This is not the justice league

Rating: 2/10 (16 November 2017)

TL;DR: The movie is a mess: Safe but unoriginal, thin and confusing plot. Zero character development, leading to disappointing performances. Ridiculously bad CGI. Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg, and Superman. The most iconic super heroes in comic book and pop culture history. Should be easy to make a cool and compelling movie about them right? Eh, maybe not. Lets start with the Pros: - Ezra Miller as the Flash is entertaining at points. His comic relief at points felt forced, but some of the jokes landed. - Comic Book references; for a DC comics fan, there are cool references throughout the movie that were cool to connect to the comics and made me smile a little bit. Moving on to the neutral points: - The plot was extremely safe; however, it is also ridiculously rushed. One could say this is expected because 3 of the main characters (Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman) are appearing for the first time. The plot also is ridiculously unoriginal: Aliens are looking for artifacts. Once they find artifacts, the world will be destroyed. Team must assemble and stop them before it's too late. One could argue that this is expected too; look at the Avengers, they did that also. But the thing that the Avengers did that DC fails tremendously at is setting up each character with a backstory so the audience can feel and care about each character's motivations (except Hawkeye). The only character that is given a little bit of an emotional backstory here is the Flash, and if you have watched the TV series you know what backstory I'm talking about. In summary, the plot was incredibly unoriginal, rushed, and predictable to the very end. - Ben Affleck as Batman: Affleck fails to impress as he did in Batman v Superman; however it isn't his fault. He does the best with what he is given here, even delivering some funny one-liners. However, if anyone know Batman at all, the character written in this story is a complete 180 from both Batman v Superman and the Batman of the comics. Gone is the dark from the Dark Knight, replaced by a Batman so light, there were flashes of the post Keaton, pre Bale Batman portrayals. The fact that Danny Elfman's score also brought these memories back did not help. - Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman: Gadot suffers from the same problem as Affleck: her character is written extremely poorly. Similar to Captain America, she is a warrior from a time long gone, a time that was simpler and more heroic. Therefore, Wonder Woman should be going through the same effects that Captain America did in the Avengers: bashing with other characters who don't exemplify heroism while portraying the ideal heroic nature that she was raised with. However, her character gets demoted to sexy heroine; every shot that introduces her starts from her behind and ends at here chest area. Gadot does the best with what she's given though, and is just fine in her role as co-leader to the squad. - Danny Elfman's score: Heroic at best and fine at worst, this score is no Zimmer's Man of Steel or Wonder Woman themes. Every track here is nearly forgettable, only saved by Elfman's callbacks to his familiar Batman theme, original Superman theme, and the Wonder Woman theme. Lastly the negatives: - CGI: With a rumored 300 million dollar budget, one can only wonder how in the world can a studio mess up something that is more than 90% of the movie? Starting with the very first scene which is (spoiler) a video recording of Superman. As most know, Cavill was unwilling to shave his mustache because he was filming MI6 at the same time, so the studio had to digitally remove it. The end result is something that looked like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. Immediately bringing laughs, this scene is just a precedent for the rest of the film's horrific CGI. The villain looks like a college student digitally created him for an extra credit project, with clunky movement and not fitting in with the background at all. Cyborg is an unfortunate casualty of this as well because for the whole movie his CGI just distracts from Fisher's performance and dialogue (more on that later). Nearly every shot during battle scenes and on Themyscira look like they were animated for a commercial. - Momoa and Fisher as Aquaman and Cyborg: Similar to Batman and Wonder Woman, it looks like these characters were written with little to zero personality. However, unlike Gadot and Affleck, Momoa and Fisher are barely there, delivering their lines like they are reading them for the first time. Their characters just feel like ex machinas at points. Momoa tries a little to just be himself, which can be seen as a good thing, but doesn't fit the tone of the movie at all. - Jumping around from location to location: When Star Wars Rogue One came out, people complained that the first half hour was dizzying due to the jumps from planet to planet. In this movie, it's not planet to planet, but from city to plane to city to island to ocean to city to flashback, without any warning or location status to even prepare the audience of the scene. - Editing/Reshoots: Building on the last point, the movie itself feels off. One can definitely tell the different tones from Snyder and Whedon immediately. (Spoiler) For example, Aquaman is introduced twice, and it is extremely obvious which one was the reshoot compared to Snyder's version. It's like there were two versions of the movie, and they couldn't decide which version to release so they just grabbed and mixed scenes from both versions. The final battle as well is immediately guilty of this. - Handling of Superman: Superman was gonna come back, only a child would be surprised by this. However, this movie retcons Batman v Superman in a way that makes no sense.