I finally watched this last night, and wow, was it bad!
So slow and plodding in every way, and even the action scenes weren’t worth all the lengthy exposition and setup. Like everyone says, so much grimdark.
Batman looked awful. He’s a Dexterity fighter, so to see him all short and squat, buffed out armor, slow and clunky was an insult. Add to that his total reliance on gadgets, use of guns and missiles, and never engaging Steppenwolf at all made him impotent.
The way they brought back Supes was stupid.
The whole story of the motherboxes looked like LotR. The color scheme was similar to the opening Sauron fight, all the races came together, and even down to the ‘one box was given to the Amazonians’, etc.
I hate Lois Lane so much. Once again, she’s the only person in the world who can truly save the day.
We get it. Flash is fast. Everything he does doesn’t need electric sparks and slo-mo shots.
Like evey movie so far, Diana Prince is the only redeeming part of it.
Finally saw this and I am telling you if Gal Gadot wasn’t in it, I’d of skipped it totally. Horrible story about 3 boxes. Someone got paid to write this script and someone said yes this is good lets make it!
I continue to dislike the portrayals of Superman and Batman.
I can only imagine how horrible and CGI filled the Aquaman movie will be later this year.
I just saw Black Panther and even being disappointed after all the hype, it was still a lot better than the last DC movie I saw (which to be fair wasn’t Justice League, but was supposedly better than Justice League). I can wait to see this one eventually and come back here and say how it was awful.
This movie was sent off to die. They cheaped out on the CGI, probably to make up for the money spent on reshoots. The cutting off it being a two part movie since it’s clear Darkseid was supposed to be in it too. Then add in the stupid forcing of the movie to not be more than 2 hours…while introducing 3 characters.
If it wasn’t for Jenkins, Wan, and Reeves being the upcoming directors I’d say bury the DC world. Maybe they can resurrect it in the coming couple of years.
The reshoots certainly are also responsible for the CGI looking bad simply due to scheduling reasons. In addition to any monetary constraints, I’d assume that any additional vfx work was done on a really tight timeline while also negatively affecting the vfx work on scenes they didn’t end up re-doing. There’s only so much money you can throw at a problem; vfx tuning, comp and other post-production work also require a bit of time.
If a movie is entertaining, the work gets a pass no matter what. If the movie is bad, maybe good VFX can salvage it, but it’ll sure get more scrutiny. I’m not sure how many people would be analyzing Cavill’s lips if the things he were saying were engaging, because then you’d be looking at his eyes, like you do to people you care to hear.
Batman was the comic relief, which actually kind of worked for me. The Flash was a shy geek, which also worked as a second comic relief. The cyborg dude, I still don’t understand why he was in the movie, except to bring together other characters and the mcguffin. Aquaman was a complete disappointment, even less interesting than cyborg dude. Wonder woman was pretty awesome, and is the primary reason I actually ended up enjoying this movie. And finally, pet cemetery Superman was pretty great, but regular Superman was just boring.
I loved it every time the villain was on the screen because of his name. It made me laugh every time. Let’s put this Justice League together, so we can fight the lead singer of Steppenwolf!
I didn’t dislike the movie and it had a few good moments but it ended up being just…ok. Justice League should feel epic. It’s supoosed to be DCs version of the The Avengers but will be added to the pile of mostly forgettable comic movies.
I agree. And since it was a DC super movie, that really surprised me. I was really expecting them to mess it up completely somehow, but it turned out ok. I guess we were going in with different expectations.
Also saw it on HBO. It was meh. Which on the one hand is better than Batman vs. Superman, parts of which were actively infuriating. But on the other hand it’s worse than Batman vs. Superman, because a few parts of B vs. S were awesome (though the awesome bits were mostly nicked from Frank Miller or the Batman video games) and Justice League never rose above meh at any point.
It had two big problems, one of which that no character really shone - Bats was better in his own movies, Supes in his, Wondie in hers. Movie Flash was fine, but by no means better than his modern TV equivalent. Even Aquaman was done better on the JLA cartoon.
The other major problem is that the villain was lame. Why would anyone making a make-or-break movie for their cinematic universe use Steppenwolf? There’s nothing to him as a character and no one has said “I want to see Steppenwolf in a movie,” ever. Go full Darkseid or go home.
But still, it did rise to the standard of meh, even with Steppenwolf. So if they made a JL movie that did go full Darkseid I might go see it. At least I might if it didn’t have that annoying guy they insist on calling Luthor in it…
(Steppenwolf trivia. Both the New Gods character and the band were referencing the same thing, the novel by Herman Hesse. It was a cult classic during the 60s, man.)
Ok, so I went back and watched the credits. There’s a scene with Flash and then at the very end, they do indeed bring back the guy they insist on calling Lex Luthor. How annoying.
By the way, one of the most striking images in the movie was in the sequence where world landmarks are adorned with the black and white Superman logo, and they showed this amazing looking pixelated building:
I looked it up, and it is Mahanakhon Tower in Bangkok, Thailand. It just recently got completed. The Ritz-Carlton is in there apparently, amongst other things. That little pixelated spiral goes all the way up the building. Very cool design.
I watched this too last night (again). It made me remember my biggest takeaways:
-In a big way, the movie basically admits that there’s not much reason to have anyone around other than Superman. I mean, it’s kind of literally just a stalemate at best, then Superman shows up and he wins.
-The villain is truly just awful. I mean, if you are going to essentially do a follow up on previous movies, at least have the villain be on par with, or at least not a giant step back from, Doomsday from Batman versus Superman?
Obviously I’m not familiar with Steppenwolf other than from this movie, but I don’t understand why he’s not on par with other villains? Obviously he’s supposed to be a stand-in for Sauron from the Lord of the Rings trilogy by Peter Jackson. He is setup the exact same way. In the LOTR trilogy, Jackson showed a battle where Sauron was defeated by a united army of dwarves, elves, humans. In Justice League, they show a similar battle where the armies of Amazons, Altantis people and humans came together to beat him the first time, and he retreated. But now he’s back and he has transporter technology from Star Trek, so he can beam right to where he needs to be. And this time instead of facing 3 armies, he’s just facing a bunch of super heroes. I thought that was sufficient stakes.
A question about the sequence at the end of the credits for you folks who are familiar with comics: In the sequence, we’re following a person who looks kind of like Deadpool. Obviously he’s a bad guy in the DC universe though, since he’s meeting with Lex Luthor. But he can’t be Deadpool, since that’s a Marvel character.
Edit: Oooh, here we go, I found a nice article on this at Polygon:
