A Justice League Movie Review

So I saw Justice League the other day with my brother and sister. On a Tuesday, where the prices were cheaper. €7 a head. Was the movie worth it? Probably not. Then again, most movies aren’t really worth seeing in the cinema, in my opinion.

Still, a review is in order, while it is all fresh in my head. A quick summary before we go into spoiler territory: Justice League was alright but it was too slow, there wasn’t really enough action and too much sappy cheese. Good enough for an average viewer, probably not great for a real DC fan.

SPOILERS AHEAD. I AM WARNING YOU NOW GO AWAY IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED.

And with the spoiler warning out of the way, there’s one thing I really want to get off my chest.

HOLY FUCK CALM DOWN WITH THE SUPERMAN WORSHIP.

Seriously, the entire film, I felt like I was watching a Superman prequel. The whole movie is “oh no Superman’s dead we’re all sad and scared now!” The first half is generic tense sadness because Superman is missing, the second half is waiting for Superman to sort his shit out so he can help out. It felt a bit like when the Incredible Hulk finally arrives in the first Avengers movie, but because Superman is great at everything, it was more like waiting for Captain America, Thor and Hulk to all arrive. If anything, it was like a massive Superman dick-sucking competition, and everyone else had obviously been made to look weaker to make him look better.

Yes, Superman comes back. Of course he was going to come back. That was predictable as heck. If you’d only ever seen one superhero movie and that was Batman VS Superman, you would have known that Superman was going to come back. In the mean time, the Flash is made out to be a Spider-Man-esque kid, all clumsy and innocent and pure and falling over himself. What made him feel bad though was that everything Flash did, someone else did something to one-up him.

If anything, the Spider-Man-esque kid should have been Cyborg. Cyborg didn’t really have much to go on though. He looked neat, but he was like 90% CGI and incredibly shiny. He almost felt like a robotic mascot, which kinda sucked because Cyborg did prove himself to be a useful character.

At least Aquaman was cool. Didn’t do that much, but he was cool.

Most of the problems with the film come from the plot and the writing. You can sometimes see where they’ve had to stitch things back together. The shiny special effects and action scenes were pretty good, and the cinematography in general was very nice. Production-wise, Justice League was a quality movie.

One random problem though, at least for me, was the lack of a compelling soundtrack. Wonder Woman’s soundtrack was fucking amazing. Apart from Icky Thump by the White Stripes, the entire soundtrack was utterly forgettable, almost non-existent. Especially during fight scenes. There was music but very little sense of tension or buildup.

Everything just seemed off. The characters were off. The background was off. The CGI was very good but in places it felt off. Too much maybe. The bad guy seemed off. The minions seemed off. The background characters, particularly the Amazonians who only appeared briefly to try and stop the big bad, seemed off. The whole world seemed off. The buildup to the final fight seemed off. The final battle in general seemed off. Even the cheese and sap seemed off. Like something was missing. Like there was a lack of soul.

The cheese and sap in particular. In any super hero movie, you expect a little bit of cheesiness, and you expect some happy, sappy, lovey-dovey parts. But Justice League was all over the place in both departments. “I wanted mature cheddar cheese, not cheap edam!” is how sister Skully described it.

Actually, thinking about it, Justice League was basically a DC version of Avengers, but nowhere near as good. Even the plot was similar. There’s some evil cubes that a horned, angry, exiled bad guy wants to steal and he wants everyone to bow down to him, and a team of heroes needs to be assembled to fight the big bad guy, but along the way they need to learn teamwork and things like that. There’s a bit where they are all introduced and gathered up. There’s a bit where the powerhouse needs to be calmed down by the rest of the team. There’s a bit where the bad guy brings in tons of minions. There’s a bit where the civilians are all saved. There’s a bit where they find a place to build their new super hero club.

The difference is, in Avengers, every character has their own unique skill set, they all had their own weaknesses and worked around them. In Justice League, one is a literal god, two are as powerful as Thor, the other two have stupidly large amounts of untapped potential. The only person you really feel for is Batman, who is a slightly more likable Tony Stark.

It just doesn’t work.

I guess I’ll give it a 6/10, since at least you can watch the damn thing, unlike fucking Suicide Squad.