Although it’s Batman (Ben Affleck) who largely inches the plot of Zack Snyder’s Justice League forward, it’s the Flash (Ezra Miller) who’s the key to understanding this new version of 2017’s Justice League. Capable of moving so fast that time slows down for him, Barry Allen’s alter-ego perceives reality in a way that’s particularly attuned to Snyder’s digitized world of comic book fantasy. The director’s penchant for macho spectacle tempts comparisons with action filmmakers like Michael Bay, but Snyder is a stylist of poses, not a composer of movement. Like the Flash, he delights in watching moving things come to a halt.
This re-edited and partially re-conceived and re-shot version of Justice League repeatedly, almost compulsively, enacts different ways of slowing its momentum—evident in the ossification of its heroes into staid figures, the creeping inertia of its aimless plot, and the entropic dispersal of digital objects into particles. Almost every major action taken by both superheroes and supervillains in this “Snyder Cut” is captured in slow motion or decelerates to a near-stop. The characters and settings, wholly or partially composed of digital animation or compositing, look terrible when they’re in motion. Despite Snyder and cinematographer Fabian Wagner washing virtually every color out to a sickly gray, the seams between the physical and the digital are made apparent when the movement in the frame illustrates a lighting mismatch or the uncannily smooth surface of a digital object. When they move, the images are awkward, even ugly, so it’s no wonder they tend toward stillness.
This new Justice League features an opening two hours mostly consisting of scenes that could be interchanged with each other with little effect on the story’s coherence. Batman has had visions of an alien invasion (as depicted in Snyder’s earlier Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) and is recruiting a team of superheroes to fight the looming “war.” He has no way of knowing this, but his preemptive militarization of superherodom is justified, as an early scene shows the alien-like Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds)—a humongous, grayish figure with fearsome horns, decked out in a spiky, seemingly living battle armor—invading the island of the Amazons and stealing one of the heavily guarded artifacts called Mother Boxes.
A coherent plot progression, though, doesn’t really coalesce from Batman’s quest. Sometimes we’ll peer in on a supporting character like Lois Lane (Amy Adams) running errands and looking forlorn, in scenes that add nothing to those before or after them, but which may set up a scene to come two hours later. To help the viewer cope with the lack of a solid through line connecting most of these scenes—the lack of a sense of movement—the film is broken down into six parts and an epilogue, each with their own title card and subtitle (for example, “Part 2: The Age of Heroes”). Despite this attempt to lend a semblance of structure to the dissociated scenes that comprise the film’s first two hours, watching these first few acts feels like treading water—sometimes quite palpably, as a fair share of them are set in or near the murky underwater kingdom of Atlantis, home to Aquaman (Jason Momoa).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM-Bja2Gy04
One scene buried in the muddled first two hours of Zack Snyder’s Justice League illustrates the alliance between the perspective of the Flash and that of the film, with rather distressing implications. Outside a dog-walker’s office where the hapless Allen is applying for a job, a young woman (Kiersey Clemons) makes eyes at him, though the exchange of glances is so poorly directed that it takes a few beats to recognize that that’s what she was doing. Immediately thereafter she crashes her convertible into the tail-end of a tractor trailer and is catapulted into the air. Allen races to her rescue, and time slows down. Before plucking her slow-moving body to safety, he stops to admire her face from below, her petrified expression looking somehow peaceful when frozen, and reaches out to lightly touch her hair. It’s not only a flagrant fetishization of a helpless woman, but also a beautification of the moment of death, which seems to be intended to somehow endear us to the youthful Allen.
The film’s conventional ways of appealing to viewers—the Flash’s man-child bumbling, Aquaman’s tough-guy comebacks—clash with its fascination with death and dissipation. Allen’s self-effacing one-liners notwithstanding, the heroes are little more than impervious statues who stand outside of any normal understanding of life and death, and even take it on themselves to exercise fatal power over others. That’s right, these heroes kill. The introduction of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) features her gratuitously hurling a hostage-taker skull-first into a wall, turning his head to jelly, and then blowing the leader (Michael McElhatton) of a group of terrorists into smithereens. The scene depicts Wonder Woman as fast enough to deflect a volley of bullets from an automatic rifle, but she apparently can’t be bothered to non-fatally disarm and neutralize the bad guys. Her lust for death here is more than out of step with the character in Patty Jenkins’s two Wonder Woman films.
It might seem odd, then, that in the second half of the film these heroes fight to restore life. They resurrect the recently deceased Superman (Henry Cavill) in order to reclaim the Mother Boxes. It will also turn out that they need to stop Steppenwolf’s acquisition of the world-destroying “Anti-Life Equation” on behalf of his overlord, Darkseid (Ray Porter). Heroism in this universe means overcoming entropy, the dissolution of solid forms into chaos, by becoming impersonal, invulnerable, inorganic. The reborn Superman wears a dark suit that’s been drained of the lively colors associated with the character, and he’s so powerful that he barely needs to move to vanquish any given foe. Shielding the world from destruction comes to mean preserving the cold, stiff self, not necessarily saving life. The sixth member of the Justice League, Cyborg (Ray Fisher), may be another key to the Snyderian worldview in this respect, as he was transformed into a machine-man by one of the Mother Boxes, which are described as kind of matches in reverse, in that they can “turn smoke back into a house.”
Our heroes stand firm by the time the epilogue rolls around, but the world of the film seems none the brighter: At all moments, Snyder’s imagery threatens to degrade into the kind of indistinguishable gray mass that real-world scientists say awaits our universe at its entropic endpoint. If this all sounds dull and oppressive, that would almost seem to be the point. Prominent among the changes that Snyder has implemented, relative to the 2017 version of the film that featured cuts and re-shoots overseen by Joss Whedon, is to remove much of the anodyne “fun” that the Avengers mastermind incongruously inserted into what turns out to be a dour, proto-fascistic vision of mythical violence exercised in an utterly fallen world. Willfully unstructured and emphatically stationary, Zack Snyder’s Justice League could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.
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