A Zack Snyder film that Joss Whedon tried to clean up - and it shows. What a mess!

Rating: 4/10 (20 November 2017)

As we all know, Zack Snyder (BvS) has a very different vision of superhero movies than Joss Whedon (Avengers). This movie felt like a mish-mash of both incompatible styles. Scenes just happen without any connectivity, the plot is so generic it could have been written by a 5-year old. The attempt by WB Studios to Marvel-ise the movie by bringing in Joss Whedon and shoe-horning in comedy elements is nauseating. Yes, Flash has his comedic moments, but they feel very out of place. Superman's jokes are just out of character for what has been established.
This should not please BvS and Man of Steel fans, nor should it please Marvel fans who are more into character chops and comedy. What we have is a very unfocused movie with such an uninteresting villain that I felt like they just dragged and dropped him from a Mortal Kombat cutscene. Whatever they were trying to establish with Cyborg's struggle as a half-man half-machine falls way flat, so does Wonder Woman's attempt at being an anchor for the morality of the team. Batman just mopes around and Flash just goofs around. Jason Momoa was a standout, but that's the point - not enough screen time is devoted to any of these characters for us to like them. There are no character arcs.
There are certainly some good set pieces in the movie - the Amazon fight was good, so was the final fight scene, although it was very obvious they color-corrected much of it to look at least visible to the naked eye and for that I am thankful to Mr. Whedon. The stand-out scene for me was when Superman wakes up - Superman's fight with the team (although contrived in response to the success of Civil War) was interesting and I perked up for a moment, only to be undercut by Steppenwolf going "YOINK! Stole your BOX" and Superman returning to Smallville for the highly predictable recuperation scene with a sub-par Lois Lane performance and his mother (MARTHA!). Honestly, they missed a lot of great potential conflict with that subplot.
All-in-all, I am surprised by how much everybody seems to be liking movie. I can only attribute that to the die-hard DC fanboyism and the vocal immature majority of the internet. I just want to know what the comic book fans think of this movie. So many great stories involving the Justice League (can someone please show Chris Terrio and his WB overlords the Timmverse JLA series?) This movie falls flat on its face into sub-par cheese cartoonish territory with the rushed team-up plot line and no focus of character chemistry. This is exactly what you would expect from a Zack Snyder helmed WB-DC product which Joss Whedon was hired cleaned up. Kudos to Joss Whedon for adding/modifying scenes that made the movie at least slightly watchable, but I would have loved to have seen a Justice League movie totally helmed by Joss Whedon, or even one which truly represented Zack Snyder's vision (however bad it may be). A 50-50 product just made it schlock-central, a betrayal to all involved in the creative process and insulting to the viewers.