Batman and Wonder Woman go on another recruitment drive, seeking out The Flash and Cyborg, while Aquaman finally heeds the call to action from Atlantis.
Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Epilogue
The Plot
- Barry Allen meets and saves Iris West in Central City and then visits his father in prison.
- Steppenwolf interrogates Atlanteans to learn the location of their Mother Box and then succeeds in stealing it despite Aquaman attempting to help. Mera implores him to embrace his heritage and help his people.
- Bruce and Diana review the candidates for their proposed team, with Bruce recruiting Barry Allen while Diana attempts the same with Vic Stone, who gets to grips with his new powers.
- Victor buries his Mother Box in his empty grave after Parademons come after it, so they kidnap Silas and various others who have been near it instead.
The Good
- Much like Part 1, I’ll never be mad about scenes of Lois Lane grieving Clark’s death. Given he returns so quickly in terms of actual screen time, anything they can do to convey the weight of that loss is a good thing.
- Victor Stone’s flashback to his glory days as a star quarterback. People say all the time that Snyder should direct music videos instead of movies, but he shoots the shit out of the football game in the snow, so I think I’d like to see him take on a sports movie. I like that this little sequence also establishes Vic was good with computers pre-transformation, rather than being a jock who got genius thrust upon him via alien tech. The visual representation of ‘cyberspace’ has a lot of nice touches too, including his ‘avatar’ looking like his football days, the way the vastness of all the data available to him is conveyed, and him gifting a stranger $100k after watching CCTV of her being a good person. To me this is the biggest shame to omit from The Theatrical Cut.
- More Alfred is always a win. Taking a stab at showing how Batman is going to take on alien weaponry doesn’t hurt either, and will be important for Part 5…
- JK Simmons sure is a good Jim Gordon. You get a couple of fun extra lines out of him in this version. The two witness sketches are really different, with Snyder’s looking a lot more like Batman, which fits the dialogue, while Whedon’s is very clearly a Parademon, which fits the actual story. Given the ‘Has Batman gone bad?’ story goes absolutely nowhere, I guess I’d call it in favour of Whedon. Like do the thing or don’t, ya know?
The Bad
- The utter buffoonery of the hot dog scene. In theory this is the equivalent of Wonder Woman and Aquaman’s big debuts in the movie, showing off what they can do in a scenario tailored to their abilities and personalities. And I will concede that it’s cool to see him move so fast he can shatter a glass window with his finger tip and whatnot, but the musical choice doesn’t fit him at all. I get that it’s meant to be more about the Meet Cute with Iris, but it just doesn’t work for me. And that’s before you get to the clown show of him gently brushing a hot dog away from her face and pocketing it for his later benefit. Honestly they’re lucky that some of Whedon’s very worst instincts made it into the theatrical release, because Barry playing with all the dogs after the rescue is more ridiculous than 99% of his version.
- The idea that Parademons would be able to best Atlanteans underwater is ridiculous to me. Much more of this to come. It also feels like an entirely unnecessary scene as Vulko already said people were getting snatched, so seeing it happen did nothing but take up a minute of screen time and show that Steppenwolf has a little spider robot that can force you to project your memories. Neat! Could that not have been introduced in the equivalent higher stakes scene in Part 4 though?
- I’ve never been crazy about Batman/Wonder Woman romance stories, though I much prefer Bruce as a romantic interest for Diana than Clark. Given how much of the DCEU was coloured by The New 52, I’m glad that element didn’t find its way in. If we MUST do that, I don’t think them accidentally brushing hands and Bruce trying to diffuse the tension by calling it out is the way to go. It feels REALLY off for his character to acknowledge little social oopsies rather than just remaining gruff and broody. It was too much Ben Affleck, not enough Bruce Wayne. This may be my most hyper-specific critique in the entire project, but I do feel strongly about it. Character voices matter!
- I don’t like Cyborg learning his abilities via a clumsy voice recording from his father set to a montage of him giving it all a try. Writing it out like that, it doesn’t sound so bad, but the idea he’s been moping around their apartment since his transformation, ignoring and arguing with his father, but having his mind changed by a little tape recorder saying ‘You’re going to be so powerful though!’ is goofy to me. I much prefer him figuring it out for himself and staying annoyed at his father.
