The Snyder Cut comes to a close with a LOT of teases of things that would never come to be…
Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
The Plot
- The League return to their separate lives, though Bruce makes plans for a headquarters for The Justice League.
- Lex Luthor escapes Arkham Asylum and informs Deathstroke of Batman’s secret identity.
- In the unspecified future, Darkseid has conquered the planet. Batman leads a new team of Flash, Cyborg, Mera, Deathstroke and The Joker. An evil Superman arrives…
- But it was all a dream! Now awake, Bruce meets The Martian Manhunter who warns Darkseid is not finished with Earth.
The Good
- Barry telling his father he’s gotten an entry level job at a crime lab is lovely, and Billy Crudup plays it beautifully. Genuinely stumped as to why Whedon trims some of that because it’s gold for such a short scene.
- Bruce buying the bank that repossessed Kent farm to allow Martha to keep it is a nice bit.
The Bad
Strap in!
- “Ryan Choi, Director of nanotechnology.” So I was quite flippant about Choi earlier in the movie, but it all kind of radiates backwards from this reveal. It seems they wrote multiple scenes just so they could clumsily announce ‘Hey guys you’re going to get The Atom in a future movie!’ at the end. Fuck off. Props for using Choi instead of Ray Palmer, but no version of The Atom merits such a scene, especially in a four hour movie. I also can’t stress enough how inelegantly written the scene is.
- Bruce standing atop the monstrous tank from ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ is just cheap fan service (a theme of the Epilogue!) This isn’t a future wasteland Gotham that an older Batman has lost control of, and there’s no conceivable need for him to have it yet. They did not earn this whatsoever.
- Why the FUCK is Superman STILL wearing the black costume when he ducks into an alley to change?!? You can’t even spin the costume as a ‘going into a final battle fresh off being dead’ thing; This version of Clark sincerely thinks this costume is dope and wants it to be his permanent new look. Awful.
- The Deathstroke scene is obviously a relic to when he was going to be the main villain of Ben Affleck’s solo Batman movie. I feel like given that was 100% cancelled when the Snyder Cut was released there was no real reason to keep the scene other than the ‘here’s the historical record of what it would have been in 2017’ factor… Which isn’t actually true given he added new material. I suppose in theory Lex being smart enough to deduce Batman’s identity is a fine card to play (though he famously can’t guess Superman’s), but given almost every villain in Batman movies ends up learning his secret, I’m not convinced Deathstroke being armed with this knowledge would have been overly fertile new narrative ground. Plus that whole Icelandic village know anyway.
- Woof. This fucking Knightmare 2.0 sequence. The chief offender is of course the teenage wet dream line that Batman will “fucking kill” The Joker. Jared Leto looks better but acts worse than in Suicide Squad, and you’ve got him and Affleck doing 90% of the talking while the others get 1-2 lines each and then politely stand there doing nothing. Thanks for picking up the phone though, guys! They didn’t even have the decency to do a good old fashioned “He’s only in Bruce’s head!” thing either, and instead he is apparently legitimately important to Bruce’s plan to fix everything. Wild. Truly. I don’t know how much of the extra $70m WB spent on this scene in particular but it was irresponsible. Not because they can’t afford it, but because it was brand new content explicitly intended to tease films that were NEVER going to exist. The Deathstroke/Batman stuff was one thing, but in 2021 the new suite of DC projects were on the horizon and they knew they weren’t going to be making new Justice League films, especially with Zack Snyder. Maybe some exec thought ‘hey if this does well, maybe we WILL let him do it!’ but it seems like so much money to spend on a maybe when they’d already pushed things so far. The Snyder Cut itself was going to be the deciding factor, not a few minutes of glorified test footage. Whatever kick I once got out of The Knightmare sequences in BvS is entirely gone in this sequence and I find the notion of a full film based on it repulsive. Oh! And Evil Superman is back in the blue and red! If you’re going to do a black costume surely you do it here instead to reflect his corruption by Darkseid???
- And then of course it was just a dream and instead there’s this bullshit interaction with Martian Manhunter, who was originally some combination of Green Lanterns. Them being interchangeable doesn’t exactly scream sincere good intentions and reverence for all these comic characters he reported to want to include for the fans. It also does nothing to make the problems with the earlier reveal go away as J’onn confirms he chose not to help them against Steppenwolf. Thanks dude! It’s all very nebulous, the obligatory ‘and this character will be on the team next time!’ scene like with The Atom but not quite as bad. If it’s just the team returning to their lives and then a different version of this it would be whatever, but given what comes before, it’s just an avalanche of bad.
The Theatrical
- Lois narrates the Theatrical ending as she returns to the Daily Planet rather than Silas Stone, who explicitly survives and helps Cyborg start to adopt a more comic accurate look. Aquaman swims. Flash runs. Wonder Woman catches thieves. Batman is in a jet rather than the giant tank. Superman flies to end the movie. It’s succinct and nice, though I do miss the full Billy Crudup reaction to Barry getting a job.
- A mid credit scene features the classic Superman vs Flash race trope. Never going to be mad about that.
- Then the post credits scene is similar to Snyder’s Lex/Deathstroke scene but instead of setting up the original pitch for The Batman it instead teases The Injustice League as the ostensible villains of the sequel. Probably a better way to go, though I wonder if the ‘important’ scene being at the end and the silly one being in the middle was indicative of the way the wind was blowing as it pertained to the future of the DCEU even in 2017.
