I too finally sat down to watch this on HBO the other night. I think I went into it with a relatively open mind… most of the comments above put the movie in the “meh” range and call out some high points, so I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
Nope. Man, that was horrible.
I probably ought to just copy/paste SlainteMhath’s post above this one, but maybe I can add a few pieces on insight.
Batman: Having him be Inspector Gadget is absolutely the wrong thing to pull from Nolan’s movies. Batman should absolutely be all about the planning, the detective work, and the ability to pull a solution out of thin air based on what he’s seen before, despite all the shit going down around him. Making him a brawler with mini-guns mounted all over a bunch of vehicles is just terrible.
Wonder Woman: Somewhere in there was a decent story about Diana Prince hiding her light under a bushel for decades at a time and unwilling to let the world see what she is/was capable of. They didn’t choose to tell that story (and maybe it’ll be told in the 1980s WW), but in theory they resolved it during the CGI-fest at the end?
Flash: I liked almost every scene he was in. The costume was just as crappy as it appeared in the early promo-shots.
Cyborg: A little more fleshed-out than I had thought he would be, to be honest. Still a nothing of a character, but I thought the actor did more with him than the script allowed, if that makes any sense. His costume was crap too… but at least they showed him revising it in the credits. I’m still not entirely clear why/how he lost control of his gun-arm after Superman’s resurrection. I get why we had to have everyone fight, and that was as good a reason as any to start it off, but… I dunno… random technobabble.
Aquaman: I really like Momoa. Or at least I want to. And I like that they went in a pretty all-new direction for one of the most whitebread characters in the DC arsenal. But man was he wasted in this movie.
Superman: I liked how menacing they made him out to be right after he came back from the dead. And that’s about all I can find to compliment. He was a McGuffin for 90% of the film, and for the other 10% you kind of wish he’d stayed dead so that the other characters could have overcome their individual issues and joined together to defeat the enemy… instead of having Superman show up and do it without breaking a sweat.
The villain: Ye gods. Sure, the bad guy is never going to be anything great in an ensemble movie (Thanos excluded, I guess), but Steppenwolf was just a horrible example. No motivation beyond being generically evil, no background or history to speak of, no sympathetic traits whatsoever, bad costume, stupid weapon, bad dialog.
