Zack Snyder's Justice League
Zack Snyder's Justice League is a flawed but fascinatingly ambitious four-hour director's cut that is definitely an improvement.
The backstory is by now well-documented. Snyder stepped away from the original Justice League following a family tragedy, and Joss Whedon completed the film under Warner Bros.' direction with significant reshoots and a mandate to bring the runtime down and the tone up after the critical reception to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The result was a compromised film that satisfied almost no one, too choppy to work as a narrative and too indebted to a different filmmaker's sensibility to function as a Snyder film. The Snyder Cut, as it became known, was the subject of a fan campaign that ran for years before Warner Bros. relented and provided the funding to finish what Snyder had originally assembled. Whether that campaign deserved to win is a separate question from whether the resulting film justifies the effort, and the answer to the second question is a qualified yes.
Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) assembles a team of metahumans to defend Earth against Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), a general in the service of the planet-conquering New God Darkseid (Ray Porter), who is searching for three Mother Boxes, ancient artifacts of immense destructive power. The team includes Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa), Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), and Victor Stone (Ray Fisher), with the resurrection of Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) forming the centerpiece of the second act. Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Amber Heard, and J.K. Simmons also star, alongside Joe Morton as Victor's father Silas and Kiersey Clemons as Iris West.
The single most significant improvement this version makes over the theatrical cut is what it does with Cyborg. Ray Fisher's Victor Stone was reduced to a functional supporting role in Whedon's version, his backstory compressed to the point of incoherence. Here, Cyborg is the emotional core of the film, a man in the process of coming to terms with a body and a set of abilities he did not choose, grieving a mother he could not save and navigating a relationship with a father who made a decision on his behalf that Victor is not sure he would have made for himself. Fisher is given the material to make that arc land, and he does. It reframes the entire film around a character who previously registered as an afterthought, and the difference in emotional weight is substantial.
The addition of Darkseid is similarly meaningful. The theatrical cut's Steppenwolf was a generic CGI antagonist operating in service of a threat that was never properly established. Restoring Darkseid, and including a sequence set in Earth's ancient past in which Darkseid, then known as Uxas, leads an invasion to recover the Anti-Life Equation, gives the cosmic mythology of the film a foundation it previously lacked. It also makes Steppenwolf comprehensible as a character rather than simply as an obstacle: he is trying to reclaim his standing with Darkseid after a prior failure, which is a motivation considerably more interesting than the usual world-ending ambition. A new Knightmare sequence in the fourth act, in which a future version of Batman operates alongside an unlikely coalition including the Joker (Jared Leto) against a Superman who has fallen to the Anti-Life Equation, points toward a sequel that will never happen but is vivid enough to make you briefly wish it would.
That said, the honesty that a 3/5 rating requires means acknowledging what the film does not fix. The four-hour runtime is justified by the material more than it might seem from the outside, and the pacing is considerably better than the runtime would suggest, but the film still has structural problems that more time does not resolve. The Mother Box MacGuffin remains as inert a narrative device here as it was in the theatrical cut, a plot engine that generates stakes without generating meaning. The dialogue in several scenes has the functional quality of a draft that needed one more pass, and the film's climax, while visually grander than Whedon's version, still resolves through a combination of brute force and convenient timing that the preceding three and a half hours have not quite earned emotionally.
Snyder's visual sensibility is the film's most consistent asset and its most polarizing quality. The decision to shoot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, framing the image in a taller format suited to IMAX presentation, is a choice that works better than it sounds and gives individual shots a compositional weight that the standard widescreen theatrical framing rarely achieves. Snyder has always thought in images first, and the ability to frame a comic book panel with the deliberateness of a painter is on full display here. Whether that translates to storytelling coherence is a more complicated question, and it is the tension at the center of his entire filmography.
Zack Snyder's Justice League is available on HBO Max and that is the right place for it. A four-hour film was never going to work theatrically, and the streaming context allows you to engage with it on its own terms and at your own pace, which is the most favorable set of conditions it could ask for. It is a better film than the theatrical cut by a significant margin, and it is a genuinely interesting artifact of a franchise moment that has already passed: the end of the Snyderverse before it had the chance to become whatever it was trying to be. Watch it for Cyborg, watch it for the visual ambition, and make your peace with the fact that the story underneath both of those things is only intermittently as strong as the images carrying it.
