In the Flesh: Zack Snyder's Justice League (Patreon)

Four hours, two minutes, and thirteen seconds. Zack Snyder’s Justice League clocks in a full half-hour longer than Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, an hour and fifteen longer than Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and edges out Jackson’s Return of the King cut by nearly twenty minutes (though it’s nine minutes shorter than Return’s extended cut). Of course it’s facile to hold big-budget shlock like Snyder’s film up against a few of cinema’s defining entries, raise your eyebrow at the assumed hubris of it running longer than they do, and leave it at that. No, while Justice League’s length is a problem, distending its limited charms far beyond their ability to sustain interest, it’s the film’s limp CGI and tedious camerawork that confine even its best moments to the Marvel-esque netherworld of bland and blurry superhero hijinks. Stood against the Whedonized 2017 theatrical release, Snyder’s film is so clearly superior as to make comparison a waste of time, but its merits as its own feature are slight.

Steppenwolf, voiced by Ciarán Hinds, is probably the film’s best front-and-center special effect, an ogreish bruiser clad in shimmering reactive metal, and to his immense credit Hinds manages to work a little emotion through the layers of CGI and voice distortion. Justice League hits enough story beats with the alien warlord to imbue his struggle to conquer and remake Earth with a little emotional weight, though just when it has a chance to mine some pathos it pulls back completely, erasing all tension and leaving the last segment somewhat airless. The rest of the movie’s effects work is straightforwardly shoddy. The insectile parademons look alright, but the rolling hills of Amazon stronghold Themyscira are like something out of a texture pack for Age of Empires III. Even workaday shots like Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) crossing a rail yard look pressed and lifeless, robbed of all depth by shabby green screen work.

Then there’s Snyder’s disastrous decision to show the film in 1.33.1, an aspect ratio which might, I suppose, hold water on an IMAX screen, but which in a conventional theater or at home closely imitates looking at the sun through one of those mirrored eclipse boxes. The aspect ratio crowds and cramps Justice League’s dozen shots of its heroes lined up side by side as though posing for a desktop background. It leaves images like the underwater temple of Atlantis looking truncated, sharply restricts the scope of any given action sequence, and kneecaps early distance shots of Batman (Ben Affleck) on horseback in a remote wilderness. For a movie so intent on grandeur to self-sabotage with such a poor bedrock artistic choice feels indicative of Snyder’s instincts as a director, though it must be said that in collaboration with screenwriter Chris Terrio he does a solid job of fleshing out his characters.

So what, in the end, does $70 million and a total carte blanche for Snyder buy you? Some competent screenwriting, a cast which averages “mediocre” at best and exudes a kind of negative sexual charge not even Jason Momoa can reverse, some so-so action, Jared Leto cosplaying Heath Ledger while doing a cut-rate Jim Carrey impression, and a bunch of ugly CGI tableaux. Zack Snyder hands Joss Whedon his ass, a task similar in nature to kicking the proverbial dead horse: as pointless as it is easy. I guess the alien warships belching gigantic clouds of flame and smoke out of their vents are pretty cool to look at.