Justice League (2017)
Starring: Ben Affleck (Batman/Bruce Wayne), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman/Diana Prince), Ezra Miller (Flash/Barry Allen), Jason Momoa (Aquaman/Arthur Curry), Ray Fisher (Cyborg/Victor Stone), Henry Cavill (Superman/Clark Kent), Jeremy Irons (Alfred), Ciaran Hinds (Steppenwolf), Connie Nielsen (Queen Hippolyta), Amy Adams (Lois Lane), Diane Lane (Martha Kent), Jesse Eisenberg (Lex Luthor), Joe Morton (Dr. Silas Stone), Amber Heard (Mera), Billy Crudup (Henry Allen), JK Simmons (Commissioner Gordon), Joe Mangianello (Slade Wilson/Deathstroke)
Directed by: Zach Snyder, Joss Whedon
SPOILER ALERT!!!
I am going to spoil the heck out of this movie, so if you haven't seen it and you don't like spoilers, STOP READING NOW!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
I finally got to see Justice League last night, two weeks after it debuted. I'll say right now, I liked it. I was smiling a lot throughout the film and had a big grin on my face by the end.
I've heard many online comments about how it met with mixed reviews and hasn't had the box office figures that Warner wanted. Well, I don't care. Movie studios have irrational expectations about box office figures for movies. It's amazing that they're ever satisfied. I think most movie reviewers write like cranky old farts who want every movie to be Citizen Kane. I thought Citizen Kane was boring and I couldn't finish watching it. I like movies to entertain me, and sometimes move me, and I want to leave the theater feeling good. Justice League did that for me.
Here are the things about Justice Leaque did that made me happy: it formed the Justice League (even if they were never called that during the movie). It had characters working together to save the world. Everyone got to show off their powers, including Aquaman, who was not just a guy who can talk to fish. They got over their initial reservations and disagreements and didn't spend the whole movie trying to figure out what to do. They also smiled and laughed, all of them, even Batman.
I know some people are bothered by Batman not being the grumpy man of few words from many of his animated appearances, or the angsty Batman from the Christopher Nolan films, but I like Batman having a sense of himself as the odd one out in a world of these superhuman beings. He's like the audience surrogate. I also liked that he realized he can't do it forever, and I hope the future DC films follow up on that thought. To bring the DCU movies out of the dark place they'd gone, Batman had to lighten up, and I'm okay with that.
I know some other people are also bothered by the idea that Diana spent a century moping about Steve Trevor, too. But the DC movie universe has established that no one had ever seen a superpowered being prior to the appearance of Superman, so they had to explain how no one had seen Wonder Woman since WWI some way.
Initially I was a bit bothered that none of the characters but Batman and Superman were ever referred to by their superhero names. But after I thought about it, it made sense. Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg were just making their first public appearances, so they wouldn't have superhero names. No one called Diana Wonder Woman during her solo movie, either.I do hope the trend of always addressing each other by their real names doesn't continue if there are other Justice League movies, though.
One trend carried over from the Nolan Batman films that I particularly delight in is Snarky Alfred. I enjoyed Michael Caine as Alfred in those films, but Jeremy Irons as the ultra-competent and sharp-tongued Alfred is a joy, and I like how there is clearly more of an equal relationship between adult Bruce and Alfred. It feels like a grown-up version of the Alfred from the Gotham tv series. JK Simmons was nice as Commissioner Gordon, too. I regret that he didn't get more screen time, but this is not a Batman movie so the focus shouldn't just be on Batman's supporting cast. Having time to show Barry Allen visiting his father in prison and Victor Stone working out some resentment with his dad was good, too. I felt like the whole theme of the film was teamwork, and how one person can't do it all, as Bruce implies to Aquaman when they first meet, and that theme was exemplified well by showing the relationships between these characters and other people in their lives.
