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March 18, 2021Zack Snyder isn’t happy with the criticism.
After the death of Zack Snyder’s 20-year-old daughter in 2017, the director backed away from his work on the superhero team film “Justice League.” Joss Whedon was tapped to complete the project, which included drastically cutting down the film’s length. The result was a widely panned and incoherent mess. (More, Ray Fisher, who plays Cyborg in “Justice League” as well as actors from other Whedon projects have come forward to accuse the director of abusive and unprofessional behavior on set.)
Thursday’s much-anticipated director’s cut of “Justice League,” then, streaming on HBO Max, is both a triumph over personal trauma, and a rebuke to a culture of professional impunity. Fans are excited; cast members have said they’re thrilled, as well.
Given this compelling backstory, I really wish “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” was a masterpiece, or at least a decent movie. But it isn’t. The director’s cut is an endless, joyless 240-minutes of tedium. The problems that plagued the theatrical version of the film — too many characters, an unfocused plot, a deeply uninteresting antagonist — are compounded rather than ameliorated at twice the length.
As with most of Snyder’s DC Extended Universe films, though, his version of “Justice League” is at least bad in some interesting ways. The theatrical cut was just another piece of indifferently assembled corporate product. But the new four-hour version gives fans their most undiluted view of Snyder’s vision — a vision which rather haplessly conflates heroism with shock and awe, and goodness with superpowers.
