the bottom if I can be arsed) and those of you who read and remember it; it was not polite. Joss Whedon's cut was a shambling, nonsensical, incoherent garbage fire that made any right-minded soul recoil in horror at just how cripplingly dull it was. Imagine the rejoicing then, that Zack Snyder announced he was resurrecting his own original cut of the movie with some two hours of new footage and that thanks to The Internet it was going to be released to a worldwide audience. For the non mathematicians amongst you, that's nearly double the run time of the first cut and clocks in at 3 hours and 52 minutes. I don't think it's pride I'm feeling, but I can legitimately say I have watched every second of that run time and it was enough to drag my sorry ass out of my self-imposed retirement and back onto a keyboard. Buckle up buttercup.
It's difficult to separate out all the things I want to say if I'm honest. JLTSC is a giant and unwieldy beast, such as it is and is separated into six parts and an epilogue, each with it's own title card. In the spirit of the DCEU, maybe I'll do similar.
THE PLOT
Would this have worked better as a limited series? Arguably yes, but also no, as the plot is absolutely designed to be a movie. I mean, that is being generous to an extent; the plot here is literally the exact same as about a million other movies inside and out of the Superhero genre. Big bad wants to destroy the world, needs a macguffin to do so, heroes must prevent the use of said macguffin. How in Hell they managed to drag that out to nearly four hours is beyond me, but I can only assume they had a conference call with the producers of the Hobbit trilogy on how to string out a tiny amount of source material as much as humanly possible before it breaks and gets little bits of plot everywhere.
There is a lot of superfluous shit in here as well. Whole scenes of dialogue that have very little actual development, actions that seem to serve very little purpose and some stuff that is just outright weird. Why is the Icelandic woman creepily sniffing Aquaman's discarded jumper like some weird stalker with a little shrine of pebbles he touched, used tissues and toenail clippings? Why is Lois Lane sniffing Superman's cape longingly after it's been stored for however long and probably just has a faint musty smell? Why does she tell him he smells nice after he's been literally interred in the Earth for possibly weeks? Why is there so much sniffing going on Snyder? Everyone is a bit creepy in honesty, but we'll get to that.
The main macguffins are three Mother Boxes, which when combined and synchronised becomes The Unity, a neat little doomsday device. Fun times. These are of course all hidden conveniently on Earth, despite there being a cameo from a clearly alien Green Lantern and some actual Gods who could easily have hidden at least one Off-World somewhere remote. Randomly, there appears to be a scene where the already hidden boxes are dug up and re-hidden in plain sight which makes roughly zero sense and genuinely leaves me with no sympathy for their guardians when they inevitably kick the bucket. Roughly 2 hours in we get another macguffin, but it doesn't come up again until right at the end so they were obviously saving it for a sequel, which I can only assume would have a runtime of 3 weeks and has to be viewed in shifts. At one point early on, they try and set Batman up as a possible bad guy, even though the audience already knows it wasn't him and then about an hour and a half later that whole thing is forgotten about after a brief social meeting around the Bat Signal.
The oddest thing is quite how many of the story beats seem to be directly lifted from other movies and particularly Marvel movies (DC you shameless hacks). The parallels between Darkseid and Thanos are far too close for comfort (I'm sure a comic fan will point out which property stole what from whom originally but we're talking films here, get back in your basement), the Mother Boxes and the Infinity Stones, The Anti-Life Equation and the Infinity Gauntlet. Of course they're different, I'm not a complete idiot, but the feel and purpose is there. There are Cyborg/Vision similarities, and as some smart cookie pointed out even some of the lines are so similar it beggar's belief.
THE CHARACTERS
These are classic comic book characters, some of whom have been favourites for decades, with rich, storied histories and a fan base so rabid they'll savage you in your sleep for even hinting that their idols suck. Pretty much every one of the Justice League is portrayed here as a bit of a dick. The Flash saves a woman from a car wreck ostensibly because she's pretty and during the rescue we get a super slowed down view of him letching on her like a creepy old dude near a school yard. Considering he's meant to be the comic relief, he is also not funny. At any point. His Dad in jail however drums up the most actual emotion in the entire film, so at least there's that. Aquaman is a borderline alcoholic with Daddy issues and a penchant for taking his shirt off spontaneously for very little practical reason. Cyborg has Daddy issues because his Dad is a dick, and they manifest predominantly as Cyborg being your average Emo teenager. Even when he does a good thing for a random poor lady, he acts all stalkerish about it. Batman is a smug prick at various points because he's Bruce Wayne so of course he is. Superman is always a dick, so it's barely worth mentioning. I think the only character who isn't actually an outright dick is Wonder Woman, but she's almost entirely there to spout reams of plot exposition and cringe inducing 'empowering' lines of dialogue direct from those terrible memes with a sunset and an unrelated titbit of pseudo-philosophy. She's the cinematic equivalent of that "handwritten" script font that everybody uses on wedding stationery nowadays. You know the one I mean.
