“The DCEU hasn’t failed...completely. There is no doubt about it. Wonder Woman hasn’t failed. Justice League may not fail. Warner Brother may not fail. If something embodied by some of the worst action movies ever made can bounce back with this much confidence, then it might just succeed. The DCEU is not dead yet.” ...I wrote that back in June with a feeling of optimism that could only be inspired by a genuine mythmaking exercise of the skill of Wonder Woman. I was a dumbass. Justice League is not only the worst superhero blockbuster of the year, it is a Batman and Robin level disaster of such hysterical proportions that unlike Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice it doesn’t inspire anger but more pity. That movie was trying. Justice League is so thinly sketched out that it compels one to realize that the only thing that motivates it creatively seems to be not being Batman v Superman. It doesn’t seem to matter if this movie was good, it only seems to matter that it existed. That it was a big movie that brought all of these characters together. There’s a tableau of all the characters standing across a CGI background late in the game of this movie that appears and all I felt was embarrassment. This wasn’t a team, this was a group of characters crushed together out of financial necessity, and it is sickening. It is this same horrifying crushing sense that basically defines the entire film. All of the characters, all of the special effects, all of the development just seems crushed in for no reason. This film was supposed to be three hours long and I’d gratefully want to see that version because at two hours, this is horribly uninvolving and just too light. Batman v Superman had the same problem, but it went on for three hours and that was because all of the scenes were terribly apathetic. Justice League feels apathetic because it is cut down too much. There are so many characters repeating lines that are supposed to be character arcs, almost like the movie doesn’t understand what develops characters. It just keeps chugging ahead. It doesn’t help that the cinematography is consistently kneecapping anything that could connect us to a scene. For most part the film is like staring at an image that claims to be symmetrical but never really is. Its distorting and confusing and matched up with the otherwise horrifying digital compositing, the film devolves into looking like a Justice League cartoon rather than an actual Justice League movie. The actors have nothing to hang a performance on either. Ben Affleck should be better in this film but any of the halfway interesting character that he made in Batman v Superman disappears within the nothingness that is his character in this movie. The same goes for Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, so compelling in her own feature, here sadly and suddenly not. Ray Fischer, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Diane Lane, Amy Adams, J.K. Simmons, and HENRY CAVILL all show up, and none of them can manage to make any of this drivel compelling. In fact, while CAVILL acts like the more traditional optimistic Superman that he should have been from the beginning, it just feels so incredibly stupid because the director and writers don’t know how to frame this optimism, which doesn’t contrast with anything else in the movie very well. I’ve waited four movies for Superman to actually grow up and it turns out the best way for him to do so to them was just die. That’s so horrible, horrible character work and SUPERMAN showing up fully formed is just as much of a stupid move as putting a halfway decent, if somewhat nostalgic, Danny Elfman score in the movie but not letting the audience hear it over the sound mix. The DCEU has failed. The rest will fail. There’s so much wrong with this movie that it forces one in the moment to laugh at the startling incompetence on display, but then slowly fall into a stupor predicated on the failings of this film, and many failures there are. This is a horrifying experience, an empty myth, a film categorized by finally showing us the correct version of a character so ingrained in culture that his last two films were superficially contextualized by that ingrained ness and him in his full form still sucks. Justice League is a bad movie, so bad that unlike its predecessor, it doesn't even deserve to be taken apart. GOODBYE DCEU.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |