With Superman reborn, The Justice League are finally at full strength for the final battle with Steppenwolf as The Unity begins and Darkseid looks on.
Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Epilogue (and Final Thoughts)
The Plot
- Clark flies Lois to Smallville and gradually regains his memory and suits up in a new black costume.
- The League trace the Mother Box to Steppenwolf’s base in Russia, with Cyborg planning to interface with the three boxes and prevent The Unity.
- Even with Superman’s help the team struggle to fend off Steppenwolf, so Flash has to run fast enough to rewind time and reverse their failure.
- With Darkseid watching, The League kill Steppenwolf and save the day, but Apokalips prepares for full invasion.
The Good
- Oh hey! Some colours! Fewer than the theatrical equivalent, but the Kent farm actually looks nice. It’s a gentle little scene with good blocking like Lois & Clark at the kitchen window with a swing in the foreground. I love the idea of Clark wanting to just be out in the field for a bit, feeling the breeze and touching the corn.
- While I don’t like Victor being such a grouch to Alfred, Diana trying to talk him back from possibly dying from connecting to The Unity is a good callback to her being the one to recruit him in the first place and their discussion about hopelessness.
- More Amazonian wailing in the soundtrack as Diana fights Steppenwolf. Still works!
- Flash running so fast that buildings are pulled back together from rubble around him looks pretty great, likewise the slow zoom into Cyborg’s eye to switch to his perception of ‘cyberspace’ inside The Unity. Both were teased earlier, and Victor declaring that he’s neither broken nor alone as he pulls the illusion apart is an excellent button on his journey.
The Bad
- Unless Victor quietly told Bruce about his Knightmare 2.0 vision off screen, the leap in logic required for Batman to accurately tease Snyder’s multi-film arc being tied to Lois is absurd. Sharing that you had a premonition of Barry telling you “Lois is the key” moments after you just used her to help bring Superman back from the dead and then deciding it actually means “something darker” is just lunacy. Now I love an insane but always correct Batman as much as anyone, but this goes way beyond the limits of that.
- Saying “we actually finally have a plan” THREE HOURS (and six minutes) into a movie is bananas.
- I personally have never liked Superman’s black suit in any form, but it looks even worse when the rest of the team’s colours and the backgrounds are so muted. Just more dark sludge in a sea of dark sludge. It’s also deeply funny to me that Warner Bros were against using it so he shot the original footage in the blue and red costume and then colour-corrected it in post to try and convince them… and they just said no again. Obviously all bets were off 3 years later when he got the green light for the Snyder Cut, so here we are, with digitally darkened duds. Also, in the comics Kal is reborn already wearing the costume and we later learned it was to help him better absorb solar radiation. He wore it for roughly one year before switching back. But in the movie he ostensibly chooses black over blue & red because he… wants to look cool? I guess? Superman is a dork (compliment) and has never tried to look cool in his whole life! My whole beef with Snyder’s Superman is he tosses aside core elements of the character to make it better fit his definition of being a badass. Superman is Superman. If you don’t think he’s cool, that’s fine. You’re welcome to tell stories about characters you think are cooler. And doing your own version of something is valid, but if you stray a certain distance from the heart of the character I personally think you’re no longer doing that character.
- The final assault. It starts decently, with Batman driving around attracting the Parademons’ attention, but as their raid on Steppenwolf’s base goes on it starts to look bad. From the compositing of Aquaman hanging off the Batmobile, to the barely coherent visual chaos of so much black, grey and brown flying in all directions, with only the occasional bolt of red to break it all up. It’s just profoundly clear none of this is real and it doesn’t even have the decency to be pretty to look at, though, if you can parse it, I suppose there is a decent sense of gradual progression into the heart of the base. But then Batman is firing guns left and right and I guess it’s fine because they’re lasers instead of bullets? I know he’s a little more relaxed about aliens and monsters, but he fucking headshots one of the Parademons at relatively close range. Whedon keeps some of this but it’s toned way down.
- “Not impressed.” I’m not saying no version of Superman would say something like this when arriving to shrug off the villain’s biggest weapon, but when you pair it with the black costume, the overly aggressive way this fight plays out (they rip one of his horns off!) and Snyder’s general vision for the character it just compounds the ‘Grr Badass Superman’ schtick and I hate it. It’s try-hard.