Of course, you can't have a Justice League without Superman, but the film surprised me by bringing him back earlier and in a different manner than I had expected. I thought he was just going to burst out of his grave in Kansas during the last five minutes, revealing that he wasn't quite dead after all and his Kryptonian physiology had just been regenerating slowly because he didn't have access to sunlight. Instead the team had to make a hard decision, with Batman pushing the hardest to use Kryptonian tech and a Mother Box to reanimate him. I thought that was an interesting twist on Batman's attitude in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but obviously if we'd gone on with that version of Batman he would never have wanted to work with any of those people. It seemed right that Bruce would be the one to suggest it. It would have been out of character for anyone else, even if he did get the idea from Cyborg. Bruce is the tactician, and finding a way to bring in the biggest weapon is a tactic.
I also really enjoyed that the "Big Guns" he called in to calm an angry freshly-revivified Clark was not a kryptonite shard this time, but Lois Lane. That reinforced the theme of family and relationships again.
The film had a lot of fun with Barry Allen as kind of a second audience surrogate, the part of the audience that was geeking out over the superheroic antics. I'm a big fan of The Flash television series, where Barry is a well-adjusted and competent young man, but the movie version isn't that same person. He's been suffering without his dad, he doesn't have a surrogate family, and gaining his powers has made it hard for him to deal with ordinary life. One of my favorite scenes was the team finding Steppenwolf holding hostages in a tunnel, and Barry being too scared to act until Batman told him to save just one person. It was a good Batman line, and it was the right direction for Barry. He's not the guy who punches people, he's the guy who saves people from punches. Having Superman notice Flash zipping up from behind him while being simultaneously pummeled by everyone else was a great scene, too; Barry's comical surprise at realizing Superman could see him was perfect. So was having the movie end with the two of them having a race. That's happened before in the comics and in the Justice League Adventures animated tv series, and it is always charming to me.
Now I can't say the film was entirely without flaws, but the quibbles I have with it are few. Probably the biggest is the foolishness of casting a fine actor like Ciaran Hinds as your villain and then covering him in CGI and vocal distortion so that it could be anyone acting that part. I know Steppenwolf is much larger than a normal human, but there are practical ways they could have done that, the same way Marvel has Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk in their movies. I would also have liked Steppenwolf to be fleshed out a bit more. The movie needed a villain like Loki, with a personality, instead of a generic bad guy wanting to destroy the world.
I also felt that it would have been better to have the final big fight happening in or near a bigger population center, rather than a largely abandoned city somewhere in Eastern Europe that was obviously meant to be Chernobyl. I'm guessing they wanted to get away from the huge fight between Superman and Zod in Metropolis during Man of Steel, and maybe not have to deal with all the property damage. And perhaps they also wanted to point out further the detail that Aquaman comments on, that the people who live there only do so because they have nowhere else to go. The Justice League aren't just heroes for the rich and famous or for big cities in First World countries. They are heroes for the entire planet, even parts of it the rest of the world pretends don't exist.
There are a couple of really minor complaints in addition to these, the first of which is the Henry Cavill mustache mess. Apparently Cavill had grown a 'stache for another role, and wasn't permitted to shave it off for his scenes in this movie. So they digitally removed it, which ended up making him look a bit weird. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't heard about it in advance. I had also heard in advance about the Amazon bikini costumes that were designed for this movie. The movie really didn't need that, and it seemed like a poor choice, thought not enough to ruin the movie for me.
Those complaints aside, I really did like this movie. I didn't feel any of the characters were too far from their comic-book origins, it made the setting feel like a bigger world, one that contains Themyscira and Atlantis within it even if the rest of the planet doesn't know about them, it made Darkseid an ominous looming threat, Batman stopped being such a jerk, Aquaman learned to play well with others, Barry has some friends, and Diana will stop hiding from life. That's all good in my book. I hope DC doesn't give up on this just because it didn't make as much money for them as they wanted. I will certainly go to see another Justice League film as long as they keep it in this vein.
I give Justice League four thumbs up out of a possible five.
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