Viewing Hours: Justice League (2017)

A new semester well underway, approaching its tumultuous midpoint. Chaos reigns. Time is at a great premium. What to do? Start up a new series on the Child Sized Coffin, of course! Sure, that makes sense.

Welcome to the inaugural Viewing Hours, a hopefully fun and exciting new segment on the Coffin where we talk about movies, good, bad, or indifferent. There’s a whole slate of movies lined up for consideration, but let’s start with one that had long been on the viewing list around here, missed in theaters and then picked up this past November as part of a Black Friday deal: DC and Warner Brother’s 2017 Justice League.

At this point in time, there should be no need to introduce the superhero or comic book movie to the masses. For the last ten years they have been perhaps the most dominant box office force known to man, and have more or less been a mixed bag in terms of quality. While the vast, vast majority of Marvel’s 19 film output has been excellent and fun, practically everything with DC Comics attached to the opening logos following 2008’s absolute masterpiece The Dark Knight has been really bad. And that would be putting it mildly. Ranging from horrible (Green Lantern from 2011) to generally inoffensive (Man of Steel) to downright horrendous (Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice) to good but not great (Wonder Woman), DC has overseen some real bad movies. The heartbreak of this is two-fold: first, mine is a DC family, and has been pretty much since my wife and I began dating, and for me personally, going back many, many years; and second, DC Comics owns, without even a hint of exaggeration, the greatest comic book characters ever created. That second point alone should make failure of the movies all but impossible; yet it seems that success is the thing perpetually alluding the film arm of the company. It must be hard for DC, coming off the incredible success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, only to watch Marvel building up to the Avengers, landing victory after stunning box office victory with essentially their B-team of Captain America, Ironman, and Thor. When the Guardians of the Galaxy are a ticket selling phenome, you know DC had to look around and think, “surely, we could do that.”

Well, history shows they can’t. And what Justice League really is is an attempt to jump right to Avengers-level cinematic universe building without the several years and movies’ worth of establishment and character building. Hey, you already know Superman, he was in a movie that wasn’t necessarily trying to plant roots for anything bigger. Surely you know Batman, why, he’s had seven movies of varying quality and tone over the last twenty five years. By the time you see this one, you’ll know Wonder Woman, because she was in Batman vs. Superman for a few minutes where she basically appears as female Superman. Have you been watching “The Flash” on tv? Cause this Flash is someone totally different. Here’s Aquaman, who you’ll get to know later when his spin off movie comes out, almost 18 months after this one where he’s introduced. And there’s Cyborg! Uh oh, here comes the bad guy, and it’s Steppenwolf, and he’s the bad guy because he says bad guy things. Who needs ten years of building and teasing to get a villain introduced with menace and gravity? Looking at you here, Thanos. Well, Steppenwolf isn’t Thanos: he works for DC’s version of Thanos though, so that should be good enough for you, audience member.

Steppenwolf is on Earth to find the Mother boxes, which will terraform the planet for some reason into something bad but never quite explained, and he’s real mad. He’s mad because he tried this before, in Earth’s past that is intended to seem distant, but really only would have been seven or eight hundred years ago. But don’t worry kids, these heroes are on the case, and they will learn to work together through what honestly feels like a series of character-specific teaser clips to save the day and learn that they are greater together than they could ever be apart.

As snide as most of that was, it actually sounds like a better movie than Justice League.

Directed, again, by Zack Synder, who seems to be the only director DC knows, and then finalized by superhero movie extraordinaire Joss Wheden after Synder’s daughters’ death, Justice League is a real mess of clips and motivations, none of which really fit together or make sense in any cohesive narrative fashion. Tragically overdone CGI permeates every second of runtime, and is so irritating. The characters inhabit a world that is not real, not because of its’ metahumans and alien warlords and governments trying to address the first while apparently being oblivious to the second, no: they inhabit a world that is not real because nothing on screen is believable and real. Everything is CGI embellished or edited or enhanced. I think the idea is that you’re supposed to be watching a comic book come alive, and backgrounds and walls and skies in comics never look like real world walls and skies. But this is really unsettling. It’s like watching a Tell-Tale game for two hours that feels even longer than that.

