I watched Zak Snyder’s Justice League cut (slowly and pieces)

A few weeks ago I rewatched the whole of Marvel’s Infinity War + Endgame but I watched them episodically, in segments of either 20 or 40 minutes. I intended to write about watching it that way but the blog has been busy with other things. The short conclusion is that it is a good idea, Endgame in particular is a TV mini-series stitched together and has more of a story arc over a sequence of smaller narratives than a unified plot.

So I will give an uncharacteristic thumbs up to Zak Snyder. His Wagnerian sized version of 2017’s Jutsice League is really, really long — just short of four hours if you count the credits. However, Snyder has chopped it up into multiple parts with their own chapter headings and for reasons unknown, crammed the film into a TV sized aspect ratio. I don’t know if at some point HBO had suggested that it might be shown episodically but the film has been made to make it easier to watch in parts [ETA: apparently that was exactly the plan].

Does that make the film better? Yes but with a big enormous caveat. This is very much a Zak Snyder film and contains all his intentional problems. It is pretentious, has lots of slow-mo, odd music-video like sequences, many people starring off into the distance to express their inner feelings and, of course, a colour palette that’s best described as “metallic”. The dialogue is grim. The characterisation is angst. It’s a clever but disaffected teenage kid’s idea that goofy comic books are essays on Nietzsche.

This is still not a great contribution to superhero movies but it does have the positive quality of somebody getting to make their own big budget singular vision of what superhero movies could be.

The main plot is the same. Steppenwolf is a baddy come to find the three “mother box” macguffins. Batman and Wonder Woman need to recruit a team to stop him because Superman is dead. Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg get recruited. Stuff happens. They figure out the only way to stop the baddy is to bring Superman back to life and so on.

It really isn’t a complicated plot, so it seems absurd to say that it is improved by being made longer. The problem is the major beats in both versions of the film depend on a sense of momentousness. Snyder is aiming for epic fantasy as a genre, pushing for a kind of Lord of the Rings of superhero movies. Spending along time getting around to things happening is part of that. In the 2017 version of the film, Superman isn’t dead for very long before he’s alive again. In the Snyder cut, you’ve already watched the equivalent of a regular sized movie before Henry Cavill’s bare chest gets some screen time. That is a weak way to create dramatic tension but it is at least a way of creating dramatic tension. As a consequence the whole sequence does have more impact than in the 2017 version.

The extra space in the film is also a boon for Ray Fisher’s Cyborg. He’s got a lot of back story to cram in and as some of it impinges on the Mother Box Macguffins, it can’t be given as a single infodump. Longer scenes with him and his father round out his character a bit better and overall he feels more central to the film. By contrast, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman feels less present than in the 2017 film but I think this is just because in the 2017 film she had the benefit of a more dimensional character courtesy of her solo film.

Does the Snyder cut, validate Snyder’s vision for DC’s shared universe? No. It shows exactly why it wouldn’t ever work. At 242 minutes this is a thin story but as the 2017 version shows, it really does need a lot of time to tell it. Avengers: Infinity War (149 minutes) and Endgame (181 minutes) are longer when combined than Justice League but Infinity War alone covers most of the major plot elements of Justice League. Worse, this film was just meant to be the starting point of a bigger arc of which we get a bit of a peek into with a dystopian epilogue.

If you have access to a streaming service carrying it then worth watching in parts if you have a reasonable degree of Snyder tolerance. If you don’t, then I wouldn’t rush to sign up to a new service just to see it.