dark n’ gritty + the snyder cut
Strange Fixations, Vol. 22 — superman is DEAD and shit is SERIOUS
Hello friends!
I took a couple weeks off because things have been pretty busy around here and also the stuff I was obsessed with was more work-based than fun, media-based. But today, Zack Snyder’s Justice League aka the Snyder Cut got released. I wasn’t even going to watch it at first because frankly, I have little invested in the DC movies, I never saw Batman vs. Superman in its entirety or the theatrical release of Justice League, and all the Snyder fanboys on the internet have so thoroughly put me off anything even remotely related to Zack Snyder that it felt like it was just going to be disappointing. But then I thought, what better way to dive back into Substack than an uninformed and ridiculous post about a thing everyone will definitely be talking about? So let’s get dark and gritty.
First off, I have to say, it was basically good! Four hours is an insane runtime, and you can see how Justice League was really supposed to be two movies, but allowing that this is a movie that would have never been released in theatres this way, I didn’t hate it! It probably helps that I never saw the theatrical release, so I’m not seeing a bunch of scenes I already saw pieced together with new stuff, in a different arrangement, but I was surprised at how coherent and satisfying it was as a movie about the Justice League. That’s them, all right! The Justice League!
The basic story in both movies is that Batman and Wonder Woman have to recruit Aquaman, Cyborg, and the Flash to stop a big bad alien guy, Steppenwolf, from gathering three “Mother Boxes” and uniting them to take over the world. Also they resurrect Superman to help, somehow. From what my husband told me and what I was able to glean from the internet, what’s different in the Snyder Cut is mostly more expanded stories for Cyborg, the Flash, and Aquaman, a different look and characterization for Steppenwolf and his Parademons, different ways of starting and ending the story, and more intensity and brooding with less clever quips.
What works, and what the fanboys love Snyder for, is that he takes the source material seriously. If this is a world where wildly superpowered beings exist, where alien monsters try to destroy or conquer the planet on a regular basis, that comes with a lot of destruction and death, which is heavy stuff. While the Whedon cut (and more of the Marvel movies, you might say) chooses to play up the comic-bookiness of it all and get a few laughs in, Snyder and DC tend to be more invested in depicting what the kind of world where all these dark, life-changing things happen on a regular basis would actually look like. That said, my god does Snyder love his slow-motion and big booming reverb noises. It’s too much, honestly. You can only pull those moves a couple times before they lose their punch and it’s literally like every other scene in here. Early in the movie Lois Lane puts her coffee cup on a police barricade and it makes a deep boom like a bomb exploded underwater. Like, we get it, Zack.
What also works for me is the stories for Cyborg and the Flash. As you may have heard, Ray Fisher, the actor who plays Cyborg, has accused Joss Whedon of abusive behavior on set, and by all accounts Fisher’s presence in the theatrical cut is fairly minimal. But in the Snyder Cut, Victor Stone and Barry Allen are really the characters with the fullest arcs, the ones who we get to see develop the most. This is probably because they’re the characters who haven’t already been introduced to the audience through their own movie by the time Justice League came out. Aquaman gets a bit more development too, but he also got his own standalone movie a year later. Ray Fisher really shines in this cut; it would be easy for Cyborg to be a simple, robotic part (sorry) but Fisher fleshes him out (I’m SORRY) and makes his journey from being closed off and disdainful of his powers to a full-fledged member of the Justice League unashamed of who he is, truly gratifying to see.
Also, for what it’s worth, I like the updated Steppenwolf design. It’s crazy as hell and I get why it would have caused fights during the original production (the effects budget alone, my god) but it fits the bill for “big fuckin’ intimidating alien villain” as opposed to like, “kind of lumpy bad dude in a big helmet, I guess”. Again, I have nothing invested in the extended universe, I’ve never read the comics, I don’t care about Easter eggs and if it was the same costume from book 5 or whatever, all I know is shiny spiky armor on big guy look scary.
So now that all the nice stuff is out of the way let’s talk some trash. What doesn’t work? As I mentioned, the slow-motion and boomy reverbs get eye-rolly after a while, and they just. keep. coming. Snyder is not exactly known for his restraint as a director, and sometimes you need to pull it back. These moves are big and effective for the mood he’s trying to create, but when you’ve seen the same thing multiple times in an hour it starts to seem like they’re all he’s got in his bag of tricks. Mix it up a little.
Also, this is admittedly a personal thing but I just don’t get Snyder’s music choices in this. The score is fine, but in the moments where a song is placed, I was completely taken out of the movie as I thought, “What is this?” They’re mixed so loudly that it seems like you’re meant to be actively listening to them, but a lot of them have those kind of whispery and/or mumbly vocals that make it tough to suss out lyrics. Back when Watchmen came out I praised Snyder for the credits sequence that lined up the (again) slow-motion passage of time as the “Minutemen” went from their heyday to lives in disgrace and hiding, set to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’”. Again, a little heavy-handed, but I thought it worked, and hey, that’s Snyder.
Finally, it’s just too goddamn long. If this had ended up as the theatrical vision and was split into two movies I could maybe forgive it, but even so, this movie is built as the singular vision, in one piece. The movie that could never have been released in theatres. Four hours is wild, especially with all the super-serious lines, the pregnant pauses, the shots of people walking away that go on for juuust too long, and ALL THAT SLO-MO! The movie seems to recognize this, being split into “parts” so as not to collapse under its own weight two hours in, but the parts don’t feel especially significant to me other than as ways of breaking up the story into chunks you can take pee breaks in between, maybe stop and come back later, because it’s four hours long. They feel sort of like chapters of a book, in that they’re the points you might go, “okay that’s enough for tonight, let me pick this back up tomorrow.” By the time we got to Part 6, the final part (before the half-hour Epilogue!), I felt like I was entering a fugue state. Who am I? Where am I? Do I live in Metropolis now?
Anyway, it was fun.
A few parting shots, random notes I took, as we wrap this thing up:
- Fully took me the whole movie to realize Alfred was Jeremy Irons. First guess, Christopher Lloyd; second guess, Hank Azaria. I got my masters’ degree in Film Studies, everyone.
- The movie didn’t really Need to show Jason Momoa taking his shirt off every time he went into the water but you know what, I appreciate it.
- There were a lot of little moments in action sequences where I was like, “But why…” (Security guard confronted by the terrorists Diana stops oddly doesn’t even acknowledge the shady man with the briefcase clearly leading a band of men with guns, letting him walk right past as he raises his gun at the other men, while the leader gets behind him and shoots him in the head; Diana moving super-fast to stop all the terrorists’ bullets instead of just… using that same speed to disarm them? How does Steppenwolf’s little robot bug pal work, and how does he know where the Mother Box the Atlanteans have based on a picture of a box on a structure? Seems like Team Apokolips should have remembered that they left their all-powerful Mother Boxes on Earth… they were like ‘oh shit, they’re on Earth, the only planet to ever successfully fight back against being conquered?!’ How many years has it been, my dudes? You never put those two together? Anyway, I’m great at parties.)
- Finally, absolutely love it for humanity that our main solution to “big bad box we need to hide and protect at all costs” is “BURY IT IN THE GROUND”
Alright we’re done here, no honorable mentions this week because this thing is already long enough, I’m no Zack Snyder!
Have a great weekend and take care, my friends.
❤ Elyse
Originally published March 19th, 2021 at https://elyse.substack.com.
