Review: Justice League Wasn’t The DC Miracle We Waited For

From the minute this movie was announced, I tried really hard to contain my excitement and keep my expectations to a minimum but failed.

Justice League is supposed to be the biggest superhero movie of the year and it did a good job of shoring up that impression trailer after trailer.

The movie finally arrived on November 16. Although it wasn’t bad, it didn’t meet my expectations either.

Justice League Poster. Credits: techcrunch.com

Justice League is a sequel to Batman VS Superman and continues the story from that movie. In this movie, Superman is dead and the world is in a state of chaos because it has lost its beacon of hope. Things get complicated as the world faces a new alien threat which forces Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Diana Prince (Wonder Woman) to bring together a group of people with special abilities to try and save the world.

Ever since the DC Cinematic Universe began, its movies have always had mixed reviews from critics and fans alike.

Somehow, it feels like DC hasn’t found its rhythm yet and, although Justice League was an improvement of sorts, I still have an axe grind to grind with it.

Let’s start with the things I liked about Justice League. This time around, it’s obvious that DC learned from some of their past mistakes. The humour in this movie was fluid (mostly thanks to Ezra Miller who plays The Flash) and the team felt like a cohesive unit which is a sharp contrast to Suicide Squad.

Alternate Poster For<em> Justice League</em>. Photo credit: hollywoodreporter.com

Also, DC has always been great with action sequences and Justice League left me smiling when the fights came along. They were all mostly cool and I particularly liked how they toned down the slow-motion effects in the Wonder Woman scenes in this movie.

Sadly, Justice League is still a very disjointed movie for the most part. Apparently, the runtime of the movie was cut down by 45 mins and it was very obvious; the 2 hours spent eventually felt like the coming together of discordant tunes. You can expect nothing but a riotous, sad cacophony.

Like Batman VS Superman, I also found Steppenwolf an underwhelming villain even if he is a huge improvement from the Doomsday.

In addition, when creating a movie of this scale especially when creating an expansive universe, I think it’s important to invest time into the character development so you can get your audience interested in those characters for future movies. Unfortunately, Justice League is a rushed movie and that does little or nothing to get the audience interested in most of its major characters (except you’re a fan of the comics, cartoons or the actors themselves).

Personally, I think Justice League came out a year too early. Before this movie, Batman VS Superman was the only major prequel to the events of Justice League. Suicide Squad had a different direction and Wonder Woman was an origin story.

In the light of all these issues, I do not think DC makes terrible movies. My only hope is that they spend more time on the drawing board to properly structure their movies. In addition, it’ll be best if they drowned out the noise from the not-so-friendly rivalry with Marvel Studios and just focused on making their own movies.

Marvel started this journey in 2008 and there is no point trying to catch up. The best DC can do is to ignore the competition and take the time to build something they can truly be proud of.

Justice League might be the best movie on the DC roster so far, but it’s far from perfect and I think the creators know this as much as we do.