Justice League Movie Review - Spoiler Free!!!!!

"Justice League"/Warner Bros/DC Comics

It took them half a decade to catch up to Marvel, but DC's movie universe has finally managed to scrape together their own team of superheroes on the big screen. I walked into the theater at 6:00 with rather low expectations. I didn't hope for much to come out of the movie; I simply wanted it to be something better than most of what's come out of the DCEU. I didn't expect it to be Wonder Woman, and it wasn't. But it also wasn't Suicide Squad. The movie certainly had its flaws, which you'll find a little bit later in the review. But it was also pretty decent, and that's where we'll start.

The characters carry this story. I was a little wary coming into the movie with so many characters; they kind of fumbled the ball and then blew it to pieces with Suicide Squad, but the characters here were really fleshed out, even the trio who we hadn't seen significantly prior to this movie. It might have been nice to get an extra scene with some of them like Cyborg (Ray Fisher), but they're generally engaging. Some characters are also a little different than we've seen them. In Batman V Superman, we got a Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) who was cynical after the death of his Robin. In the wake of Superman (Henry Cavill)'s sacrifice, however, his faith in humanity has been somewhat restored and this is reflected in a lighter-hearted character who even flirts with Diana (Gal Gadot) a bit (although this is used more as comedic relief and shows no sign of actually going anywhere).

As for the plot, it was a touch too similar to Thor: Ragnarok's plot for my tastes but I'm willing to consider it a coincidence given some of the elements in play. The alien invasion force is actually rather interesting and their design was rather intimidating as well as memorable. The leader of this force, Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) is not the most memorable villain - he's come back after a millennia of exile to get revenge on the armies that defeated him once before and level all life on Earth. He's no Loki or Lex Luthor, but the rather flat villain for our heroes to mow down is such a common thing across superhero movies that it's hard to count it against the movie without feeling unfairly critical on it.

The humor of this movie was also on point. Even Batman's cracking the occasional joke, but Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and the Flash (Ezra Miller) carry the weight of the movie's comedy. I won't say too much about it because it might ruin it, but most of Aquaman's comedy comes from blunt remarks and observations while Barry's humor is much more chaotic and bubbly.

While we're on the subject of Barry, I'd like to take just a moment to talk about him and how his character feels with another version of him speeding around Central City on the CW. While both Grant Gustin and Ezra Miller are playing the Scarlet Speedster, both are vividly different characters that stand on their own. This will probably be the part of the review with the most spoilers, so you can scroll past the picture below to rid youself of those spoilers. Ezra's Flash is a little bit younger and a little bit less mature than Grant's. He doesn't have his life together yet. In fact, he hasn't even gotten a job at the CCPD or earned a degree in criminal justice. This was a brilliant choice as it gives a clear separation between the two, and is actually represented in their lightning trails. Grant's red lightning trails behind him in a very compact form, tracing his path. In contrast, Ezra's white lightning jumps all around him in a chaotic storm indicative of both his slightly more scatter-brained mindset and his lack of control over his powers. Ezra Miller's Flash was a high point of the film.

"Justice League"/Warner Bros./DC Comics

We've talked about the good. Now let's talk about the bad, starting with the CGI. There were parts of the film that are painfully fake and clearly created in a computer. Some of you will be familiar with the opening animation that shows a bunch of DC characters kind of just floating around empty space showing off some of their more iconic abilities. Unfortunately during some fight scenes one of the characters looks a whole lot like this animation. I'm not talking crap about the opener, which I think is pretty good. But during this fight this particular character almost looks like he should be in a video game rather than a movie.

Next up we'll take a look at the Amazons and the handicap Warner Bros. gave themselves in the production of their movie. In recent days there has been a bit of uproar over the fact that the Amazons have gone from wearing actual armor to wearing what are essentially leather bikinis. This has the obvious problems, showing a step back from how Wonder Woman didn't lead into the fan service of the typical comic book. Something that I found almost as irritating, however, was the lack of consistency with this change. The Amazon queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) has a brief appearance and she as well as the presumably elite warriors who escort her are all wearing full-body armor similar to that we saw in Patty Jenkin's movie. This was also evident in the Amazon warriors in the background; from what I could see there was a roughly even 50/50 split between Amazons wearing the older armor and Amazons wearing the new armor. This made it feel like it was almost a marketing gimmick; it had little screen time and just happened to create a bunch of buzz a week or so before the release date.

I mentioned the handicap Warner Bros. gave themselves, and that was their choice to demand that Justice League's runtime clocked in at less than two hours so that they could cram in as many screenings as possible. I think this is honestly more of a middle ground; it's not particularly bad or good. After hearing this I was worried that the film would be very rushed but they handled it fairly well. I wouldn't have minded a couple extra minutes; above I mentioned how Cyborg could have used an extra scene with his father, even if it was only a few lines of meaningful dialogue. I feel like an extended cut might be able to include brief moments like these that are not technically needed to advance the plot but unobtrusively enhances it.

There is one more thing that I would like to address about the movie that I consider to be one of, if not its greatest failure and that is the handling of Superman. However, it would be a monstrously hard, if not impossible task to talk about why this is without providing massive spoilers. I don't consider speaking of Superman's reappearance a spoiler in and of itself because his symbol was shown on the frickin' posters, so for now I'll leave it at this: I wasn't exactly happy with how they handled him, but it was better than I thought it would be. I'll go into far more detail with Superman's role in a VERY spoiler-filled article that I'll put up after the weekend to give people a couple of days to see the movie.

Since we've had a large amount of negative topics to talk about, let's take a brief moment to discuss something else that's good: the fan service. Not the type of fan service you find in every scene showing Hestia in DanMachi, but far more clever references. These moments were great. There were throwbacks to previous DCEU properties, such as a very clever throwback to Wonder Woman that was my  personal favorite moment in the movie for all the work it did (I might stick this into the Superman article just to talk about how much I liked it without spoiling the joke). There are also throwbacks to other DC properties, which should be easy to pick up for some members who grew up watching certain cartoons as a child. Or an adult, because a lot of this blog is dedicated to cartoons.

My expectations for Justice League were pretty low. My hopes were basically for it to be better than the other movies we've gotten from the DCEU, with the exception of Wonder Woman. I found JL to exceed these expectations by a fair margin. It was pretty entertaining and the characters were worth getting invested in. The restrained time limit, while disappointing, didn't have the terrible impact on the movie I feared it would and still managed to make me care enough about the new characters to check out their solo films. Okay, I would have watched them anyway, but I have additional reasons to want to. It was just barely good enough to be considered entertaining and outstrip its flaws and the second DCEU film I'd be willing to pay to see again.