Why Didn’t I Hate Zack Snyder’s Justice League?

I broke a solemn vow last week, and that was to give Zack Snyder money. Instead of springing for HBOmax I bought Zack Snyder’s Justice League on DVD at the supermarket. I had a night away from the wife and kids and wanted to settle into an ironic hate fest which would kick off ten hours of YouTube diatribes on the train the next day. That was the plan. The problem was… I didn’t hate it.

I didn’t love it either, don’t get me wrong. Snyder and I have been on a deteriorating relationship since Man of Steel. I loved his Dawn of the Dead remake, was on board for Watchmen, but was rather disgusted with Man of Steel, his unheroic reinvention of the quintessentially heroic superhero. The blog post I wrote on the movie was my second most read post, hitting two thousand reads in the first month of posting. From the comments, I apparently vocalised what a lot of people felt about the movie but were unable to articulate–people didn’t like it, but they didn’t know why they didn’t like it. My petitions did not reach Snyder’s ears however, because Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was even worse, so bad that I even enjoyed it. I watched it with a movie reviewer friend of mine and we giggled all the way through. Over the following year I loved listening to the dissections on my podcasts and YouTubes parsing all the mistakes and wrong takes on the story and characters (the best is MovieBob’s 3-part 5 hour epic take down). I wrote a bog about that as well, on Snyder’s inability to even understand heroism.

Justice League (2017) I didn’t even bother to comment on. The lines had been drawn, the camps had been entrenched, we all went into it with formed opinions. Personally, I found it excruciating and had to watch it in five sittings.

This was where I was when I decided to sit down with the ostensibly uncompromised vision of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which is a fitting swan song for DC’s attempted challenge to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s continued industry dominance. This is to say that it is a glorious elevation of style over substance–almost. There’s actually a compelling narrative in Cyborg’s origin and development and Ray Fisher did a fantastic job of walking an almost impossible line of self-pity and rising inhumanity while still feeling relatable and not annoying. (To me, that’s the movie. Ezra Miller also got more of an arc, but I DID find him annoying.)

The main plotline was completely nonsensical but also happily unburderning. It was the standard fare of “get the thing and put the thing on the thing” (multiplied by 3) and the writers were too lazy to complicate it beyond that so I never felt like I was wasting brain power on trying to make it fit. 

Or maybe I was just tired of taking it seriously–even serious enough as a joke. One of my favourite Chesterton quotes is “…Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.” The flip-side of that is that the opposite of serious is not serious. And this movie is not serious–isn’t it? I mean, it can’t be in total earnest, can it? Part of the draw of Zack Snyder is the draw of style over substance, elevating the art above meaning. Those that like these movies like just switching off their brains and letting it wash all over them. That’s what you have to do in order to enjoy these things. Oh, they’ll say that these are more intellectual films than the Marvel movies, that they are a more morally ambiguous universe, that they’re movies for grown-ups, not kids, but all of that is hollow posturing when you stack, say, BvS to Captain America: Civil War, which is not a perfect movie by any stretch, but seems to so effortlessly achieve what BvS completely agonises over and then fails to do, which is to attempt a discussion at the double edge of heroism and those with a god complex. Snyder himself doesn’t seem to credit his audience with much intelligence at least, since he holds the audience’s hand through every single action of the movie, right down to explaining every action that leads to Clark Kent being handed a checked shirt to wear, and reiterating the evil villain’s plan to get the things a good two or three times… and then having Wonder Woman explain it all again.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) is a much better movie than The Justice League (2017), but that’s true of most movies. It manages to three times as long but only a third as painful, and that’s something of a wonder in itself. But I wonder if this painlessness is really the real trick at play here. As Nick Mason from The Weekly Planet put it best, the sensation of watching “ZS’s JL” is the same sensation as watching a “making of…” documentary. You see the effects, you enjoy the actors, you get the flavour of entertainment without the meat of excitement, or any sort of passion. And being four years removed from Justice League, and five from BvS, there’s a kind of nostalgia for a passed mini-age of cinema history. Batman has been recast, as has the Joker, and it’s only a matter of time for the rest. Sure, we’re going to get The Flash, but that’s shaping up to be the post-modern subversion of the Snyder/Nolan iteration of DC, and we learned in film school that subversion is the last stage of genre development before reinvention–and we’re about to get the reinvention with 2022’s The Batman.

I think the sum total of Zack Snyder and his movies amount to this quote from Macbeth, “A poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: … a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But hey, if all you’re wanting is some insignificant sound and fury, then it’s hard to find anything else more palatable and less taxing than this overblown extravagance, and isn’t that a big reason of why we love cinema? Because of the extravagance? Sure, there are some artists that are able to marry spectacle with pathos, but where do you turn when you’ve watched all of them? 

 Or what if you’re too numb to feel and you just want to be shouted at for hours on end?

You pop on a Zack Snyder DVD, that’s what you do.

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