Justice League has something for everyone — and no way to fit it all together

Warner Bros.

It’s probably a mistake to ascribe any sort of grand strategy to Justice League, Warner Brothers’ latest superhero film made in conjunction with DC Entertainment. The film is necessarily a clash of multiple personal visions and multiple corporate ones: original director Zack Snyder stepped down from the film after a family suicide, and Joss Whedon stepped in to complete the movie, stitching together Snyder’s footage via months of extra reshoots to add character-building and comedy. And Warner certainly had to be aware that Snyder’s grand scheme for the DC Extended Universe — DC’s rushed attempt to catch up with Marvel’s nearly decade-old movie franchise — has been unpopular with critics and has underperformed with fans, until Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins stepped in with a film that matched the color scheme of Snyder’s films with a lighter tone and a more human outlook. The pressure to follow Wonder Woman’s example (or at the very least, to insert more Wonder Woman into Justice League) must have been fierce, after that movie’s success in the wake of the derisive response to DC’s Suicide Squad. Justice League does feel like a film with too many hands pulling in too many directions.

But it’s still tempting to see it as a test balloon for DC, as a straw poll for superhero fans, asking, “What do you really want to see in a superhero movie in 2017?” Because the film goes in so many tonal and narrative directions, it feels like a grab bag anyone can reach into and fish around in for something to their personal tastes, from dramatic themes to offhand banter, from mindless pummel-fests to thoughtful conversations about heroic responsibility. Justice League isn’t an entirely coherent film, but it’s certainly an egalitarian one. And if anyone’s tracking what individual viewers respond to — which moments they most call out on social media, which bits get the most attention in reviews — DC could potentially learn a lot about where to pivot next. The company is already ponderously turning its ship away from its Extended Universe plans in order to pursue more standalone films. If any of Whedon’s humor in Justice League works for crowds, or if they complain they want more of Snyder’s heavy, grimdark action, that’ll at least be another data point for DC’s future planning.

In the meantime, audiences are left to navigate the odd tonal mismatches of Justice League, which continues the Expanded Universe story from the point where Batman V. Superman left off in 2016. Superman is dead, the Earth no longer has an obvious alien protector, and Batman (Ben Affleck) is worried about a coming threat that may surpass his abilities. With the help of a database taken from Lex Luthor, he attempts to rally a handful of exceptional individuals to the cause. He already confronted Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) in her own movie. He also meets Barry Allen (a.k.a. Flash, played by We Need To Talk About Kevin star Ezra Miller), in a sequence that feels a little too much like Tony Stark’s snarky original heart-to-heart with Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War. He tracks down Arthur Curry (a.k.a. Aquaman, played by Game of Thrones’ Jason Momoa) in a remote northern coastal town, which for some reason has an ancient Atlantean secret painted on the wall of its town hall. A fifth possible superhero contender, Victor Stone (a.k.a. Cyborg, played by Ray Fisher) gets in touch on his own. All of Batman’s would-be Justice Leaguers have their own reasons to want to avoid the coming fight, and only one of them initially gives him a positive response. But naturally, the coming apocalypse is too big and messy for them to ignore.

The nature of that apocalypse will make a lot more sense to longtime DC fans familiar with Darkseid lore than it will to casual viewers, who may not see much difference between the main villain here, with his collectable McGuffins and destroy-the-world plan, and the tiresomely samey villains the MCU keeps throwing out on its way to the Infinity War movies. Suffice to say there’s a video-game-style quest to collect powerful objects, a series of escalating fights as the villain gets each of them in turn, and a gradual awakening as the heroes realize they need to drop their personal baggage and work together. On a grand thematic level, the film’s relatively basic messages are reasonably satisfying. “There is strength in numbers,” “taking an active stand is more satisfying than brooding,” and “being involved in the flow of the world is part of what makes us human” all feel more relevant to the current social and political moment than the question “Why does humanity need heroes, and why do we so often fail them?”, which has preoccupied DCEU movies from Man Of Steel to Wonder Woman.

