I don’t have children, but now that the monstrosity of 2017’s Justice League has finally been corrected, I feel like I might actually be able to bring a new human into this world
I remember where I was when I first heard mutterings about the potential for a Justice League redo. I was in the foyer of a cinema after watching the first Justice League. A legion of 40-year-old men and about two women huddled together to discuss the atrocity of the thing they’d just witnessed, like a quietly concerned, medieval mob crowding around a murdered peasant. The film was half directed by our lord and saviour Zack Snyder, half directed by an upside down radish with eyebrows – and the end result made me so angry I actually developed glandular fever.
But the great error has finally been corrected, because Snyder now has his very own cut of the Justice League. And I am glad to confirm that it is, by far, the best superhero film the director has made this year.
Without the constraints of a meddling studio, Snyder has finally delivered the movie he and his fans wanted all along, a dark, action-packed, four-hour epic, consisting of two interval breaks and a subplot that, as many had long speculated, firmly connects the DC Extended Universe to the Woody Allen masterpiece Annie Hall – although I won’t spoil the details of that connection in this review.
Although there are some similarities to the previous Justice League film – like the inclusion of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other characters you might recognise from the more mentally arresting pages of PornHub – everything about this new cut is infinitely better: there’s now a 45-minute scene in which Alfred cooks Bruce Wayne a chicken fricassee dinner, and a 62-minute scene in which Diana Prince files her tax return. This is the sort of character depth the first attempt so sorely lacked, and exactly why the runtime needed to be more than doubled.
The action sequences are also a marked improvement. For instance, where Cyborg once launched Aquaman into the sky with the assistance of his rocket-propelling arm, we now get to see the reverse, as the fish whisperer places the mechanical man on his trident, pulls it back and pings him at a herd of space goblins like a metallic pea being shot across a table. “Don’t forget your greens!” quips Cyborg after snapping his robotic limbs back into their sockets, a line that made the girlfriend and I laugh so hard we had to pause the film and watch some stand-up comedy to calm down.
The drastic makeover given to Steppenwolf, the film’s villain, is also entirely necessary. Where he once resembled a roid-filled shaven goat, he’s now covered in pieces of bent cutlery, looking like a sentient Uri Gellar art installation – and nothing could be more terrifying. Except, of course, for Darkseid, an even bigger baddie who has been seamlessly slotted into the narrative thanks to a menacing motion-capture performance from Glenn Close.
No doubt, there will be people who question if this $70 million remake was really worth the time and effort. They’ll say things like ‘it’s only marginally better’ and ‘it’s essentially the same thing but longer with lots of slow motion bits’. To those people, I say it’s time to get a life. It’s time to open your eyes. I know greatness when I see it, and this is it. Zack Snyder’s Justice League might be the best film ever made.