DCEU Retrospective: Justice League
Time for one of the biggest disasters of the DCEU (so far). The much anticipated Justice League is next on the docket.
Let me get this out of the way: I absolutely HATE what they did to Barry Allen in this movie and I feel that Ezra Miller is an absolutely awful choice for the character. Who else did they audition for the role that they decided that Ezra was the best choice? Like so many other characters in this ongoing saga of sadness, the writers seemed to have fundamentally misunderstood the character that they were writing. Sure Barry isn’t necessarily the suavest person in the room like say Bruce Wayne, but he’s not a reclusive social outcast who has such bad anxiety that he makes an ass out of himself whenever he’s around another person. Just what the actual fuck DC?
Ok now that I’ve got that out of my system, this movie had so many issues that all could have been solved by taking a slow and steady approach. Because they rushed to get this movie out to compete with The Avengers stuff, the movie had to spend about 45 minutes setting up all of the new characters and telling us why we should care which ultimately forced the final showdown to be done in all of 10 minutes because they were running out of time.
This movie was actually the very first review that we had on this site and I was the one that wrote it. Looking back at it, I have to question why I gave it such a high score. I gave it a 7/10 and this movie deserves maybe a 5.5/10 at most. The visuals suck, the writing is awful, and the pacing is all over the place in this movie.
What they should have done was used Superman’s death in BvS as the reason why other heroes began to appear in the world. They could have put the Aquaman and Flash solo movies in there so that they were already established when this movie came around and it would feel more natural when Bruce came knocking asking for help. Then they could have spent a little more time with the Superman resurrection and fleshed out Steppenwolf a bit more in this movie and set up better for Darkseid. But of course none of that happened and we got this dreck instead.
Obviously a big part of why this movie fell apart was the personal issues that Zack Snyder was going through during filming which caused Joss Whedon to take over. Whenever you have to have a different director step in, especially one with such a radically different style compared to the original director, there’s going to be a loss of harmony between the different styles and this movie suffered heavily for it. I’m not saying that Snyder’s cut of the movie will be any better, but at least the overall tone of the movie will stay more consistent.
Like so many other DCEU movies, this movie had a ton of potential but shoddy writing and a rushed approach squandered that all away. Thanks to this movie, DC has decided that they don’t necessarily want to do a shared universe sort of thing anymore and will focus on independent stories moving forward. While that may be for the best at the moment, I can’t help but feel cheated over what might have been.