Steppenwolf is much more prevalent here than in the original cut, but is also pulled directly out of the draw labelled Generic Superhero Movie Villain. His motivation to destroy the Earth appears to be solely to get back into favour with his boss which makes him a snivelling little shit more that a terrifying foil for the heroes. Stereotypically wildly overpowered until the third act like all good bad guys, when he gets completely Nerfed against foes he handled easily only a few hours ago. Superman has always been completely overpowered and dull, so effectively you spend the best part of three hours waiting for the inevitable ass-kicking to happen and when it does it has the emotional impact of being smothered in cold, damp flannels and gently prodded by an old schoolmate you never really liked but got on well enough to say 'hi' to. Darkseid, considering he's the most hyped of all the DC villains and one of the major selling points of this movie, is a cameo essentially. So is DeSaad, although most casual viewers (myself included) would have been hard pressed to know who he was from the comics. In fact there are a bunch of characters here that amount to nought but cameos ( I assume they were angling for a sequel). Martian Manhunter crops up twice for no real reason, Deathstroke appears at the end for a couple of scenes that genuinely feel like DVD extras, Lex Luthor is the same and so is the Joker. I won't linger, but Jared Leto's Joker is still shit, his inclusion here is utterly pointless and that's my final word on the matter. He doesn't even say the stupid line from the trailer that all the fanboys got so worked up about. I guess that's my final word on the matter.
THE DESIGN/GRAPHICS
The year is 2021. PS5 and Xbox Series S are out and are making video game graphics closer to real life than ever before. A few years ago, artists created a model for Thanos in the MCU that was hyper-real enough that light refracted of his stubble and the pores in his skin stretched as he moved. Hell, in 1996 Spielberg created dinosaurs that still stand up to intense scrutiny today. And yet here, in The Snyder Cut, we have Steppenwolf who looks like a Bay-Former had an illegitimate offspring with a ball of plasticine that was subsequently involved in some sort of accident in a tin foil factory. Cyborg looks like the remaining human half of his face is suffering from some sort of latency and is constantly attempting to catch up to the cyborg half. Even his cyborg eye is slightly higher than his human eye in some shots, making me think they used some sort of prosthetic to key off in post which had an eyehole for the actor and skewed the proportions. Everything here looks like it was rendered for the cut scenes of the accompanying video game tie-in (that thankfully doesn't exist). This is what all those self-righteous DC fans were harping on about for all this time? To say it feels unfinished and rushed is first of all an understatement, but also King of Ironies when you consider the run time.
THE SCORE
I've seen so many social media posts blathering on about how great the score to this movie is, but having heard it I'm worried there's been a spate of assaults resulting in head injuries around the globe that nobody is reporting on. In isolation, I'm sure that some of these songs are listenable and that the instrumental score is well composed, but when you line them up with the movie, it's just nonsense. Driving drums segue into atmospheric whispy vocals in complete juxtaposition to the action on screen (Bruce Wayne walks across a room then has a conversation with Wonder Woman. Drama), everyone who dies gets some breathy version of a classic or some newly-scrawled breathy warble-song. Almost without fail, whenever Wonder Woman does anything other than plot exposition there's the same pseudo-ethnic inspired vocal refrain that's so intrusive and so forgettable at once that you'd need a technical degree to work out how that's even possible. As much as you might like Hallelujah! as a song, it sounded out of place on the trailer and the terrible, breathy, semi-acappella version over the end credits is just a final insulting nail in the coffin of the dignity you just ransacked watching this crap over that last 4 hours.
DEUS EX SUPERMACHINA
I could have lumped this in with the plot, but it deserved its own entry. Literally every moment of peril, danger, imminent doom, slight discomfort, abject perplexation, or trapped wind is solved by another superhero showing up or someone exhibiting a power or skill from out of the blue (or briefly foreshadowed earlier on). Wonder Woman shows up randomly in London to foil a completely unrelated terrorist plot. Aquaman turns up to save Wonder Woman. Batman saves Flash. Flash saves Aquaman. Superman rocks up to save everyone. Lois saves Batman from Superman again, but this time with the power of love rather than the coincidence of their Mother's names. The Flash uses speed healing abilities he didin't have when he was injured early in the movie and then his magical but self-prohibited time reversing powers in a precise and exact fashion as if he'd done it a million times before. It's tedious and lazy writing.
SLO MO
Snyder loves his Slow Motion shots. Loves them like a brother. This movie would have been half the length if he'd have filmed things at normal speed. I get that it adds drama here or there but when most directors use it, it's sparingly or serves a specific purpose. Snyder does it because it's the only way he can breathe life and drama into a script so dry and dead someone from Texas tried to mount it on the front grill of their pick up. Superman calls Lois Lane 'Lo' and it's the most awkward thing I've seen committed to celluloid in months. Batman tells the Joker he 'will fucking kill [him]' and it's the second most awkward thing I've seen committed to celluloid in months. I wrote pages of notes while I was watching; you can pinpoint the moment I gave up when my notes just say
"This script was either written in crayon or excrement"
and then a few notes down
"Definitely excrement".
Back to my point though. Slow Motion is a privilege, not a right. Please use responsibly.
AT LEAST IT'S OVER
I could go on for pages (more) but I grow weary and I'm still not a t full strength after nearly four hours of drivel. Suffice to say, it isn't a completely terrible movie. It's shot, edited and directed in a more competent fashion than most of the direct to DVD shit you can get in ASDA. It is still a very bad move. I suppose the only question that really matters is:
"Is it better than the Whedon Cut?"
That's a really difficult question to answer. In simple terms yes, it is; only in the same way that being stabbed in the guts is better than having your legs torn off in a horrendous industrial accident. You don't want either, but one option is just about better than the other.
Thanks for sticking with it this far, assuming you did. Feel free to share this with everyone you like if you think they'd enjoy it and everyone you hate if you think it's suitable punishment for whatever heinous acts they've perpetrated on your person.
My rant on the Whedon Cut: https://angerinamansuit.blogspot.com/2018/04/if-there-were-any-justice-in-world.html
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