Is this Just Amazing? JustNICE or JustCrap?

Rating: 6/10 (21 November 2017)

This right here is the 5th movie in the DC extended universe and by now you'd think they'd gotten pretty good at making them, especially with the same fella directing over half of them? Well Not really.
The film follows Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Godot), as they look to assemble a team of other gifted individuals to help fight off a pending invasion. The death of Superman has left a void on the Earth, and this has paved the way for an ancient evil to return as he attempts to conquer the planet, he must collect some infinity stones artifacts to help him start the end of time (or something like that).
If a story really is a movies backbone then Justice league is disabled.
Characters are most certainly Justice Leagues strong point and as a huge fan of these comic book heroes it was exciting to watch Bruce, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Cyborg and Superman all meet up and interactive with each other. The chemistry between the main crew is fantastic and I personally would have loved to have seen more moments like this.
Affleck, Gadot and Cavill (even with his weird CGI top lip) play their roles excellently and the newbies Ezra Miller (The Flash). Jason Momoa (Aquaman) & Ray Fisher (Cyborg) all do a fine job of bringing their characters to life. Ezra Miller adds a lot of humour to proceedings, even if some jokes fall a little flat) and Jason Momoa portrayal of Aquaman goes swimmingly. The only character I'm not a fan of is Ray Fisher's Cyborg. This isn't his fault, in fact his acting is quite possibly the most impressive of all, however his character is very generic and feels very much like a knock off Iron-man.
One of the films biggest issues is it's runtime. A studio imposed time restraint of 2 hours would have been a huge crucifix on Zack Snyder and then his replacement Joss Whedon considering just how much they had to cram into this film. Not only did it have to deal with the repercussions of Batman v Superman but also introduce many new characters and bring with it a powerful new threat. The movie jumps from one scene to the next and the audience is at real risk of getting dizzy. Its all very messy and cumbersome, some scenes could be stand-alone youtube videos with little to connect them to the following scenes The final chapter could have been shot for any other DC movie and then just bolted to the end.
Then we come to the films main villain One of THE worst villains I have ever seen. Steppenwolf (I had to google his name as I couldn't for the life of me remember) is entirely CGI and has no real presence. Muttering words like "no protectors here, this world will fall..blaah blah blah" is as shallow and uninspiring as they come. Apparently as a dedicated comic book reader his motivations would be a more clear but to me I had no idea what his problem was and this just highlights how little I cared about the main story.
The action in the film is decent enough and there are some stand out moments that made the nerd in me cry in delight, however so many blatantly obvious CGI backgrounds and almost video game like character moments pulled me out of the moment more often than I'd have liked.
Justice League feels like a cake that was made without all its ingredients and not left in the oven long enough. DC should have taken more time to establish its characters first before throwing them all into the same pot. Overall it was much better than I expected, and the two bonus scenes in the credits show some interesting potential down the road. A handful of nerd porn moments elevated this film out of the shitter and the chemistry between the characters was a joy to watch. It is a flawed piece of entertainment that requires audiences to overlook a lot of issues but I had fun