#-cyborgs who are about to be suicidally reckless to protect their stupid humans

[scribefindegil]

about halfway through the first Murderbot book and I Understand all the Breq comparisons now

[minaminokyoko]

A ‘Justice League’ Rant

Foreword

Alright, DC fans. Before you light your torches and grab your Aquaman pitchforks and set off a rousing chorus of "Kill the Beast" when you read my review/rant, I am going to attempt to set the mood and explain myself. Some of you won't care. Some of you won't even read the whole thing before you jump onto your keyboards and proclaim that I'm just a stupid girl who doesn't understand comic books and comic book movies and that the Justice League movie is great and it's better than all the Marvel movies.

Let me stop you right there. 

This ain't about the Marvel movies.

This is about DC and Warner Bros and filmmaking in general.

I don't have it out for DC/WB. I don't have it out for the DCEU. This anger and disappointment is not a result of the 20+ Marvel Cinematic Universe's successful run. This anger and disappointment comes from deep inside a little girl who at the tender age of six or seven first realized what kind of person she wanted to be when she saw Batman: Mask of the Phantasm for the first time. One of my earliest memories was seeing the pain and torment that Bruce Wayne went through after he fell in love with Andrea and he wanted so desperately for it to be okay that he loved her and that he didn't want to keep his promise anymore. I have loved DC since I was old enough to love anything. I love Batman so much that I have his symbol tattooed on my right shoulder. Dead serious. He is my guiding light and he has been since I was six years old.

So, once more, I want you to understand that the reason I hate the Justice League movie is not because I dislike DC.

The reason I hate the Justice League movie is that the Justice League movie hates me.

This movie is hollow. It is a hollow farce. It took six of the most beloved characters in fictional history and stripped them of all the reasons why they have been beacons of entertainment since their inception and plastered them on a cheap ass green screen and shoved it out into the world to make a quick buck. There was no passion, no heart, and no creativity in this film. It doesn't have an original thought in its damn head. Not one. Everything I saw was something I've seen before elsewhere, and it was done better elsewhere. If you don't believe me, fine. Let's go point-by-point. I will fully explain every reason why I almost demanded my money back after sitting through this poisonous flick.

-The plot is so unbelievably thin you couldn't stretch it farther than a couple of inches. Forgetting the fact that Batman vs. Superman was one of the worst films ever, picking up where it left off somehow just made it hurt even worse since we had to acknowledge the fact that it exists and then have to build another plot from the resulting shitstorm. So we begin with Crazy Steve (Note: I refuse to call him Batman or Bruce Wayne, because BatAffleck is neither. He in no way represents any Batman other than Linkara's epithet Crazy Steve from his reviews.) catching a  burglar (with a literal sack of stolen shit on his back, like he's a fucking crook from the 1950's or something) and then a parademon appears and he kills it. So...first of all, was Crazy Steve there for the crook and the parademon just happened to be there? Or was Crazy Steve there for the parademon and he just used the crook? That makes absolutely no sense. Those two things didn't need to be there together. It's a plot contrivance of the highest order.  It was also unnecessary as fuck. You could have just had Crazy Steve on patrol and he saw the demon, caught it, and then it died. After seeing this, the jump from 'hey, a weird alien’ to 'ZOMG WE GOTTA GET THE BAND BACK TOGETHER' is liable to give you fucking whiplash. Crazy Steve immediately jumps to "putting a team together" when he has such little evidence of the calamity, and it's even more absurd since Crazy Steve has NO experience working with a team. At most, Jason Todd existed at some point, but that's it. He doesn't know anything about metahumans aside from maybe what Amanda Waller mentioned to him at the end of the equally abysmal Suicide Squad. Further more, he just starts trying to collect these people without explaining why they should just arbitrarily trust a man they just fucking met who dresses up like a giant fucking bat. I mean, would you? Really? Especially knowing that he tried to kill Superman on incredibly flimsy reasoning? How do you know he won't immediately turn on you if you turn your head and cough and seem like a threat to him? Crazy Steve had no way of knowing aside from Diana that any of these people were stable enough to form a team and try to fight an unknown enemy. It was so rushed. He just whisks them away and doesn't blink at revealing his secret identity to four perfect fucking strangers (though Diana arguably doesn't count; she's much more level-headed and hasn't shown a propensity for losing it at the slightest provocation.)

