Zack Snyder does it again

Rating: 4/10 (4 May 2018)

Imagine you are tasked with creating a superhero team movie. The seemingly obvious way to do this is have your individual heroes meet up and then jump into showing the newly formed team facing obstacles together. Justice League is a case study in why this is actually a terrible way to produce a team-up movie.
A better way would be to build up the individual team members, and the relationships between them prior to the actual formation of the team. And if you're already on a tight timeline, because, say, you're trying to catch up to the competition, all the more reason to make good use of whatever few prequels you might have access to. So the fact that Zack Snyder squandered Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman on incoherent action sequences and epic slo-mo glamour shots really takes a toll on the misbegotten Justice League.
Furthermore, a good team-up movie isn't really so much about the team facing the world, but rather all the dynamics within the team itself. What little attempt there is to show this in Justice League is equal parts superficial, cliched, and dull.
Justice League was already going to be a heavy lift considering all this, but the basic film-making flaws complete the disaster.
As with Snyder's other DC movies, the pacing is awful. The script is lifeless and flat. The CGI is absolutely terrible, a problem compounded by its reckless overuse. The action is loud and underwhelming.
The low production value of Cyborg is inexcusable in a movie of this scale. He looks like something you might see in a arrowverse spinoff on CW (which in spite of its cheerful cheesiness, produces characters with way more spirit and chemistry than anyone in Snyder's DC-verse).
There seemed to be a lot of critical commentary that Ezra Miller's Flash was a rare bright spot in the movie. I have to disagree with that. His character and his lines felt just as forced and predictable as everyone else.
Then there is Jason Momoa's Aquaman. All I can say is that I hope the makers of the Aquaman film move away from the lord of the brocean interpretation here.
Finally there is the villain, Steppenwolf. Sweet jesus, where to begin with Steppenwolf. Creating a solid villain has always been a challenge for super hero movies, including Marvel films. But it feels like in Steppenwolf, Snyder went out of his way to perfectly model every single complaint about poorly made super villains.
I give Justice League a generous 4 / 10. The good news is that its lousy box office performance might force Warner Brothers to reconsider the direction of these movies.