- “Fuck the world” is some edgelord nonsense, regardless of what Vic has been through. The line, not the sentiment. It’s the whole ‘Cursing = Mature = Good’ way of thinking. Like people who get more excited/disappointed over a film being Rated-R or not. The rest of the Vic/Diana scene plays largely the same, though the 2017 is slightly lighter in tone. Snyder has added a vocal effect on Fisher that to me just adds to that 4Chan vibe. Vic is still a human and I do think Whedon portrays that better in their respective first halves, having him speak like a normal person and wearing a hoodie. Whedon is also just WAY better at poetic dialogue, with both scripts taking a stab at the same idea.“If they’re gifts, why am I the one paying for them?” absolutely mops the floor with “What part of this looks like a gift to you?”
- Ryan ‘Atom’ Choi’s cameo is the bad kind. I get it, comic book fans love to do the Leo meme and point at characters they know on screen. But his scene achieves very little beyond that. It features an awful joke about being dumped by his prom date, and some vague chat about doing experiments with the alien metal. At least Batman doing the same leads somewhere in Part 4, but this does nothing but add 2 minutes to the runtime. If you have a legitimately good scene that’s key to the movie and feel like saying ‘Hey that scientist? That was the guy from the comics!’ that’s fine. But instead this conversation seems to exist purely for the sake of the cameo and would have been really easy to lose when trimming for time.
- While I thought the slow motion shot of Mera at the start of the movie looked great, and some of the underwater scenes are solid, the air bubble scenes are drab and somewhat inconsistent with Aquaman. Anyway, as I said earlier, it super fucking sucks that Steppenwolf can beat multiple Atlanteans, including Mera and fucking Aquaman underwater! Inexcusably bad decision making.
The Theatrical
- There’s very little difference between the two versions of Barry visiting his father in prison other than Whedon deploying it MUCH earlier. Both are played seriously though Snyder’s is slightly more dreary, and Whedon adds a little sharpie gag in the waiting area which I thought was perfectly fine.
- I massively prefer the theatrical version of Victor & Silas’s argument. Vic maintains his anger but in a less edgelord way, and if anything subverts that with the line about Silas assuming Vic was the monster when he in fact meant the opposite. That’s another killer line that comes from a guy that amidst all the quips did build a reputation for killer lines. Plus as I said above, Cyborg gets to discover his abilities organically rather than his dad just telling him he can do things. It’s Victor’s journey, nobody leads him.
- The Bruce/Barry recruitment scene proves that not all the goofy humour came from Whedon, as the two versions are virtually identical, and Barry remains very quippy in the Snyder Cut in general. The only real addition here is Barry doing a ‘tight five’ about brunch, which is again, absolutely fine. I feel like Miller was asked to play the character as neurodivergent and both films are consistent with that idea, especially in this segment. We’ll get to the most egregious divergence next time.
- Whedon adds the little Russian family in an effort to put a face to the potential destruction from the impending final battle. All superhero movies should feature a scene where they save a very specific innocent bystander IMO, so this is a worthwhile addition to the movie despite the mandate to make it shorter.
Overall
If I were keeping score I’d say the two versions were about even after Part 1, while The Snyder Cut ‘won’ Part 2. I’d call Part 3 an emphatic win for Whedon though, demonstrating why he was brought aboard before Snyder departed the movie in the first place. For all his personal failings and on-set behaviour, he’s a far more experienced and accomplished screenwriter than Terrio or Snyder. There are two very specific lines he adds for Cyborg that illustrate that perfectly, even if 2017 was missing some pretty shots of Victor Stone playing football and acting as a Good Samaritan. He functionally tried to trade minutes of screen time for Cyborg (and later Flash) for improved dialogue.
Snyder’s meandering has become pronounced at this point, with superfluous or bad scenes starting to crop up, after it was initially more of a case of them being a little long. Whedon didn’t entirely remove much from the first half hour, just trimmed it. But as the run time has bloated we’re hitting stuff that can just be sliced out entirely. One of the few total omission’s from Part 1, Diana’s trip to the Temple of Artemis, is much better than Steppenwolf interrogating Atlanteans for example. Bruce and Diana are playing footsie, Cyborg is an edgelord, and The Flash is falling in love amidst a flurry of hotdogs.
Sure, the editing of 2017 is rarely smooth, but Whedon had at least checked in with 5 of the 6 members of the cast within about 20-30 minutes. Both are approaching their halfway points now, but one is twice as long as the other. I’m not going to tell you every extra minute of The Snyder Cut is bad by any means. In fact much of it is decent, it’s just that a line needs to be drawn somewhere and you simply can’t make a four hour superhero movie. Obviously he did or you wouldn’t be reading this, but where isolated moments benefit from more breathing room, his version has now begun to feel overly indulgent.
Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Epilogue
The Reel World 