Justice League Review

In spite of the fact that I quite literally fell asleep while watching Batman v. Superman, and that I have yet to see Suicide Squad, I somehow felt at least semi-obligated to see Justice League, and so I joined the crowds and went this past weekend.  As a result of that, I’m about to type a bit of a rant, adding my own voice to the chorus of misgivings about the DC universe’s latest flop.  As usual, I’ll try to keep it light in terms of spoilers.

The Justice League 2017 yearbook photo.

Starting with the extremely limited good: as a lover of good fight scenes, this is a difficult review/rant to write, as the action scenes in Justice League come off as incredibly competent overall.  While lacking the fast-paced hand-to-hand electricity of, say, Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier (seriously, check out this, and this), the visual style and use of slo-mo gives the fighting a similar feel to that of Wonder Woman (which I lauded here), and while the use of the Flash and Cyborg might not be as nifty as the filmmakers expected the result to be, the coolness and wow factor is there overall, with one real exception.  Well, two exceptions.

Ben Affleck returns as a largely ineffectual and somewhat derpy Batman.

First: Batman.  While Ben Affleck certainly isn’t bad as Bruce Wayne, he’s hardly good either, and on the whole I’d describe him as forgettable.  Setting his performance aside for a moment, though, the problem that looms even larger is the role Batman is forced to play in the central conflict of Justice League.  I’m not the biggest comic book fan in the world, and so I’m not sure if these are situations into which Batman is typically thrust, but his inclusion in grandiose cosmic fights against demi-gods, aliens, and various other mythical creatures comes off as silly, and in many cases his role in the fights themselves is way too minimal for such a central character (and arguably the Justice League’s leader) to have.  Even considering the film’s addressing of this quandary with the tongue-in-cheek “my superpower is that I’m rich” line early on, the scale oftentimes seems simply too large for the Dark Knight to operate effectively in, and watching him helplessly stealing an alien’s gun and shooting at the bad guys with it during Justice League’s pivotal ending scene just made me long for the simpler days of Nolan and Bale’s more grounded but more potent Batman (also addressed by Justice League in Alfred’s line about wind-up penguins).

Second: Aquaman.  With perhaps the most disappointing overall character arc, the most unexplained and unintelligible abilities, and saturated with some of the film’s many misses as far as humor goes, Jason Momoa’s rendition of Arthur Curry fell completely flat, though arguably not through any fault of the actor’s.  For starters, save one underwater scene, Curry operates entirely on land throughout the film.

One of the few scenes in which Aquaman is actually in water, which, you know, makes sense.

What?

I can understand wanting to use Aquaman, and I can understand the unique take on him being attempted, but what this take needs to do is at least try to make sense.  I was (perhaps mistakenly) under the impression that Aquaman and his fellow Atlanteans drew their godlike powers from the ocean, or being in the ocean, and I highly doubt I was the only one mystified by the DCEU’s Aquaman-related choices in this respect.  Watching him sky-surf a deceased bug man into the roof of a building and emerge unscathed, holding a super out-of-place-looking trident, is hardly what I envisioned.

Speaking more generally, another thing Justice League suffers from is a lack of connection to the characters.  While skipping origin stories can work (see Spider-Man: Homecoming), it can only work when the audience is already familiar with the characters being introduced.  Having never really been featured on the big screen, Cyborg is simply not on a level playing field with Peter Parker in this regard, and throughout Justice League I found myself wondering why I was even supposed to care what happened to Victor Stone if I barely knew who he was.  While other new characters get slightly more in the way of backstory (namely the Flash), Justice League feels incredibly rushed overall in this regard.  It knows it has 2 hours to get from Point A to Point B, and it differs greatly in the careful world-building of the MCU in that it seems to know that it’s late to the superhero movie party.  The Avengers was as great as it was because it brought together a team of heroes that had already been well-established in individual films.  Conversely, DC opted to skip this chore, and Justice League suffers greatly for it.

Wonder Woman and two other guys.

It’s not all bad, to be fair – Gal Gadot‘s Wonder Woman, who we already know and love, is as great and captivating as ever, especially in her opening scene and in basically all fights.  The future is similarly bright for Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen, who is sure to please audiences in a standalone film where his campy antics don’t clash so horribly with the ostensibly dark tone DC (and mostly Batman) continues to propagate.  In such an environment, Miller’s comedic brushstrokes just seemed forced, whereas they would have been more than welcome in a previous, more lighthearted origin story, or in any Marvel (or non-DC in general) joint.

While he could be smashing baddies with super speed, Barry Allen instead decides to playfully boop Wonder Woman’s sword.

Truly the most damning aspect of Justice League, though, is its absolutely preposterous dialogue, which ranges from the shameless and repeated use of badass hero colloquialisms (basically Batman in any fight scene) to the just plain weird (see literally any interaction between Henry Cavill’s Clark Kent and Amy Adams’ Lois Lane, namely the historically bad and completely pointless “you smell good” scene).  At times, the dialogue felt as though it wasn’t written, but instead was being uttered live by a seven-year old playing with Justice League action figures, which adds to the overall plastic feeling of the whole endeavor.  The good news is that there are plenty of unnecessary-feeling scenes to plop this dialogue into, and mixing this with the breathlessly rushed pacing results in an uneven and strange combination of a movie, the tone of which seems hopelessly confused throughout.

