Maybe the problem with 'Justice League' is that it's not enough like 'Batman v Superman'
Justice League is fine. It's fine! If you trust the Tomatometer, it is 13 percentage points more fine than its predecessor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Justice League earned those points by going out of its way to address the criticisms lobbed at BvS, resulting in a film that's lighter, funnier, more narratively straightforward.
It's just not nearly as interesting. And that's a damn shame.
Whatever its shortcomings, Batman v Superman felt like the product of a single distinctive vision. Maybe not the vision everyone wanted – maybe one that some people found annoying or unpleasant or even downright reprehensible – but a single distinctive vision nonetheless.
It was a film steeped in panic and paranoia, and driven by the emotional illogic of nightmares. It painted Batman and Superman as two imperfect people trying to do some good in an endlessly cruel and needy world, and it flirted with the terrifying notion that even their superhuman deeds might not be enough. Maybe nothing ever would be. It felt suffocating, in the same way that existing in 2016 felt suffocating.
True, the execution of that vision could be sloppy. The plotting was confusing and disjointed, Doomsday was a big fat nothing, and Lois Lane had little to do besides be a terrible journalist. And yes, it all hinged on a big reveal that – while it makes sense thematically – played as deeply silly in context. But its audacity gave us a film that was weird and operatic in a way that nine-figure superhero blockbusters rarely allow themselves to be.
Justice League is not weird. It is safe and familiar, or at least trying really hard to be. To that end, the heroes have been made more laid-back and down-to-earth – there are more smiles, more jokes, more humanizing fumbles, and lots more Joss Whedon-y quips. The stakes are of the usual save-the-world variety. There's some generic messaging about teamwork, as all these lone wolves learn to work together for the greater good.
A great deal of lip service is paid to the importance of "hope," which is used almost synonymously with "Superman." Everyone in the movie seems to agree that hope died the day Superman did, which is strange because hope was already in desperately short supply before Superman died in Batman v Superman. (Wasn't one of the complaints about that film that the universe felt too dark and grim?)
Everything that was complicated (and, to some people, infuriating) about the Superman we saw in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman has been wiped away, leaving us with a blandly pleasant fellow who's completely free of angst or anger or self-doubt. Perhaps the new Superman is closer to what the fans wanted. But he doesn't really feel like a character anymore. He, like the rest of his movie, feels like a focus group-approved concept.
In any case, none of it amounts to anything very memorable. Batman v Superman is a film we haven't stopped arguing about for the past year and a half – people remembered it, even if they loathed it. Justice League? I felt the details fading from memory before we even got to the first end-credits scene.
That's a disappointment, especially in a year that reminded us how and why superhero movies have remained so popular for so long. The genre could've been played out by now. The reason it hasn't is because smart storytellers have continued to find new depths to mine and new angles to highlight.
Logan and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 dug into the real emotions behind these fanciful stories. Thor: Ragnarok and Lego Batman poked fun at genre tropes while wrestling with deeper themes. Spider-Man took an almost meta approach to superhero world-building. Wonder Woman was a beacon of pure goodness that offered an outside-in look at our messed-up society.
Batman v Superman imagined a scared, suspicious world (which is to say, a world not so unlike the one that dominates our headlines every day), and wondered what a superhero would or could mean in that context. It decided that piss jars and Jolly Ranchers and Marthas all had a place in this world, and set the thing to a heavy, foreboding score by Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL.
If it took itself way too seriously at times, at least we could give it credit for trying to be something worth taking that seriously. If it pissed some people off, at least that made for livelier conversation than the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that is Justice League.
Justice League only imagines being a movie that people will like enough to pay money to see, so that Warner Bros. can make a sequel. It works so hard to be that movie that it forgets to be anything else – anything more interesting or idiosyncratic. It has none of the ambition or WTF-ness of Batman v Superman. It's not awful. It's not awesome. It's fine. And that's even more dispiriting than all the gloom and doom of Batman v Superman.
Topics Comics
