Justice League.... Don't know why everyone is knocking this movie. I enjoyed it. I mean it's not orginal---a lot is the first Avengers movie with a bigger special effects budget and maybe little less character development. But it's good.
I agree mostly. It's pretty similar in plot to the Avengers. But I think it was better paced than the Avengers which was really slow in the beginning as it reintroduced characters it likely didn't need to. League did that but also had to establish Aquaman, Cyborg, and Flash. It had a tougher job. I was reading a review that compared Avengers to a season finale whereas League was like a season premiere. Avengers benefited from a well-executed plan that stoked public excitement and it provided a big payoff. Justice League was coming in wobbly, with fans uncertain what they were getting, another gem like Wonder Woman or another turd (according to the critics and not me) like BVS. So the anticipation was more like dread than pure happiness with Justice League IMO.
League might have had a bigger FX budget but I'm not sure it looked that way compared to Avengers. The Battle of New York was great. I do think more could've been done in the climatic bout in League.
Personally, I didn't mind the slowness of the Avenger's movie because I found the conversations between the characters to be great (especially Widow and Banner). and I actually cared about the characters because I already saw them. I also felt like the movie was purposely "leading" the viewer on before dropping the hammer down with the battle of New York. Unlike Justice League... the Avengers members did not fight together at all until the final fight. There were some individual fights (im/thor, thor/hulk, cap/loki) but that saved the true Avengers coming together until the end. The MCU slow burned your ass for 5 movies and then did it in the movie to "bring them together." And it worked, IMO of course.
The Avengers also was able to give you those moments i the movie that were memorable, something JL failed at IMO. stuff like Thor calling his hammer to fight hulk and then smahign him with it, Hulk smashing loki, hulk smashing the serperts, the various team ups in the final battle that looked like a comic book coming to life.
And all the SFX were top notch (movie still looks good).
I feel the DCEU blew there load on BvS. They should have NEVER teamed those three up if there long term plan was Justice League. What was really special about JL? We already saw their big three team up to fight an unstoppable CGI monster in BvS. So you don't get that "moment" akin to the Avengers where all the big guns are together that you waited years for.
They simply should have had Man of Steel, Wonder Woman, Batman (in his prime), and then Aquaman movies followed by JL. This version of Flash doesn't really need a solo movie becaue he's so green and Cyborg just exists for exposition dumps and to get torn apart so they can be the introduced in the actual JL movie. That would have made JL seem like an event instead of just another DCEU movie.
WB tried to rush their whole universe and failed because of it. They were too reactionary to everything with no long term plan. They keep tryng to compete with the MCU instead of just focusing on themselves. Look how many times they have changed movie announcements the last few years. They bounce back and forth between being "director controlled" and then they snatch a movie up and edit it to sh*t when its done.
Very good point from Triple X about the causal filmgoer perspective. I'm too inside it to have considered that. But yeah, on the outside these comic book movies might all just look similar. And in many respects they are. So one might not be any different than the other, except if one is getting universal praise like Ragnarok and the other is getting slammed by the critics like Justice League, it makes sense if people who aren't invested in these things like hardcore fans, will back off or go with the critical consensus.
I thought the character moments in Justice League worked for the most part. I wish there had been more of them. With Avengers I felt the beginning was too slow because we had seen some of these characters introduced-in detail in other films. And there's a tendency to indulgence and irreverence with the Marvel films, a smugness, that I can't say started with Avengers but I do think has infected the subsequent Marvel films. And the audience for the most part is okay with it because they've earned the audience trust. WB/DC has not done that yet so they might get knocked for it. And Marvel has also gotten the low-hanging fruit with its humor and character beats so DC doing something similar is going to be seen as copying. Justice League had a lot more to do with introducing half of their team and Avengers really just needed to flesh out Hawkeye.
I think the plan was for Justice League to be a two part epic. Snyder was building up something much bigger that would justify forming the League more than what we saw in the finished film. It looked to me that BVS was setting up either a full on invasion by Darkseid or an Injustice scenario with an evil Superman. However due to the poor reception of BVS, WB just started changing plans. So Justice League serves as either a one and done or they can revisit Darkseid later. I think that's why they mentioned him in the film, but unfortunately didn't do additional set up.
I get why WB wants to move away from Darkseid because of the similarities with Thanos. And I guess they weren't thinking to beat Infinity War to the punch and put Darkseid in this film, getting ahead of Thanos in Infinity War next year. Perhaps they were afraid of the comparisons. So with this Justice League film it serves to make true Lex's warning at the end of BVS but still leave the door open to bring in Darkseid down the road.
I also get why WB moved forward with the Justice League instead of doing individual origin movies for Cyborg, Aquaman, and Flash first. I'll throw Batman in there too because perhaps this take on the character needed more defining. Anyway, I think they were behind the 8-ball and didn't count on how long the comic book movie boom might last. I also suspect they were afraid that if they kept rolling out solo movies that they would get diminishing returns or half-victories like Suicide Squad and it would tarnish the brand. So why not just give people want they wanted anyway and that's a team-up movie.
In cartoons Cyborg has been around since the 80s and is prominent in the Teen Titans cartoon from a decade ago and the current Teen Titans Go. Flash has had two television series and Aquaman at least is something of a popular punchline so all of these characters had some name recognition. Granted the audience hadn't seen these versions of the characters, but I would argue that somewhere along the way they had encountered a version of Flash and Aquaman at least, or knew their names and knew that they were superheroes.
So I can see that supporting the WB suits decision to just leap frog over solo individual films to do a big film and then with the hoped for success of Justice League it would get fans excited for the individual films. And it would be a different strategy than Marvel, banking on the (once held) bigger name recognition advantage DC had. Unfortunately it didn't work. That being said, we'll see if the movie has any legs, breaks even, and maybe even eeks out a tiny profit. I think all those things are possible. Despite its flaws, Justice League is popcorn entertainment that isn't a big offender when it comes to foul language and might even be less an offender when it comes to graphic violence compared to Ragnarok.
