The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: The Story So Far

Written by Tom

‘The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World’ is my series of posts looking at the DC Cinematic Universe, how it’s developed itself over time, and what its aesthetics are trying to do. We’re about to start looking at our third block of films (running from ‘Shazam!’ to ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’). Given that the series is a bit long now and was last seen about two years ago, maybe a quick recap is in order…

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Zack Snyder made a one-off deconstruction of Superman called Man of Steel. At the same time as this, DC were looking to fast track the creation of a cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s. Man of Steel, being the financially successful reboot of their most iconic character, seemed like the perfect place to start and so retroactively became the DCEU’s first film with Snyder becoming the mastermind of the universe going forwards. This gave Synder a massive problem though: his first film was about deconstructing heroism, something that would be unsustainable in a continuous superhero franchise. How do you create something which would move the franchise away from deconstruction while maintaining stylistic consistency with a film dedicated to it?

His answer was to deconstruct his deconstruction in Batman vs. Superman, setting up his usual grimdark aesthetic but using it to house a story that’s fundamentally about how grimdark aesthetics can be dull. Once filtered through Synder’s bombastic directorial style (a style which can’t do anything quietly), the result was a film that basically screamed at the audience about how non-functional it was. This set the DCEU up as a cracked mirror of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – it wasn’t interested in doing standard superhero movies as much as it was interested in exploring “superhero movies gone wrong”. As an artistic statement, this is fascinating and has been able to maintain a strong cult fanbase to this day. Many mainstream viewers and critics found Batman vs. Superman to be too messy and weird though, many of the film’s more contentious moments becoming widely parodied memes. The DCEU was already beginning to show cracks.

Cue Suicide Squad and Justice League, the films that would bust those cracks wide open. Both of them tried to capitalise on the DCEU’s “superheroes gone wrong” aesthetic – Suicide Squad by literally putting villains in the superhero role and Justice League by wrapping up Synder’s deconstructionist aesthetic with a story about the DC superheroes finally becoming the icons they should’ve been two movies ago. The issue is that they were both production disasters.

Zack Snyder vs. the World – Justice League

Written by Tom
The third of a trilogy of posts, arguing that Zac Snyder’s DC films are genuinely interesting pieces of work which are in no way designed for their primary audiences.

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At this point, talking about the issues with Justice League feels like kicking a dog while it’s down. It had a tortured production and wears the scars of it quite blatantly. The producers seemed to finally lose faith in Snyder’s direction after the response to Batman vs. Superman and started requesting changes to make the film into something it wasn’t (the same methodology that gave us the beloved smash hit Suicide Squad). Personal problems meant that Snyder couldn’t finish the edits, leaving the film in the hands of Joss Whedon who would’ve had even less control over the edit and was being asked to do too much stuff with too little time. The result is exactly the type of mess you would expect: scenes feel compromised, everything’s too rushed, nothing is focused on providing any one single effect, and, as a result, everything falls flat. What else did we think we’d get?

But then again, the question of these Snyder blogs has never been whether Zack Snyder’s DC films are good or not; instead we’ve been interested in if they work internally as singlular texts. I contend that both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman do work as texts because both give themselves a job and largely succeed at doing it. Man of Steel tasked itself with deconstructing Superman and does it. Batman vs. Superman tasked itself with turning the DC cinematic universe into one which could house the Justice League and does that. Whether you like the films, or whether you think those tasks are ones which should’ve been done in the first place, are ultimately different concerns and you can find other people’s opinions about them everywhere else on the internet. Here, for just three posts, we’re interested in the texts themselves.

So let’s turn our lens to the internet’s current punching bag: what is Justice League doing as a film and how does it relate to the previous Snyder films on a thematic/narrative level?