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And taken as a whole, Justice League is often thrilling and rousing, with few of the outright infuriating twists that have made past DCEU movies so frustrating: the “Your mom’s name is Martha too?” miscalculations or “Superman destroys the city he’s trying to save” tone-deaf shenanigans. For once, the heroes have a relatively black-and-white battle ahead of them, without existential questions about whether humanity deserves saving, or whether they deserve to save humanity. And that lets the characters cut loose in a triumphant barrage of over-the-top carnage that shows them each to their best heroic potential. A somewhat inevitable mid-film twist changes the dynamic considerably, and officially overpacks the story, but it at least enables one thrilling combat that’s slightly more varied than the others.

On a moment-to-moment basis, though, Justice League often feels fractured. Whedon’s reshoots are sometimes painfully obvious, as when Flash and Cyborg share a brief personal moment in a graveyard that looks as cheap as a first-season Buffy the Vampire Slayer set. While those scenes can seem roughly interpolated and out-of-place, though, they often offer the film’s most meaningful character moments and flashes of humor and humanity. A quick gag involving Aquaman reveals more about him than the entire rest of the film’s two-hour runtime. Flash and Cyborg’s moment, where they discover a small thing they have in common, feels like an important softening for one of them, and a chance for the other to finally find commonalities with another person.

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The problem is that these moments just don’t jibe, visually or conceptually, with the bulk of the film, which focuses on the usual massive CGI throwdowns between living irresistible forces and immovable objects. The main villain is a nigh-invulnerable otherworldly CGI monstrosity with an army of disposable monsters at his back, which enables fight after fight after fight where heroes and villains alike are smashed through walls and floors until every battle feels like a playtest for a new destructible-environment engine. The heroes only barely develop shared strategies toward the end of the movie — normally, their tactics are each to jump him in turn, knock him down, and get knocked down themselves, which makes for extremely repetitive combat, no matter how many walls come apart in the process. The exceptions: Flash, who runs around in slo-mo superspeed that’s frustratingly similar to the effect used to portray Quicksilver in X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse, and Batman, who keeps showing up in different vehicles, trying to protect his nowhere-near-invulnerable body.

There are plenty of threads worth pulling on in Justice League, and Bruce Wayne’s devotion to compensatory gadgets is one of them. On the surface, he’s the badass who jokes that his superpower is wealth. Behind the scenes, he’s aware that he’s aging, he’s physically vulnerable compared to the other heroes around him, and he’s not likely to be able to keep up heroism long-term. It’s a relatable plot thread, but it’s also a mighty thin one. There’s so much going on in Justice League that it can only devote a few lines to that vulnerability, or to Barry Allen’s emotional isolation and social awkwardness, or to Diana’s long-lasting grief over Steve Trevor. (Kudos to Justice League for at least trying to explain her century-long absence from world affairs, but the thought comes and goes so quickly that it barely registers.) The film has to stand in as an origin story for three new heroes, as well as an origin story for a team, and it blurs past a lot of significant character beats with a brevity and apathy that does nothing to turn its protagonists into people. Again, fans already familiar with the characters, and with no interest in seeing their origins play out again, will likely be fine with the concision, and glad to just see these heroes engaging in epic onscreen adventures. But newcomers are going to have a harder time swallowing Flash’s in-jokey one-line origin (“So, you were hit by lightning, huh?”) or the brief peek in on Atlantis for yet another fight and a taste of exposition.

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Which is why Justice League winds up feeling so much like a straw poll for viewers, with a mishmash of everything they might want, all run together. Wonder Woman fans may show up for the kick-ass flashback to a world-scale Amazon battle (complete with some fan-service DC cameos) and an extended Themyscira sequence, but there are also a disconcerting number of Wonder Woman upskirt shots for the disrespectful horndogs in the audience. Fans of melancholy heroic angst have Cyborg fussing over his lost humanity; fans of mindless action have him blasting and beating whatever gets in his way, his previous concerns dropped, unaddressed and unacknowledged. It’s a Zack Snyder movie and a Joss Whedon movie, which may ultimately work better for audiences than a pure project from one or the other, given that both men have their fans and their detractors. It’s just a pity they couldn’t have consciously worked together to create a cohesive, coherent vision that merged their sensibilities thoroughly, instead of this back-and-forth tug of war that seems to be perpetually checking in with the audience: “Is this what you want? How about this instead?”