Justice League Movie Review: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

 

To fully enjoy this review, I will break it down into three parts – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Zack Snyder’s directorial vision really came to light in this movie. His somewhat predictable ways were less seen, and in all honesty, I really believe he came through with both the movie and the script. Also, it clearly helped to have Christopher Nolan in on the project as well.

Ben Affleck gave another stellar performance as The Batman with more gadgets, toys, and no killing of criminals and villains like we saw in BvS: Dawn of Justice. Well except you are a parademon, after all, some bats eat bugs, right

Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman came off her own very successful standalone movie to give more of the same, and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman gave a performance that will no doubt make him become a fan-favourite (compared to the his reception from the comics and cartoons) as well as one of the most anticipated DCEU superheroes.

Ezra Miller’s Flash brought the much-needed comedy the DCEU had been lacking, because fans half-thought the Justice League movie will be just another dark-themed, grim, and dull movie like other DCEU movies before. Especially with The Joker in Suicide Squad not bringing any comedy whatsoever.

Ray Fisher’s Cyborg was infused nicely into the movie. His growth was recognised for one who still had no firm grip on his powers, and there will no doubt be more to him when his stand-alone movie comes out in a couple of years.

Lastly, Henry Cavill’s Superman’s resurrection brought in an entirely different Superman from the ones we had become used to in the prior movies. The moody, brooding, sulking Superman was left in the grave and a smiling, laughing, happy, and witty Superman was resurrected (kinda symbolic, don’t you think? I guess we have Batman to thank for that.

The movie made it so hard to follow the action sometimes. In many fights, it was really hard to keep up with what was actually happening – considering the fact that many fights took place either at night or at places that were too hollow for the cameras to really capture and follow the action.

Battles involving Steppenwolf and Wonder Woman with Aquaman were the worst of the lot. It was just shy of a regular Megatron vs Optimus Prime battle in Transformers. Only battles against Parademons were actually really visual and gave us something to experience and enjoy.

For the first team-up of DCEU’s core heroes, there was little to no teamwork and too much focus on the already assembled heroes – Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman.

Of the newcomers, only Aquaman made a positive impact, had a good enough screentime, and was heavily involved in the fighting. Flash and Cyborg were extremely underutilised. Flash was made to look slow in some moments just to make Superman prevail (the scene involving rescuing people), and asides from the comedy he brought, he had no impact in the movie whatsoever, except setting up his own stand-alone Flashpoint movie by seeing his father in jail repeatedly.

Cyborg didn’t fare any better as the movie could well have done without him from the beginning up until when direct contact with the ‘mother-boxes’ were needed. If the movie didn’t have a mother-box using villain, Cyborg would just have easily been as fleeting as the green lantern’s cameo.

For a villain, Steppenwolf wasn’t really up to par. This was largely due to him being more CGI than anything else. And the graphics were very noticeable, with Doomsday in BvS looking way better than him. Steppenwolf’s traditional red attire and helmet was traded for a dull grey just like Doomsday was as well, and it wasn’t good for a movie of this calibre by not staying true –at least to a reasonable extent – to the source material.

All in all, Justice League was quite an enjoyable movie, one that will no doubt make fans happier and hopeful for future movies compared to what we’ve seen so far in the DC Extended Universe.

Justice League is currently showing across cinemas nationwide.