A film colleague told me of a special preview of the Bruce Willis disaster flick Armageddon they once attended. The critics were all merrily sniggering along at the movie's earnest cheesiness, until out of the darkness a stern voice intoned, "I'm glad you all find the end of the world so funny." It was Bruce Willis.
There's something about the straight-faced oeuvre of Zack Snyder that evokes a similar reaction – at least in me. And that makes his long-awaited, four-hour auteurist superhero epic something of a trial for both of us. Snyder has always been a tricky film-maker to get a handle on. To some he is a visionary; to others he's an idiot. Visually he's supremely talented at conjuring a heightened, stylised reality that's ideally suited to comic-book adaptations, not least his shouty Spartan battle epic 300 (based on a Frank Miller comic) and anti-superhero sci-fi Watchmen (from Alan Moore's original). Snyder's self-penned Sucker Punch, by contrast, was a crass, lecherous male fantasy dressed up as "female empowerment". Still, he was entrusted with overseeing DC Comics' superhero franchise, where his strategy for catching up with arch-rivals Marvel seems to have been "Where they go light, we go dark."
For the uninitiated, Justice League follows on from Snyder's glum-and-glummer DC movies Man Of Steel and Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of Justice. It was supposed to be the big superhero team-up movie, in answer to Marvel's spectacularly successful Avengers, but Snyder had to withdraw from the project owing to personal tragedy. The studio, Warner Bros, drafted in Avengers director Joss Whedon to finish the job. Reportedly, Whedon jettisoned most of Snyder's material, gave the story an emergency humour transplant and brought the whole thing in at under two hours. Released in 2017, it flopped abysmally, but Snyder's fans mounted a passionate, persistent, some would say toxic, campaign to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. To almost everyone's surprise, they got their way.
So is the long and long-awaited Snyder cut worth another four hours of our time?
Let's just say, sometimes less is more and sometimes more is too much. It takes some adjustment to remember where we are, or were, in the saga. Oh, yes, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman had arrived at the scene, too late to prevent the death of Henry Cavill's Superman during his barney with Ben Affleck's Batman. Now, there's a new threat in town – albeit one that bears many similarities with Marvel's Infinity War. In place of Thanos we have Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds) a horned demon in metallic porcupine armour, who delivers such lines as, "I have come to enlighten you to the great darkness!" (no sniggering at the back now). And in place of Infinity Stones he's after the "Mother Boxes" – three cubes scattered about the earth that unleash a mega-destructive force if combined.
It's down to Bruce Wayne to assemble the superhero resistance, which alongside Wonder Woman includes Jason Momoa's hulkingly ripped Aquaman, Ray Fisher as super-hacker Cyborg (think Terminator meets Iron Man), and Ezra Miller as the lightning-quick Flash.
All of them now get extended backstories, which gives us a little more to root for, although the first two hours feel more like team-building than character-building. Miller is our fanboy surrogate and provides some much-needed comic relief, since the rest of the gang are studies in solemnity. Brooding is what Batman does, but he faces stiff competition. Cyborg's story, largely excised from the original, is reinstated as the emotional centre of the piece, although it is one of deep father-son angst; Momoa's Aquaman is existentially torn between life on land or under the sea – or to put it another way, chunky Icelandic knitwear or bare chest and tattoos? Gadot's Wonder Woman – the lone woman in the ensemble – is largely consigned to delivering empathy and exposition. And Cavill and Amy Adams' Lois Lane now take more time to process Superman's death and resurrection (to reveal that he returns is hardly a spoiler at this stage)… but, frustratingly, just when the action climax is heating up. Cavill also breaks out his black Superman suit this time round, which is appropriate: the overall mood is funereal, though most funerals are shorter than this.
Stretched over four hours, Snyder's limitations as a visual stylist also become apparent. Repetitions start to poke through: mystical women chanting on the score; almighty blows that send shockwaves rippling across the landscape; murky, grey compositions shot through with chiaroscuro bolts of light. Snyder's preferred mode is a kind of fugue state of battle intensity, augmented by copious and conspicuous CGI, tracked in vertiginous camera moves and invariably unfolding in slow motion, since the laws of time and space have broken down completely. As such, Justice League is not exactly a pacy, edge-of-the-seat experience; it's more like examining a piece of 3-D fantasy art from every angle. Dealing with similar material, Taika Waititi's self-aware Thor: Ragnarok embraced its heavy-metal preposterousness but Justice League takes it all deadly seriously. Just as he seemed unaware how homoerotically camp 300 was, Snyder doesn't see anything to joke about here. If he was at that Armageddon screening, he'd be sympathising with Bruce Willis.
Justice League represents a personal victory for Snyder and his fans but really it is a pyrrhic one. The world has long moved on. Affleck's Batman has retired and Robert Pattinson is primed for the reboot. Gadot's Wonder Woman has successfully gone solo. Jared Leto's Joker (who features here) now competes with Joaquin Phoenix's. Even Snyder has a new, non-superhero movie coming soon: zombie heist comedy Army Of The Dead. It looks fun. They often do.
There's also a strong suspicion the true objective of this expensive exercise is nothing to do with a commitment to artistic integrity. Rather than facing the test of the box office (which it would almost certainly fail again), Justice League goes out on Warner's new streaming service, HBO Max.
Its rivals are no longer Marvel but Netflix and Disney+, which means it could use some fresh content to lure in superhero-hungry subscribers. Perhaps streaming is the best place for it. Rather than one bladder-challenging cinema sitting, it's easier to consume in portions at home (the story is conveniently divided into six parts) and you can choose in private whether to consume it as an auteur's vindication or a guilty pleasure. Success or failure are relative terms here. If you're a fan, then justice was done. If not, you can be done with Justice.
Zack Snyder's Justice League is out now on Sky Cinema Premiere and Now TV.
Everything you need to know about ‘The Snyder Cut’ of Justice League
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