Something really, really maddening about Justice League is that you can see the threads the writers were trying to establish that would connect this movie to future DC films. Prior to the release of this one, DC released a jam packed release slate of movies stretching into like 2020 or 2024, which at the time was years beyond what Marvel and Star Wars had laid out, that included all kinds of projects: Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam all had release dates, while things like Justice League II and Green Lantern Corps were down the road aways, but the notion that they were in the works was exciting. Again, you can see it, literally see it on screen, when someone says something that is supposed to be a branch to something else in the future, over and over and over again. Steppenwolf references the New Gods and Darkseid by name, there’s a post credit scene featuring Deathstroke, and most aggravating for my wife and I, there are multiple inroads for the Green Lanterns to utilize. Steppenwolf’s Parademons are attracted to fear, and one of them explodes in a burst of yellow light, offering an easy connection to Sinestro. In an exposition flashback that gives all the info the movie contains on its antagonist, alien Green Lanterns are shown, which establishes the Corps independent of any of its Earth members. Superman is brought back from the grave, and isn’t quite all there for a few minutes, and at the start of the movie to commemorate his death, black banners with the Superman insignia in silver hang from several world monuments, a reference to the black and silver costume Superman wore when he returned from the dead after his cataclysmic showdown with Doomsday in the comics. Sure, DC has already screwed up Doomsday, but you know. Something could have come from this. You can feel these people sitting in a room, discussing what needs to be referenced in this movie to set up for others, their enormous corkboard with miles of red string connecting piece to piece, truly building a world.

But in doing that, they forgot to make this movie any good.

Sometimes, Justice League is so painfully close to getting something right, only to fumble for no apparent reason. It the Deathstroke-having post credit sequence, an escaped-from-prison-and-correctly-bald Lex Luthor mentions that our heroes are setting up some kind of group, and quips to Wilson that maybe they should have “a league of our own.” I wanted to punch my hand through the television. It’s the Legion, Lex, the LEGION of Doom. You know that, you’re a founding member. Even if you really wanted to keep that pithy line, ok, fine. But do it right. “Let’s see how their league handles our Legion” or something like that. Was that so hard? Hire me, DC, I even have the correct initials. But Justice League does that over and over again, getting so close, only to drop it in the end.

The CGI is awful, and the slow motion hero shots are so, so over done at this point that they are just irritating above all else. Every character can be defined by a facial expression. Wonder Woman will always have that steely stare that straddles the line between confused and determined. Aquaman will always have that thousand yard stare that reads as boredom, no matter what he’s doing. Superman will always have that steely stare that moves very slowly, has a slow blink about halfway through, and then stares off in a direction different than that of its starting one. Cyborg will always have that steely stare that is a strange mix of angry and trying to mimic that look the Rock gives when it’s the part of the movie for the Rock to be the Rock. You know what I’m talking about.

The action always comes at you in slo mo as well, so that you can see Wonder Woman punch that wood and count the splinters that fly out. But at times, the action doesn’t even make sense, other than it is a thing the character has to do. At one point, Wonder Woman bursts through a door in a posture that really only could indicate that she hit the door with her forehead, pushing her head out in front of the rest of her body, and her head hit the door and caused it to explode into shards. Why would she do that? Just because she can do it, doesn’t mean there’s a reason that she should. She could have burst through that door in a number of ways, so why does she do it in the way that indicates that she just head-butted it to death?  

As of this writing, we have not seen Aquaman despite it garnering reviews that seem essentially positive. Or, at least, not Batman v. Superman-tier. Who can even tell anymore. What we should all be able to agree on is that Justice League is another, ANOTHER, bad attempt by DC and Warner Brothers to make the DCCU happen, without bothering to put in the effort or care or time that Marvel Studios and Disney did, instead trying to fast track things without any clear sense of what the idea really is. This is a movie that really did have some potential, a lot of potential in fact, but totally squanders it in the pursuit of . . . whatever it is that DC and WB think would be a good idea for a comic book movie. It is simply inconceivable that a movie starring Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Flash, with special guest star Superman, and also some other guys, could be a failure, while two movies starring Ant-Man have been box office, critical, and fan successes. Sorry, Ant-Man, it’s nothing personal, but you know how it is.