Overall (Epilogue)
The most inflammatory part of The Snyder Cut, a THIRTY minute epilogue to a FOUR HOUR film is just egregious. Teasing two future team members, setting up a film that definitely wasn’t happening, and testing the water on a whole series of films that almost definitely weren’t happening is bullshit. You don’t get to play the ‘I just wanted to show you EXACTLY what I would have done originally’ card and then add all this extra garbage. Especially when he wasn’t going to be allowed to make this movie in 2017 anyway. This epilogue is just jerking off and using WB’s chequebook instead of tissues.
That makes this the easiest stuff for Whedon to lose, and nobody sane would miss a second of what was removed. If you want to tease Martian Manhunter (a far bigger name than The Atom) you simply have to lose that mid-movie cameo… and also write it a little better.
Final Thoughts
I started this feature by saying that I believe The Snyder Cut is superior to the 2017 film, and then proceeded to criticise it a LOT while pointing out a lot of smart changes Whedon had made. But that’s the thing: Better does not mean Good.
I think the fundamental creative decisions made before filming even began were not conducive to a Good film. They skipped too many long-term steps setting it up, functionally debuting half their team for the first time. Steppenwolf is not a compelling enough villain, even with this extra material (if you really break it down he gets a couple of nice conversations with DeSaad but isn’t any less of a generic cartoon villain by the end). He’s a big ugly CGI villain with a big ugly CGI lair. The major action set pieces in the middle and at the end aren’t terribly interesting. It all revolved around Mother Boxes as McGuffins. Amazons and Atlanteans were made to look like jokes, with the former beaten a little too emphatically and the latter defeated on their uniquely advantageous home turf. Superman was brought back relatively quickly after his death, though the way they pull it off is cool, hence it being all over the marketing material.
I understand why Snyder originally wanted to make this a two-part movie. It’s just too much to try and pull off in one go, hence his version being FOUR hours. His preferred aesthetic is incredibly divisive, something Warner Bros knew back in 2017 when they hired Joss Whedon and Geoff Johns to try and inject some levity and colour. This to me is the single most important thing to remember about this whole saga: They did not like Snyder’s original vision and were already insisting on changes before tragedy struck and Whedon fully took control. Originally Snyder was to direct reshoots in collaboration with Whedon & Johns. Maybe if he did we would have just gotten a mediocre but slightly better movie in 2017 and everybody could have moved on with their lives rather than clinging onto hope that they were robbed of a masterpiece. In my opinion they just traded one kind of bad for another, though at least this version of bad is a more complete work, which is most of why it’s better, though did I mention it’s FOUR HOURS? I still think it looks much worse, but obviously he’s built a following that vibe with his aesthetic.
You may have read all my praise for Whedon along the way, particularly my defence of the changes to Cyborg’s story, and thought ‘urgh fuck this guy Stanning an abuser’. I have tried to make it clear throughout that my comments are entirely separate from his ‘real life’ actions, unknown at the time he worked on the movie. OBVIOUSLY fuck him now we know what we know. But that doesn’t change the fact he writes circles around Terrio & Snyder 90% of the time. More than that, his task was a thankless, nigh-impossible one: Take this 4 hour film and get it under 2 hours with only limited reshoots, and make sure it still releases on schedule. I have the lowest tolerance for long movies of anyone on this site, but I think everybody can agree The Snyder Cut is far too long, and while I frequently claim I could shorten most films by a few minutes and not hurt anything, you’d have to be out of your mind to think you can just slice a movie cleanly in half without it becoming much worse. Sure, there are full scenes that can be yanked out no problem (the hot dog Meet-Cute, the Atlantean interrogation, the Ryan Choi stuff, most of the Epilogue etc) but most of the time is taken back by ripping out a few seconds here, there and everywhere. It’s a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ situation; Most of the choices can be defended in a vacuum, but when there are SO many of them, scenes just collapse from an awkward lack of organic flow.
As is often the case, Ben Phillips had the best take on all of this: a compromise of 2hrs30m by WB back in 2017 would have probably been the ideal solution. I’ll throw in either being more flexible on hitting the release date no matter what or just paying Paramount the million dollars they wanted as compensation to let Henry Cavill shave that damn moustache. They spent seventy times more than that re-releasing the movie after all. Some of the reshot material seems good on paper but needed just a little more time or actor buy-in to make work in practice, and a bunch of the shot matches to the original footage are awkward at best. A world where you can brighten up the visuals, lose the scenes I mentioned above but get to keep things like Cyborg’s act of charity and only slightly shorten various conversations and action sequences rather than hack them to pieces sounds way better to me.
Instead things played out the way they did. The circumstances that got us here were awful, tragically in the case of Autumn Snyder, and deplorably in the case of the ‘fan’ campaign. But given I wrote all these words to coincide with the release of director’s cuts of Rebel Moon – a production Zack had FULL control of – and that he recently talked wanting to do a new cut of Sucker Punch, after previously doing ‘Ultimate Editions’ of Watchmen and Batman v Superman… this dude may just have a problem and need to learn to stand by his work. Netflix trying to artificially replicate the entire drama (which saw people doxxed and harassed) by deliberately making two versions of each Rebel Moon film, and then marketing the new ‘cuts’ as his ‘true vision’ is just pathetic. Conversely, me trying to capitalise on them doing it under the guise of a lengthy review of ZSJL just so I could stand on my soapbox about corporations being dumb with their money is Good Actually.
The Reel World 