Is Zack Snyder’s ‘Justice League’ Good? Who Knows

Cinema — particularly big-budget Hollywood cinema — is devoid of do-overs. Movies crash and burn, and then remain crashed and burned, birthing countless “what ifs”?

What if Brian De Palma had been left alone to make his own version of the scathing satire Bonfire of the Vanities? What if Lynne Ramsay had managed to make the Jane Got a Gun that she dreamt up, not the one cobbled together at the last second after she stepped away on the first day of shooting? These questions are always deeply academic, mindless ponderings that the expensive nature of the cinema machine do not allow to be answered.

At least, most of the time. History has afforded us a few second takes. In general, these fall into two categories. The first is the pointless. Consider Michel Haneke’s English language version of his own film Funny Games, an exercise in facsimile that has no reason to exist, save for propping up its creator’s ego.

The second category is more curious; films that need not exist, but against the odds somehow do, and are enlivened by the sheer impossibilities that had to be surmounted to get them to screen. Consider Gus Van Sant’s excellent, if wonky, Psycho remake, an attempt to recreate greatness that is interesting in the ways it fails, rather than succeeds.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League falls into this second category. Indeed, it resembles Van Sant’s Psycho in a number of ways, with its big, portentous sense of self-seriousness, its fascinatingly uneven casting, and its curious gleam of the otherworldly. Nobody ever seemed ready to remake Psycho, just as Zack Snyder seemed doomed never to return to the hypothetical cut of the superhero epic that he walked away from, following studio meddling and a personal tragedy. Both films come to us from some distant possible world, sent our way through strange twists of fate, reeking of unreality.

Is Justice League “Good”? Who Knows

Deciding whether a film like Justice League is “good” or “bad” is therefore something of a doomed exercise. There are too many comparison points, firstly. Is it better than Joss Whedon’s Justice League, the film released to bad box office and worse reviews? Yes. That bar is low. Is it better than the version of Justice League that Zack Snyder would have made had he stayed on the project, rather than returning to it years later. It seems possible. But who knows?

Usually, critics would do best by the films they are reviewing if they ignored such questions, and dug down deep into the work as it is, not as it could have been. But this is the second complication of merely giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to Justice League: considering the film as it could have been is part of the charm.

Simply put, I do not know whether Justice League is a good film. But I certainly know that it’s a fascinating one. And the way that it provides more hypothetical, possible cuts of a film that has already been cut into pieces at least twice is precisely the lopsided beauty of the thing.

Gods And Monsters

Whedon’s Justice League failed because it was an awful mish-mash of tones, and unspooled on fast forward. There was a lot of world-building to be done very quickly, and Whedon kept himself so busy with tinny quips that he didn’t establish either characters or a reason to care.

Snyder’s Justice League suffers from none of these problems. For all the Snyder films that I consider uneven — Man of Steel most notably among them — I’ve never been able to say that the man doesn’t know what he’s doing. We have few such singular artists working in the Hollywood machine. Snyder’s Rayndian obsession with greatness; his suspicion of systems; his dark, impossibly gloomy aesthetic — no matter the project, these qualities cannot be beaten out of him.

Indeed, his Justice League feels like the ur-text for all of his obsessions. The film is predicated on the question he has tried to explore his entire career — why do we fear greatness? — and feels as earnest as a sermon. Superman’s death is treated with grave seriousness. It is, as Snyder himself has said, a hulking analogy for 9/11: the loss of American innocence, writ large. How do we go on now we can no longer pretend we are better than we are, or stronger? The characters of Justice League spin themselves in bronze circles around the question, going through the motions with a sense of dripping tragedy.

Then there’s the look of the thing. Shot in Academy ratio, a tight box that reduces scope and gives the strong sense of something evil creeping in from the periphery, the film is darker and stranger even than Sucker Punch, Snyder’s underrated, hyper-sexual take on Alice in Wonderland. Gone are the muted colours of Man of Steel: there is darkness in Justice League that seems like it has been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean.

A Beating Cyborg Heart

There are no inconsistencies in the film’s aesthetic vision, then. Where they lie is in the plotting. Snyder is at his best when he is at his simplest — his masterpieces (Dawn of the Dead, 300, Sucker Punch) are single, clean theses, pulled off with focus and precision. Here, he seems in a game of perpetual tension-raising, forever throwing in new stakes and complications.

He does so steadily, unlike Whedon, who was clearly sweating under the weight of all those superhero backstories. But even still, about half of the sub-plots could go. Justice League works most efficiently when attention is applied to its central gaping wound — the absence of Superman — and least efficiently when it tries to establish the credentials of gloomy bad guy Darkseid.

But again, these flaws are as interesting as they are actively disappointing. Seeing too much up on screen is definitely better than seeing too little, and watching in awe as Snyder stacks another set of stakes upon the stakes he established only moments before is genuine fun. It doesn’t make for streamlined viewing, certainly, or a “good” movie by the usual metrics. But it gives some sense of the experience it might have been to watch Snyder realise his vision the first time around.

And anyway, Snyder has another focus, one to which he applies himself with care and love: the character of Cyborg. A Robocopian figure with a moving backstory, the metal man is the beating heart of the project. As soon as Snyder seems to have gotten himself totally lost in his levels of abstraction and narrative obfuscation, he returns to the story of a man who wants to be more than the world has branded him. It’s not hard to see why Snyder might love Cyborg. What is he but a man trying to escape the snares of a system that threatens to encircle his heart?

We Live In A Society

Justice League ends by introducing characters that seem bookmarked for later use. But they too are only to be considered academically: there’s no chance that Snyder will make a sequel to this thing. The DC cinematic universe is moving away from interconnected epics and towards smaller, Joker­-level character studies. And Snyder himself has already moved on from the world of comic books to the world of zombies, exchanging one portentous metaphor with fate for another.

But it seems fitting that this unreal epic, one that clambered up to the screen against the odds, would gesture at further hypotheticals. Justice League 2 might never exist in our world. But there’s some alternate universe out there where it does. And as joyful as it is that Snyder got to finally realise his vision, the idea of another impossible epic is exciting too, whether it remains unmade or not.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is currently streaming on Binge.