Zack Snyder’s Jus­tice League

The most notable thing to come out of the doomed 2017 iter­a­tion of Jus­tice League was a hash­tag. With­in weeks of the film’s release #ReleaseTheS­ny­der­Cut began trend­ing on social media, sparked by claims that the film Warn­er Bros had put out was not the one that Zack Sny­der had made.

Instead, it was the prod­uct of stu­dio inter­fer­ence and Joss Whedon’s involve­ment, who was para­chut­ed in by to ​“punch up” the script and lat­er retained all direc­to­r­i­al con­trol after Sny­der left the film in post-pro­duc­tion to be with his fam­i­ly fol­low­ing his daugh­ter Autumn’s death by sui­cide. Whe­don threw out most of Snyder’s orig­i­nal footage and car­ried out exten­sive reshoots, lead­ing to Mous­tachegate and essen­tial­ly poi­son­ing the DCEU well.

After ​“Josstice League” was met with over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive respons­es from die-hard fans and crit­ics alike, Warn­ers nixed plans for fur­ther films in the vein of Marvel’s suc­cess­ful team-ups (six months after Jus­tice League, Avengers: Infin­i­ty War made $2 bil­lion at the glob­al box office), instead focus­ing on solo movies for their super­hero ros­ter. It was a smart move: Aqua­man, Shaz­am! and Birds of Prey all received more favourable reviews. But the alba­tross of #ReleaseTheS­ny­der­Cut (RTSC) still hung around the studio’s neck.

Even though there were no offi­cial plans to release this fabled edit, fans cam­paigned loud­ly, gath­er­ing on the mobile plat­form Vero around their com­mon cause. They cre­at­ed an online peti­tion. They bought a bill­board in Times Square. They flew planes tow­ing ban­ners over Warn­ers’ offices. But more than just cham­pi­oning a Jus­tice League do-over, the RTSC war­riors also raised thou­sands of dol­lars for the Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion For Sui­cide Pre­ven­tion in Autumn Snyder’s name. Their ded­i­ca­tion to the cause attract­ed sup­port not only from Sny­der him­self but his cast too: Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa and Ray Fish­er all expressed hope that Zack’s ver­sion would even­tu­al­ly see the light of day.

In May 2020 the dream became a real­i­ty, with Sny­der announc­ing that the film would be released on HBO Max as Zack Snyder’s Jus­tice League. With a $70 mil­lion bud­get in hand, he set about (re)assembling his vision out of the chaos he walked away from four years ear­li­er: the result is a four-hour opus that rights some of the wrongs of the past but proves that no direc­tor is beyond reproach.

This redux feels more com­plete than the film that was rushed out three and a half years ago. There’s no tonal whiplash between mood­i­ness and forced com­e­dy (one of the studio’s orig­i­nal com­plaints, and a rea­son for Whedon’s involve­ment, was that Snyder’s ver­sion was too dark). Junkie XL’s score is leagues bet­ter than the one Dan­ny Elf­man cre­at­ed at Whedon’s behest. And cru­cial tweaks have been made to cer­tain char­ac­ters: Cia­rán Hinds’ extra-ter­res­tri­al vil­lain Step­pen­wolf gets a much-need­ed redesign that moves him away from his unfor­tu­nate goat resem­blance; he’s repo­si­tioned as the lack­ey to an Even Big­ger Bad in the form of inter­galac­tic despot Dark­seid (Ray Porter).

While casu­al view­ers might strug­gle to make sense of the thick-and-fast cameos that Sny­der crams in here, the more sea­soned com­ic book fans should be sat­is­fied, even if a ques­tion mark hangs over how much of the film can be con­sid­ered canon with­in the DC shared uni­verse. Rel­e­gat­ed to bit parts in Whedon’s cut, Aqua­man (Jason Mamoa), The Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fish­er) also get more to do this time around. Cyborg’s ori­gin sto­ry is estab­lished more thor­ough­ly and The Flash has a meet-cute with his future love inter­est (Kiersey Clemons, who is set to appear in a stand­alone The Flash movie which begins shoot­ing this year).

