zack snyder's justice league is now streaming on hbo max and today i watched all four hours of it of course i was going to review this i just didn't get a screener for it i decided to watch it with everybody else when it went live on hbo max so let's talk about it all of you probably already know
The history of this film it was a very troubled production joss whedon came in to change some things around ended up changing a lot more than perhaps we initially thought he did there was a cgi mustache and all kinds of interesting things and after a lot of campaigning from the fans and stars and zack snyder himself he was finally able to release his vision onto hbo max unencumbered by studio interference and in 4x3 aspect ratio which some people don't like i love it looks beautiful like i really prefer that tall image that clearly was made for imax presentation it felt really unique a lot of directors filmed their movies for imax in that aspect ratio but they don't release that aspect ratio on blu-ray even when they do it's not exactly imax like the mission impossible fallout blu-ray for instance the black bars go away to a 16x9 image which still isn't quite imax but it's something i would love if brad bird would release an imax version of mission impossible ghost protocol at home but he has said that he doesn't think that that's going to look good at home
For some people they may hate it i want to see the full frame i don't care if i have to watch it on a 77 inch screen in my basement which is where i would watch it i want to see that image i want to see the full image shot regardless of where the black bars show up on my tv which is why i'm very happy that zack snyder maintained the 4x3 aspect ratio i think this movie looks great and even though i certainly didn't hate the 2017 justice league i found it very mediocre and i've never wanted to watch it again and i haven't since seeing it this film is infinitely better zack snyder's justice league is a deeper richer version of a film that we only saw parts of and having seen his version of the movie i can confirm that all my favorite scenes from the joss whedon version are actually zack snyder's scenes it's very eye-opening to realize that the best scenes were snyder's this movie also improves on
Some characterization namely cyborg cyborg actually feels like a fleshed-out person in this movie quite a bit of characterization has been given to him i won't get too much into spoilers but you see what goes on in his mind you understand his family background a lot better where his presence was fairly routine and kind of boring in the original cut here he shines as one of the most important characters in the film the use of humor is also toned down considerably but toned up from zack snyder's other films so it feels like it's right on the level of where it should be especially with barry allen played by ezra miller character is very funny and miller's good in the role but it doesn't feel like overkill and some of the more cringy jokes from
The original cut like him falling on top of wonder woman are nowhere to be seen batman's awkward humor also nowhere to be seen the movie feels so much more cohesive and surprisingly so like honestly i'll be completely upfront i wasn't really looking forward to watching this i like zack snyder a lot i don't like all of his movies i think he seems like a really great guy and i have said this a hundred times and i'll say it again i am always on
The side of the filmmaker i am so glad that snyder got to realize his vision got to show it to people and got to right or wrong for him in his career i'm always going to be on the side of the filmmaker and i'm really really happy that his vision is now out there but since i found the original justice league
So mediocre i just couldn't really get that hyped for this so the film did nothing but surprise me although some aspects of the film don't quite work for me i did find myself really enjoying watching it even though it was so long this series is still struggling to figure out just what to do with amy adams as lois lane she's referred to as a key character by someone and she does have to do something that is very important in the movie but for the most part she appears sporadically to mourn the loss of clark kent for most of the movie that is her purpose and obviously the run time this is incredibly long i did have to take a break two hours in
just sort of stretch for like 10-15 minutes have a snack and then watch the rest it's a very long film and in some ways you can sort of lose track of things if you're not really thinking about everything that's going on and i can understand why at one point they thought about breaking this up like a mini-series it did feel like four really good episodes of a justice league mini-series the battle on themyscira for instance was jaw-droppingly better this time it felt like a baton race as they were passing the mother box between each other that whole part of it just felt like its own movie so i can see why that may have been a good idea to have a mini-series in a way i think they did something like that
with the extended cut of the hateful aid on netflix i think they broke it up a little bit i can't remember for sure and there were a few scenes that probably didn't have to be in the movie i think there is a three hour or three and a half hour cut of this movie that would absolutely be snyder's vision and i think eventually zack snyder probably looked at all of the fans who were al pacino and heat this and give me all your god and he did just that because i think that even if schneider hadn't have had the interference from warner brothers and from the whedon cut that he did have i i can't imagine that this version would have been what he released in theaters i know there was discussion about splitting the film up but this is actually one of the things i'm most excited about here i'm very excited about a movie of this length being successful on a streaming platform because if you look at a film like avengers end game
the movie's three hours in one minute or something because the movie has to fill enough theater slots every day to get enough people to come to the theater and make their money back and if a film is so long they can only program a few showings of it per day but three hours was kind of pushing it but the fact that hbo max exists or netflix or hulu or whatever this is really exciting to me that a filmmaker can recommend something that is so against the theatrical experience and have it be successful and have it be greenlit this is really exciting for filmmakers because for a long time the way movies got made was at the behest of the theatrical exhibition experience but if you do not have those rules and you can say actually i would like to make my movie this way which is very strange and not normal per se you have the option to do things like streaming services now which really is cool and exciting for filmmakers now i'm assuming that a lot of you have seen the movie but i do want to talk about a few issues i have with the film that are spoilery so if you have not yet seen the film i'm going to talk about spoilers for a second first off there's like 20 minutes at the end that felt sort of return of the king asked like it just kept going and going and it felt like the movie had ended there's a extended dream or vision sequence with batman and joker and while the conversation he had with joker was certainly more adult than i was expecting the fact that it was a vision or a dream and the unsure nature of whether or not we'll even see that come to a head in the future it felt very tacked on as did
the martian manhunter scene which again look it was cool to see that character but the revelation that he was martha kent and then later he comes back again it felt sort of like it would have been a more exciting reveal to just see him visit bruce wayne at the end to see him for the first time after that scene with lois and like i said it was cool to see that character meeting at the end with bruce wayne but i don't know if it really needed to be in the film if they end up somehow continuing this story even though zack snyder has expressed that he would like to move on and understandably so then that feels more justified but his inclusion now feels sort of like a fun thing that we can just enjoy seeing i don't know that it was necessary for the movie but at the same time do you guys ever just watch a movie and you're like yeah i enjoyed watching that and then you if you review movies like professionally if you feel like you have to somehow talk negatively about it and maybe you just don't feel like it right now i just don't feel like it i'm glad that fans got to see this i'm glad that zack snyder got to release the movie he wanted to make i'm always going to be on the side of filmmakers there's a few things about the movie that didn't sit right with me but honestly i enjoyed watching it and i'm gonna give it a b plus as i said this movie could only surprise me and it did it was considerably better than i thought it was going to be and even though there are still some bigger than life things that don't always emotionally connect with me there's some
song choices that felt a little bit out of place i'm just glad that the film is done and that snyder got to do his thing that's really inspiring to me that a filmmaker could come back after everything that he went through and just finish his movie i like i said i wasn't really hyped to see it but i'm glad i did and i'm even more excited about what it could mean for filmmakers in regards to streaming services and the differences between how you can make a movie for a streaming service or for a theater and how much more freedom you have thank you
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