Would have not made the movie better. DCEU messed up by rushing Doomsday , they rushed Supermans death, they rushed a Justice League movie and this would have rushed Darkseid.
To me Snyders version made sense but who knows if it would have been executed correctly. I doubt it since the execs meddled but this just makes the company look so confused and inept.
Gender: Male Location: 4th Street Underpass, Manhattan
I thought the film was at best good but all around just passable. It's a film that has multiple working parts, but never comes together as a satisfying cohesive whole. The whole Motherbox backstory seemed like it was ripped out of Lord of the Rings, and Steppenwolf's plot seemed like a mix of the terraforming plot from MOS and Ego from GOTG 2. There is a entire subplot about the effect of Superman's death making the world hopeless that has no emotional weight or pay off because it is only heard in dialogue and briefly seen. The entire first act felt weird, cutting between Batman recruiting the League, Steppenwolf stealing the Motherboxes, and his rushed backstory (although we do see a Green Lantern cameo, which I immensely enjoyed).
I think all in all, the films largest flaw is that such a large portion of the plot is reliant on the so called hopelessness and emotional impact caused by Superman's death, but because of his characterization in MOS and BVS, and his rushed and obvious ressurection, it holds no weight with the audience. It is difficult to understand how he gave the world hope to begin with considering that pretty much every human character with a speaking role in BVS either hated or distrusted Superman, and the sadness of his death holds no weight because he's only been dead since last year, and the audience knew he was going to be brought back. The Deus Ex MacGuffin way they brought him back further lowered the emotional stakes, with him having a brief fight with the JL for no reason other than to salvage the "Evil Superman" plot from the original script, even though it makes no sense in this one. As stated, there is no emotional weight, and the little opening credits montage and the scenes of the family only put in to give this films a shallow sense of stakes did not help. The Lois/Martha scenes were mainly annoying due to this lack of emotional weight, and they felt like melodramatic inconsequential wastes of screentime.
The actor who played cyborg sucked. He tried to be broody but came off as monotonous. I was highly disappointed that they never followed through on the "Cyborg can be used against us" concept despite it being mentioned several times. It would have given The film some tension. The Flash was okay, but some his humor was forced, with some of it being witty and funny, and some of it being random, talking about shit like brunch for no reason. I love Jason Mamoa, and he is great on Frontier, and I thought Aquaman was okay, but sometimes he took his tough guy to an almost ridiculous degree, and I was laughing during the climax when he was saying "boo yah" and "my man". The scene where he sits on Wonder Woman's lasso was funny though. The moustache CGI wasn't too bad in the scene that's being screencapped throughout the internet, but it is terrible in the opening scene where Superman is giving an interview he looks like he has the mouth of a reptile. Also there is a scene where Batman and Aquaman are talking while standing in front of an obvious matte painting background.
All in all as stated, a barely passable mess of a film that has absolutely no stakes to care about and thus no exhilarating moments. Also, comparing this to The Avengers, that film worked because until that point, we had never seen them together in a single fim. But with this, we already saw a team up and cameos in BVS, so that novelty didn't exist here, leaving just a shallow experience. All around, JL was a slightly salvageable clusterphuck.
Gender: Male Location: 4th Street Underpass, Manhattan
As far as the whole "How do you salvage the DCEU?" , I don't think you can. I honestly think that this film will hurt WW2 and Aquaman's BO, just as BVS did for this film.
This entire franchise has no creative force behind it. It's made purely on greed. Zach Snyder was the only one with any vision. His vision sucked, but that's only because like Trank and FF4, the studio picked the wrong person for the project. After utterly failing to rip off Marvels comedic tone with Green Lantern, they brought in Zach Snyder to give Superman the dark tone that made TDK trilogy and Watchmen so successful, not realizing of course that the dark tone of those films were due to the dark subject matter of their stories, rather than being sheer stylistic dressing. MOS, which I liked and consider the best of the MCU films due to having the best balance of structure and uniqueness, wasn't well received by a lot of people, so they forced him to make BVS instead of MOS, and when that failed, they forced him to retool JL on the fly because there wasn't enough time to fully rewrite its script, leading to this rushed BS.
Meanwhile, instead of using the opportunity to build up hype for JL, which as I stated in my previous post was near non existent since we already saw,a team up in BVS, they rushed out 2 films. Suicide Squad, a horrible GOTG rip off that unlike GOTG serves no greater purpose for the extended universe and is not good enough to stand on its own merit. And Wonder Woman, a CA:TFA/Thor ripoff that came out roughly as good as those films, but was overhyped as great due to being the most watchable film in the DCEU.
And now we are here. JL virtually flopped, and it seems to be all downhill from here. Ben Affleck, who was great and wasted as Batman, is gone, which hopefully means he will be making more Accountant movies. Aquaman doesn't come out until the end of next year, and in between then and now the bad word of mouth this franchise has will continue to grow. By time it comes out, the DCEU brand may have lost all viability, especially with Infinity War coming out next year as well. They will have probably completed their second WW by then, but again, will there be anybody who even care enough to go and see it? They honestly need to just reboot the whole thing after WW2 comes out, if not before.
There's a lot more salt from this movie than I expected. Especially since almost everyone here agrees that there wasn't really any excitement generated beforehand to warrant any real expectations from this given the existence of BvS and SS.
KMC Community Forums
Dec 3rd, 2017 11:11 PM