While it requires some men­tal gym­nas­tics to work out how the events of Zack Snyder’s Jus­tice League fit in with the films that have come and gone in the inter­im, it does at least feel like Sny­der cares about the char­ac­ters he’s includ­ing, and that they serve a pur­pose. That said, the film’s final half-hour is essen­tial­ly a whis­tle-stop cameo tour, to the extent that even Bat­man starts to look a bit weary when intro­duc­ing us to yet anoth­er mys­tery hero.

The post-cred­its scene from the orig­i­nal cut is spruced up and insert­ed into the actu­al film this time around, while anoth­er small but notable addi­tion was based on a fan the­o­ry Sny­der came across about a minor char­ac­ter from Man of Steel. It’s unabashed fan ser­vice, and rein­forces the view that Zack Snyder’s Jus­tice League was always intend­ed for the direc­tor and DC’s most ardent fans, rather than as a build­ing block for what­ev­er comes next.

Of course, it still could be, if the film goes down well with a gen­er­al audi­ence. Jus­tice League made back $650 mil­lion on its $300 mil­lion bud­get (not tak­ing into account mar­ket­ing costs and the­atre cuts) so per­haps Warn­ers sees this $70 mil­lion upgrade as a small price to pay for the extra pub­lic­i­ty and inter­est gen­er­at­ed by the release of this much-fet­ed cut. Con­sid­er­ing the state the DCEU is cur­rent­ly in, they don’t have much to lose. But even with all that mon­ey, and the sense that it feels more like the vision of a sin­gle direc­tor rather than a film made by com­mit­tee, Zack Snyder’s Jus­tice League falls some way short of greatness.

The over­all look of the film remains over­whelm­ing­ly dark, to the extent that the details of the cos­tume design are often lost. At times it’s impos­si­ble to see what’s hap­pen­ing. While this aes­thet­ic worked up to a point in Man of Steel, it feels less in keep­ing with the tone of Jus­tice League, which is sup­posed to feel more hope­ful. It’s also very much a stan­dard good­ies-ver­sus-bad­dies sto­ry, as much as Sny­der has teased new ele­ments; no amount of addi­tion­al footage and reed­it­ing can sal­vage a premise this unre­mark­able. To add insult to injury, the per­ma-growl that both Bat­man and Dark­seid speak with makes it hard to deci­pher what they’re say­ing, let alone how it relates to the plot.

It’s a mys­tery as to why Sny­der felt the need to make the film four hours long, aside from the fact he’s nev­er passed up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use slow motion (there are five such sequences in the film’s first hour alone). The char­ac­ters are con­stant­ly shown dis­cussing their plans (after the Ama­zo­ni­ans decide to light the bea­con to warn Earth about Step­pen­wolf, we return a full 20 min­utes lat­er to find them still faffing around), and there’s the recur­ring issue of all the CGI set-pieces look­ing iden­ti­cal. While this isn’t a prob­lem unique to Jus­tice League, it does sug­gest a lack of ambi­tion. An ear­ly fight scene looks like it was ripped straight from 300 – there’s even a char­ac­ter who bears a strik­ing resem­blance to Ger­ard Butler.

Then there’s the baf­fling dream sequence that occurs towards the end of the film, set­ting up a sequel that plain­ly isn’t com­ing. It could have been moved to ear­li­er in the film and retooled to give some sig­nif­i­cance to the plot, but instead its awk­ward place­ment as an unnec­es­sary epi­logue feels like Sny­der mak­ing an ​‘and here’s what you could have won!’ jab at the stu­dio who lost faith in him after Bat­man v Super­man. It sim­ply makes no nar­ra­tive sense.

Zack Snyder’s Jus­tice League ends with a ded­i­ca­tion: ​“For Autumn”. If return­ing to this project and fin­ish­ing it the way he intend­ed has helped Sny­der to process the loss of his daugh­ter, more pow­er to him. In inter­views, he has spo­ken can­did­ly about his expe­ri­ences and comes across as a nice enough guy with a good sense of humour. But it’s ulti­mate­ly a shame that this per­son­al­i­ty isn’t reflect­ed in this relent­less­ly ugly slog. His Jus­tice League is over­long, mis­er­able and sig­ni­fies noth­ing oth­er than the poten­tial of fan­dom to influ­ence top-lev­el cre­ative decision-making.