Another DC Misstep

Rating: 4/10 (15 February 2018)

Hoo boy, where do I begin? In 2013, DC Comics and Warner Bros. rebooted the Superman franchise with the summer blockbuster Man of Steel. The film was a box office success and many people felt it was a welcoming makeover for the cultural icon, although some opined that it leaned too heavily into the darker themes of The Dark Knight trilogy and abandoned the lighter tone of Superman's origin.
After the success of Man of Steel, DC announced it would begin crafting an interconnected movie universe (similar to the massively popular Marvel Cinematic Universe) utilizing the company's most famous characters. The divisive Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice followed in 2016, with the critically maligned Suicide Squad released later in the same year, and the acclaimed Wonder Woman following in 2017.
Justice League is the most recent DC offering and has been touted as DC's version of Marvel's The Avengers. Starring Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg, it was expected to be a major superhero heavy-hitter. Unfortunately, like the franchise as a whole, Justice League proved to be an inconsistent mess and an overall disappointment.
Directed by Zack Snyder with additional direction by Joss Whedon, who took over in the middle of production after Snyder stepped down due to his daughter's suicide, Justice League follows in the footsteps of Snyder's other works by being flashy and overly complex with little real substance. The story is a bloated, convoluted mess and it doesn't help that, unlike The Avengers, the movie never had much of a solid foundation to build off of. The villain's intentions are confusing, the Mother Boxes are poorly explained, new characters and locations are tossed in without any proper introduction, and it takes almost half of the movie's runtime to even bring Superman back from the dead.
The quality of the acting is decidedly mixed. Gal Gadot leads the way and shines as the DC universe's breakout star Wonder Woman. Jason Momoa, Ezra Miller, and Ray Fisher are all surprisingly fun and delightful as Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg. Ben Affleck seems bored as Batman and he has every right to be as the character really isn't given much to do throughout the course of the movie except attempt to rally the Justice League members together (which Wonder Woman ends up doing much more handily anyway). The same can be said for Henry Cavill as Superman, who is relegated to playing a violent, angry Superman who doesn't return to his normal self until just before the film's final act. Ugh, and why do they even continue to include the enormously talented Amy Adams in these films if they're not going to even attempt to make Lois Lane anything more than a plot device for Superman?
But perhaps the movie's biggest flaw are the truly atrocious visual effects. Big budget superhero movies can often get away with a thin story by dazzling audiences with impressive visuals. Justice League can't even do that. One of the most expensive films ever made with a production budget of $300 million, I honestly can't figure out where all that money went to. The action sequences are a jumbled mess with garish special effects and awful cinematography. Steppenwolf, the film's main villain, is an entirely CGI creation and quite literally looks like something out of a 2007 PS3 video game. And don't even get me started on the Superman "Lipgate." How the visual effects team managed to mess up a simple mustache removal is beyond me.
Overall, Justice League is a truly bad film with only a few acting performances and character interactions as its saving grace. It's a colossal disappointment in every other way and I'm clearly not the only one who holds this opinion: the movie performed abysmally at the box office. With a break-even point of $750 million, the film couldn't even muster $230 million in the United States and barely passed $650 million worldwide. This not only makes it the lowest grossing movie in the DC Comics' interconnected movie universe, but also a pale shadow of the success Marvel has managed to achieve. For comparison, Marvel's first team-up film, The Avengers, took the world by storm and ended up with $623 million in the United States and over $1.5 billion worldwide. Yes, Justice League quite literally made just a tad more worldwide than The Avengers did in the United States alone.
These numbers prove just how poorly this film and most of the DC universe has been handled so far. DC and Warner Bros. will need to seriously contemplate how to best move forward after this disaster because they quite literally cannot afford another misstep.