- Diana getting the last hit in on Steppenwolf after he continually taunted her about the fate of her sisters is good, especially when she’s the only woman on the team. However I hate the idea of her beheading him. It feels like there’s been a shift with Wonder Woman over the last decade or so, making her far more violent and tapping into that Spartan style ‘warrior rage’ you see in Ancient Greek/Roman media, presumably in an effort to make Diana more palatable to misogynists. ‘Look guys! She’s a bloodthirsty badass!!!!’ It’s just antithetical to her character; An extremely gifted fighter absolutely, but not somebody who triumphantly decapitates the villain. Diana believes that love conquers all. Bottom line.
- I’m a big fan of Darkseid. So much so that for all my criticisms of this film I still get a kick out of his appearances in The Snyder Cut despite their negative connotations when you you think them through. I think this final appearance is a hugely diminished return, and doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. Sure, you get him growling menacingly at the Justice League to tease their future battle that never happened. Sure, I’m tickled by seeing Granny Goodness in a live action movie, but it’s not just that it’s even more fan service for the sake of fan service, it’s also the needlessly problematic line “We will use the old ways.” Cutting off The Unity didn’t close a one-time portal from Apokalips to Earth; they still have Boom Tubes and could march that army through immediately if they felt like it. It’s the kind of throwaway line used for plot convenience at the expense of logic. Like a preemptive strike version of Odin using ‘dark magic’ to send Thor to Earth when the Bifrost was destroyed in The Avengers. Unnecessarily messy.
- Again, the collective colour palette of the team utterly ruins the big sexy group shot to end the film. Three dudes in basically black, one in horrific metallic CGI, and then Flash and Wonder Woman’s bright colours brought down to muddier shades as they stand in front of muted pinky-orange clouds. Not even the sky is allowed to be bright or blue! Hover the camera around them in slow motion all you want, they look way worse than they should.
The Theatrical
- I never noticed originally, but Whedon has Superman talking in the fight against the Justice League in Part 5, while Snyder keeps him mute until the farm. Thus the lines “You spoke.” and “Did I not before?” no longer make sense. Whedon’s solution? Have Amy Adams dub her half into “You SMELL good.” Obviously he’s trying to turn it into a joke, but I find this entire problem and proposed solution funnier to laugh at than his joke. I get why he wanted to keep the scene, it’s nice and doesn’t need to be reshot. But jeez man, just keep him mute in the fight! You can also REALLY tell when they switch to reshoot footage and CG them into the cornfield. That being said Lois beginning to say he’d be disappointed in her for not being strong while he was dead and him dismissing that notion immediately is an excellent understanding of both characters. Almost saves it!
- The team bicker after the Superman fight, including Aquaman really playing up the idea Victor may be working for the enemy due to his origins stemming from a Mother Box. It’s diffused by Barry, and then Diana makes the whole thing right and reassures Victor, so you still get the payoff to her recruiting him from before, like in Snyder’s version, but it’s a little warmer. Then Bruce and Diana make amends after their earlier argument. I’m not saying it’s better, but it does feel like a more lively team dynamic and really emphasises Diana’s importance.
- Conversely Bruce awkwardly asking Arthur to put out feelers in the ocean suuucks. I could absolutely see a comic having Aquaman volunteer this solution, but the way Bruce tentatively broaches the subject is awful. I think most people think the exact same about Arthur’s ‘lasso confessional’ but I’m not that mad about it. Whedon had a very similar scene in his dreadful Wonder Woman script and clearly needed to get it out of his system. It could have been a little better with more workshopping, but it’s harmless fun.
- The new version of the final fight is a real up and down affair. Positives include things like a bright red sky making it easier to see what’s going on (and evoking a ‘Crisis’ event in the comics), the payoff of Bruce testing alarm sounds to attract the Parademons throughout the film, Diana embracing leadership and using it to defy Bruce’s desire to sacrifice himself. Conversely, negatives include awkwardly trimmed dialogue sounding unnatural, having Wonder Woman’s spectacular save no longer happen in slow motion, whatever the fuck became of the Diana/Steppenwolf dialogue exchange, and, as ever, the rushed pacing. It’s a fine line between the Snyder Cut being ridiculously too long and the theatrical being too choppy and I think you feel it most in these giant action blowouts. At least you can actually see what’s happening though!
