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.
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? (more…)
FNORD 