I’m going to lead this off by saying how great I think this cut of the movie is! It is incredible how different this version is especially when you compare it to the theatrical version also know as “Josstice League.” There are so many scenes that were added back into the movie that tonally makes more sense in the film and makes it feel more “complete.” Minor spoilers beyond here.
One of the many wonderful additions to the movie were all the Cyborg and The Flash scenes. It boggles my mind how essentially 80% of their roles were cut, and as we all saw, it really ruined their characterizations in the original release. For me, they were easily the highlights of the film. There were so many tender and heartfelt moments involving them, and now I can see why director Zack Snyder had said that Cyborg was always the heart of his version of the film. He really was. Besides more of their scenes being added, I also feel like a lot of the other characters were “fixed” as well. Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Supes, and Batman! A lot of the corny added jokes from the original were completely cut, and it jsut works for this film. Zack Snyder’s film was meant to be dark, not that weird untoned mess of the Joss Whedon one. Also, since we’re talking about characters, the biggest surprise for me was Steppenwolf! Not only does Steppenwolf get a completely new look, but he is way more fleshed out and I actually felt sorry for him at the end of all this where as before, I thought he was just a one dimensional throw away villain. There is also excitement regarding how they achieved this, but I don’t want to spoil that additional aspect of the film. I think by having the characters of this movie fixed, it really raised the quality for me, because it made me really give a damn about the stakes and the story now has so much heart in it that you cant help but smile.
So here’s where I’ll stick all my critiques. The flow of the film I think worked out great despite being 4 hours long. I think the added runtime allowed for a lot of scenes to breathe, and it just lands better, but that doesn’t mean all of the added scenes needed to be there(hello Lois Lane scenes). I also noticed that many of the new additional scenes had unfinished CGI. While some things looked amazing, other things did not but I cannot knock the hard work that was put into this. Shoutout to the special FX team, and thank goodness we didn’t get any weird CGI faced Henry Cavill scenes. Another minor complaint was the Amazonian sound cue which I believe was grossly overused, and if you haven’t seen this movie yet, then you’ll know exactly what I mean when you get to it. One last thing I’ll point out, I still don’t believe this film gets Superman right. At this point, it was really hard to nail him, I think he was still under utilized and more could’ve been done in my opinion to flesh him out.
If you think this film couldn’t possibly be that much different than the theatrical version, mark my words, it is. This is completely different in so many ways its crazy. The Snyder cut of the movie really restored my faith on what this cinematic universe can achieve, and now I really want to see a continuation of it. This movie was poetic justice in every way, and I think this is definitely something Zack Snyder can be proud of. Thank goodness for the fans that made it happen, and the story of how this came to be is one of the best ones in recent history and for me, I think it lived up to the expectation.
Zack Snyders Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.
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