- The Flash’s role in the final fight changes entirely from running hundreds of laps around the perimeter to build charge for Cyborg, to using his speed to help the civilians get away from the scene. It plays on the “Just save one” moment from earlier, and is why you have the Russian family to put a face on the stakes. I’m not going to tell you it’s not cool that Barry reverses time, but I am going to tell you I think this is an equally good concept, and I could take it either way.
- Superman’s big entrance plays on the whole ‘Truth, Justice… Etc’ thing. He’s in the blue and red which is nicer, and isn’t as cocky, but some of the attempts to match the reshoots to the original footage are really rough. You also get more awful Batman quipping as he begins to claim he doesn’t dislike Clark when they made a whole movie about that. I spent the first half of the two versions saying how Terrio & Snyder didn’t understand Batman’s voice and praising Whedon’s dialogue but my word it’s swung powerfully the wrong way in the second half!
- The Unity separation is made far simpler, maybe a little for the worse. But Superman saying he really likes being alive and Cyborg saying “So do I” brings him to the exact same emotional ending as The Snyder Cut, as being a superhero and working on a team has fully restored whatever humanity he felt he’d lost. Plus we got here without him being a huge mope and got some better lines along the way. I’d of course still liked him to have more screen time and would have liked a few of the extra Snyder scenes to have survived.
- Steppenwolf is defeated VERY differently. Rather than being mutilated and then executed, the film-long teases about fear are paid off as the Parademons sense Step is afraid of losing and swarm him through a portal, leaving his fate ambiguous. Certainly not overly satisfying to watch, and there was likely a better middle ground between the two versions. Diana still gets the final attack, but now it’s to shatter his axe which is what makes him so afraid his troops turn on him, rather than chopping his fucking head off. There are also far more close-ups of each of the team, which I think is a nice touch even if you can tell they’re reshoots. Ray Fisher hated saying Cyborg’s catchphrase, which he perceived as racist. In a bubble I’m not sure it is, but if he felt he was mistreated on set by Whedon and Geoff Johns (huge Cyborg fan, and I believe the one pushing for ‘Boo-Ya!’ in the first place) then I can understand why he’d feel that way and they should have just dropped the whole thing.
- Whedon does what he can with the final team pose, brightening up the sky, adding a bunch of greenery to the town below, and of course Superman’s cape being red instead of black as it blows in the breeze goes a long way. The extra lines of dialogue from The Trinity are absolutely nothing.
Overall
The ugly dark visuals of The Snyder Cut are never worse than in this closing stretch, to the point that I think it’s actually a net win for the Theatrical Cut to brighten it all up even if it is probably the roughest stretch visually for that version too. Whedon adds a LOT of little extra bits of dialogue here and the success rate is lower than anywhere else in the film, but there’s still some good stuff, trying to give the full team a little something.
Fundamentally both versions are a raid on the villain’s lair, fighting through hordes of Parademons and trying to stop the magical McGuffin from ending the world, and then engaging in a big fight, aided by the returning Superman. One looks nicer but has some really bad reshoot matches. The other has more room to breathe and flows smoothly, but I can’t stand looking at it. Your mileage will vary hugely depending on your thoughts on Black Suit Superman and hyper-violent superheroes.
I do think both versions succeed generally when it comes to a sense of location, with The League gradually working their way through the enemy defences, and giving each member of the team something meaningful to do: Batman brings down the shields and plays a lot of defence; Wonder Woman is the key fighter and deals the final blow; Superman is the reinforcements and helps Victor with The Unity; Flash either reverses time to help Victor or gets civilians to safety; Aquaman arguably contributes the least in both, just kind of being Steppenwolf’s punching bag.
It’s all perfectly fine but I can’t imagine anybody being overly jazzed about either edition when it comes to memorable action scenes, though of course Zack gives you more of those sweet sweet seconds of Darkseid! It’s by no means as actively bad as some superhero movie final fights, but it’s also not close to the top of that list either. As I say, perfectly fine.
I personally prefer the Theatrical Cut for this segment, but both have major problems by this stage.
Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Epilogue (and Final Thoughts)
The Reel World 