For now, what continues to ring true is that the DC cinematic universe remains the rudderless trust-fund kid of Hollywood franchises – it’s sitting on a veritable mountain of movie gold, but it’s either incapable or unwilling (or both) to capitalize on it.  Maybe – just maybe – the departure of Ben Affleck (and the subsequent rumored arrival of Jake Gyllenhaal) can get this crazy train back on track, but until then, the Warner Bros. tale of box-office woes appears doomed to continue.

Review: Wonder Woman

As the summer movie season winds down, I decided this past weekend to finally endorse the sole remaining stalwart bastion of the early-summer blockbuster parade and hit the theater to see Wonder Woman, and I wanted to leave a few thoughts on my experience here.

First off, I want to say that I was surprised by the number of people present in the theater, given that Wonder Woman had been initially released way back in June, exactly 3 months beforehand.  While the theater wasn’t sold out, and wasn’t exactly a megaplex either, it was definitely crowded, which for such a holdout has to be considered at least a mild achievement.  I had read in an article published on the first of the month that the Patty Jenkins-helmed DC venture had become the third-highest grossing Warner Bros. release ever (behind two other mammoth DC hits, Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises), but there’s a different between reading those words and seeing the evidence of the numbers in the form of a crowd.

Gal Gadot’s “I run the summer 2017 box office” face.  Also her Wonder Woman face.

Second off, when talking about this movie, I’m planning on drawing what I think are cogent parallels to the MCU, so if you’re a DC fanboy who has a problem with that – well, tough.  Having seen almost every comic book movie that has come out in the past ten years (only Thor: The Dark World, Suicide Squad, and Fox’s absolute stinker Fantastic Four have slipped through my fingers, as far as I’m aware), and having personally fallen asleep during both Man of Steel (which I expected more from, given Nolan’s production involvement) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, I feel at least remotely qualified to discuss Wonder Woman in such context.

The two MCU installments that can almost immediately be compared to Wonder Woman, for better or for worse, are Captain America: The First Avenger – comparable largely because of its real-world historic setting – and Thor, with its similar discussion of the merits and mythos of gods and demigods living and fighting amongst lesser men and women.  Regarding comparisons with the first, I simply found Wonder Woman to be a far more fun version of Captain America in terms of the World War I hijinks, namely those that take place in no man’s land (a scene which, bafflingly to me, was apparently nearly cut from the final film) and in Veld.  The combat is more gleeful (if not a bit wantonly destructive – destroying an entire church steeple in an effort to take out a single sniper comes to mind) and far more visually stylish, peppering in what I felt was a proper amount of slow-motion interludes that Zack Snyder – a producer here – is somewhat known for by now.

Watching a hot chick wreck German soldiers with nothing but a sword and shield (and occasionally a whip) is what the summer movie season is all about.

The characters are also notably more magnetic when juxtaposed with both Thor and Captain America, with Gal Gadot standing out both physically and charismatically as the lead.  Chris Pine provides a more-than-suitable foil as the American spy Steve Trevor, who proves to be a worthy temporary love interest to Diana Prince, albeit the far less visually pleasing party of the two.  David Thewlis also performs well as a British statesman who eventually plays a pivotal role in the movie’s action, while other minor characters – Trevor’s secretary Etta Candy (Lucy Davis), Arabian spy Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), Scottish marksman Charlie (Ewen Bremner, whom I recognized from The Rundown, of all things), and Native American smuggler Chief (Eugene Brave Rock) – form a capable and diverse supporting cast.  Also of note for a solid performance, though underutilized, is Robin Wright for her turn as Antiope.

From left: Sameer, Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman, and the Chief.  Inexplicably not pictured: Charlie.

As for the parallels to Thor, they can more readily be drawn in both the early scenes of the movie – detailing Wonder Woman’s origin story amongst the Amazon on the hidden island of Themyscira – and in the final major battle scene, during which Wonder Woman is forced to do battle with Ares, the god of war himself.  The 300-esque fight scene on the shores of Themyscira between the Amazon warriors and the German soldiers hunting Steve Trevor, which occurs about a quarter to a third of the way into the film, marks a significant change in tone that persists well into the latter half of Wonder Woman.  I found this departure to be pleasant, as I’m never really one for subplots involving demigods and mythology, nor origin stories lacking any sense of brevity.  For this reason, I found Thor to be largely tiresome aside from its excellent use of fish-out-of-water comedy – as I’ve already said, I shied away from Thor: The Dark World because of this, and I’m still on the fence about the much-hyped Thor: Ragnarok coming later this fall.  Simply put, I have a harder time relating to the plights and successes of a hero who isn’t, well, human, but Wonder Woman did a better job navigating this issue than Thor did.

This early scene marks a tonal shift that persists throughout the rest of the movie.  It also marks one of Robin Wright’s more badass moments.

To me, and as I’ve mentioned above, the high points in Wonder Woman occur during the World War I centered combat, giving Gal Gadot a real chance to flex her muscles in both the literal and figurative senses.  Similarly, these scenes give Patty Jenkins – now the female director with the highest ever U.S. opening, besting Sam Taylor-Johnson for Fifty Shades of Grey – ample time and space to demonstrate an excellent ability to paint a very grey and very bleak picture of war, along with early 20th-century London, which in this instance has all the charm and color of a Lemony Snicket book cover.

Overall, this is clearly a film that, while hardly bucking the various tropes of the countless comic book movies before it, manages to produce a well-executed and undeniably fresh perspective on a much-needed strong female character that will doubtlessly play a huge role in DC’s upcoming jaunts.  It’s well worth checking out if you find yourself near a theater that’s still playing it.