It’s been a rocky road for the DCEU. After its lacklustre and divisive beginnings, we got our first ray of hope with Wonder Woman earlier this year. Bringing it all together is Justice League – can they stick the landing? I’m often labelled a pessimist. But how else should I be? I’m constantly punished for feeling a shred of optimism about these films.

Justice League is about a CGI monster who tries to obtain a set of cubes that will make him really powerful. Batman tracks down some guys with superpowers and forms a group to defeat the monster. That’s it. What did you expect?

Before you read on, there’s a minor spoiler in here, but nothing you can’t figure out from the trailer or posters.

To its credit, Justice League avoids some pitfalls that plagued the preceding films. For instance, it has a plot, no incoherent and unnecessary dream sequences, and an effort is made to give decent introductions to the lesser-known characters. I found myself particularly invested in Cyborg, a guy whose body was blown to bits in an accident and saved by his father’s cybernetic implants. Because his mind is intimately connected to the machines in his body, he wrestles with his own identity. There’s a fascinating story lurking in there, but it just made me wish he’d had his own film beforehand.

While the setups work for the most part, it comes at the cost of hopping around from story to story, plodding through exposition a la Rogue One. I imagine I’d be bored to death were I to re-watch it. And little of what is established in the first act pays off later.

Gal Gadot is once again terrific in the role of Wonder Woman – she deserves better than this film. Ezra Miller was decent as The Flash but his character isn’t my cup of tea. He’s the quote-unquote “funny one”. I had the same reaction to Tom Holland’s Spiderman. Comic book fans tell me these characters are meant to be like this. I’m left wondering why such annoying, unfunny characters are popular in the first place.

The humour, in general, stinks of Joss Whedon. Many have complained about DC’s darker tone. They compensated by taking everything that doesn’t work in Marvel’s films and shoehorning it in. But here’s the problem: Hearing Bruce Wayne quip “I hear you talk to fish” when he first meets Aquaman isn’t something the established Wayne would say.

In fact, forget about all that extended universe bollocks, Justice League fails as a sequel. BvS set the stage: A world where the people are divided over Superman, where Batman hates him though they reconcile before the end, Superman dies but dirt rises above his coffin so he’s not so dead after all. Nope, nope, and nope. Justice League shows the people unanimously mourning a dead Superman, who’s really dead by the way, until he’s resurrected upon which he hates Batman. So not only does Justice League defy the tone and characters of BvS, it doesn’t honour the plot developments, either.

But surely we can praise Batfleck, the one thing we all loved about BvS? Meh. All the action is boring and unmemorable. There’s no “that warehouse scene”. There’s perhaps one chase scene involving the Amazons that I enjoyed, but the rest is devoid of tension. The final battle scene is frustratingly edited, too – we constantly cut back to one civilian family in the middle of the disaster zone, yet towards the scene’s conclusion we learn that there’s a whole city of people in danger. It’s utterly nonsensical.

Worse still are the visual effects. It’s a staggering amount of money to spend on sequences resembling the burly brawl from Matrix Reloaded. The villain is entirely CG – why? A bit of make-up and headgear would have done the job. Similarly, Cyborg’s body is a cartoon – why? We’ve seen how effective a blend of costume and CG can be with Iron Man’s suit. It’s a constant distraction, and it kicks you when you’re down – after you lose interest in the story and characters, you can’t even have fun with the action sequences. Mind you, we are talking about the film that used CG to cover up a moustache – should I be surprised?

Yet, I was optimistic. Why? Because despite their flaws, the DCEU films at least tried their hand at something that wasn’t desperately safe. In contrast to the executive committee-driven Marvel Studios, they were the result of a singular artistic vision. They dared to have a deliberate visual aesthetic, established strong musical themes for their characters, and endeavoured to tell stories that were a bit weird and a bit different. And I’m so disappointed that Justice League was Joss Whedon-ified in a drastic last minute struggle to fill seats.

It’s boring. It’s inconsequential. It looks like shit. After The Avengers and Transformers it’s yet another story about a shallow villain trying to get a cube. Oh, I’m sorry, mother box. There are a couple of decent performances and some interesting new characters, but they leave you wishing they were in a different film. But I hear the film isn’t on course to make much of a profit. Some might call that justice.

3-3

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Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to check out my other reviews, including my breakdowns of every episode of Game of Thrones season 7.

Image credit: DC/Warner Bros