A mess

Rating: 6/10 (17 March 2018)

This film is a easily the worst entry of the DCEU. Yes, I think it is worse than the decent Batman v Superman (talking about Ultimate Edition, of course) and the mediocre Suicide Squad.
The biggest problem with this film is that it doesn't feel like it's from the same world as Batman v Superman or Man Of Steel. There is about one week between Batman v Superman and Justice League, and suddenly Bruce doesn't hate the world, loves everyone... and makes jokes. "I heard you can talk to fish" was something I could stand, but "Yep, there's something certainly bleeding" was just terrible. Also, in the three DCEU films set in the present day, the military and the government play big roles, here they just don't exist. Apart from some cops during Superman's resurrection, there isn't a single military force involved in anything related to the film. This is probably because of the reshoots or because of the runtime limit (I'll get to that).
Then, the story. Batman has restored the faith in humanity after Superman's heroic act, so, with the help of Wonder Woman, he recruits a team of meta humans to fight an alien threat coming from far away. Batman v Superman's Ultimate Edition had this scene where we get a glimpse of Steppenwolf, Justice League's villain. Except, of course, that BvS' Steppenwolf, with only two seconds of screen time, leaves a better impression than the PS3 character we got in Justice League. He only talks to himself, telling to the audience his plans, and he has some weird obsessions with mothers. He spends the whole movie speaking to and about the mother boxes, mother and the unity, which is formed by the three mother boxes. A lot of mothers. Oh, and don't forget the fact that he looks different than in his first appearance. Then, the story makes no sense. We don't know where the mother boxes come from, what they exactly do, and why they are so powerful. If it is such a huge risk to keep them in normal places, where they could suddenly awake, why don't they just destroy them? There are plenty of plot holes like this. The pacing makes no sense, it jumps from one action scene to another without taking its time to breath. And because Steppenwolf is so bad, I'll talk more about him. What is exactly his plan? If you know the comics, you know he is one of the New Gods, Darkseid's most trusted general, etc. You also know that his mission is terraforming the earth to make it like Darkseid's world. We get a glimpse of this in the "Knoghtmare" sequence of Batman v Superman. However, if you know nothing, all you know is that he is from far away, that he loves mother and that he is some blue guy, which makes him the most generic villain a DC Film has ever had. I'd dare to say he is even worse than Mr Freeze. And the CGI they used for him is just TERRIBLE, which brings me to my next point.
Oh, the special effects... where do I start with this? It is a 300 million dollar film, yet it feels and looks like a made for TV holiday special. Many scenes are oversaturated and have too much colour, other scenes have some of the worst green screen I've ever seen, and Steppenwolf looks like some villain from a bad 2007 video game. All of this, if I'm right, is because of the reshoots.
Where do I start with them, too? Zack Snyder, who directed the divisive Man Of Steel and the misunderstood Batman v Superman, had completed principal photography and filmed all the scenes, and even completed the VFX for some of them, when her daughter committed suicide. This logically made him step out of the project, and WB hired Joss Whedon, who had already signed with them for a Batgirl movie, to write and direct some reshoots. Why? Well, some people say the Snyder cut was unwatchable, and some say it was because what Snyder had done continued the gritty style introduced in Man Of Steel, so Joss was supposed to light it up. The thing is that apart from lighting up the tone, he literally lighted up some scenes, to the point of oversaturating night scenes to make them look like day scenes (Superman's resurrection is a good example of this). He also scrapped most of Superman's scenes and reshoot them all. How do we know this? Well, because the visual effects team had little time to finish the CGI before the release of the film, so some inconvenient things happened with Henry Cavill's face. While they filmed the reshoots, he was filming the new Mission: Impossible film, and a part of his contract with Paramount said that he couldn't shave his beard and moustache; and WB took the brilliant decision of removing it with visual effects. The problem, however, is that his upper lip looks extremely bad and clumsily done and part of his face looks blurry.
And finally, the score. When Joss Whedon (who, BTW, directed Avengers and its sequel) came on the project, he fired the brilliant Junkie XL, who had worked with Hams Zimmer on the BvS score, and decided to replace him with the once brilliant Danny Elfman. And for some reason, Elfman decided to take all the musical continuity of the DCEU away and replace Hans Zimmer's Flight with John Williams theme for Christopher Reeve's Superman, A Beautiful Lie with his own theme for 1989's Batman, and Is She With You? With a bastardisation of the theme. All of this, combined with the rest of uninspired themes, leave us with one of the most generic scores in recent super hero films.
In conclusion, Justice League is a convoluted mess, a Frankenstein film made by two different directors with two different styles, that doesn't know what it wants to be and breaks its own universe's bit of continuity.