-There is no team dynamic. At all. It's just a room full of superpowered people. The closest thing to a relationship is between Crazy Steve and Wondy, and even then, they maybe have three whole fucking conversations, and none of them are beyond superficial. It's like the movie was afraid of making an actual development, so it just kept throwing inane quips around in the hopes of distracting you from the fact that there are no characters. The whole reason the Justice League itself as a concept excites me is because you have this room full of colorful personalities with different backgrounds who come together for the common good and want to help mankind and protect the innocent. We don't know barely anyone's motivations because this movie is running off the fumes of a bad sequel. We know Wonder Woman's motivations for the most part, but having the JLA movie before her sequels still leaves a large piece of the mythos missing because we don't know how she adjusted to modern life. We don't know if she lost faith in humanity again or where she stands because we were still in the 1940's when we last saw her. Cyborg's backstory is mentioned, but his motivations are also non-existent. We get the whole "I'm a monster" thing but they immediately move on from any possible origin or explanation of what he's going through and what he wants to do since he's got these abilities but could be seen as a freak to normal people. The Flash also got a driveby explanation, but again, without prior films or history, we basically have to guess what motivates him. I know Barry Allen because I'm a comic book fan, but your average person may not. It's completely unfair to them that you just jump from place to place without explaining how Barry got his speed, why his father's in jail, and why he just jumped at the chance to fight crime despite the fact that he doesn't know how to fucking fight apparently. It's so discourteous to the character to slap him in there and not tell us why. Why does he want to help anyone if he's scared? Why isn't he insanely rich by now from the various ways he could use his speed? And then, fuck me, Aquaman is the worst of the bunch. They make no attempts to explain anything about his background. Who is the red-haired lady? I know it's Mera because again, I am a comic book fan, but the chances that your average moviegoer knows are astronomical, and so they get to sit there completely confused about who she is and what she can do and what she means to Arthur. We don't know why Arthur was just chilling out around that one village and why he gave a single shit about humanity or how he got his powers or just...anything! Anything at all! Other than he's really mouthy and has a nice chest. Look, I might be able to overlook the depressing lack of explanation, but none of these characters bond with each other or have any reasons to care about one another. There are no human aspects to them because the only one so far who has been fully explored as a character aside from Wonder Woman is Crazy Steve. Crazy Steve got some development in BvS, but certainly not enough for you to emotionally connect with him because he was a revenge hungry psychopath in the previous film. The entire fucking point of the League is to see these interesting people butt heads, but then laugh and get along with each other and get ready to protect their home from threats. Here, they're just doing what Crazy Steve tells them to do because...reasons.

-Superman's resurrection. Holy fucking shit. I just spent the last twenty minutes ranting about this to one of my friends. Where do I even start with how goddamn stupid this shit is? It comes out of fucking nowhere. After this hastily slapped together team fights Steppenwolf one time, Crazy Steve in true Crazy Steve fashion decides that we should disgrace the dead and bring Superman back. Crazy Steve has no fucking idea how the Motherbox works. None. He has done no research, he has no knowledge of Kryptonian technology, nor is he at all aware of Darkseid and the New Gods' technology. But he's like, "Nah, bruh, we all suck and we need Superman." As an aside, I am really angry at how this movie is sucking that Kryptonian cock too. How dare you. How dare you imply that these badass heroes who were doing just fine on their own in the comics and animated shows need Superman like he's their fucking babysitter. Maybe if you had established the team dynamic and established the characters, they'd be able to fight better. Crazy Steve took one fucking look at the team that had been together a grand total of like four fucking hours and decided they were all gonna die without Superman's help. It's not only reckless and poorly thought out, it's honestly insulting. It's insulting that Crazy Steve would drag Kal El from heaven (because, for real, it's entirely possible he was in literal paradise and you sorry motherfuckers took him away from his parents and his loved ones of Krypton for your selfish asses) just on the assumption that the team wasn't strong enough. My God. I am just floored by this development in the movie. It pisses me off that the movie just shrugs and acts like it was for the best to spit in the face of God and drag Kal back to earth. Maybe you shouldn't have killed him in the first fucking place, you shitlords. And it's more frustrating to me since in the comics, after DC panicked and wrote in the "regenerative coma" that they didn't just use that instead. I'd be less angry if they introduced the idea that he was never dead to begin with, but in the death-like coma. It's a cop out, but it's better than literally Frankensteining Superman from heaven to fight your fucking battle for you.

-The dialogue is painful. So painful. It is so tacked on. I went to the theater tonight at 3:50pm and I'd say there was maybe 20-25 people in there and they laughed twice. You heard me. Twice. That was an almost two hour movie, and the audience only laughed twice. Hell, I only laughed once, and it was at the end credits scene where Superman jokes that The Flash is off the team if he loses. That was the only genuine line that I heard out of this movie. It's so apparent that the studio was trying to course correct the film away from the drab, hopeless "vision" of Zack Snyder. It doesn't work. The humor misses by a mile because it's just so awkward. These versions of the heroes take themselves way too seriously, or the quips are directed at the wrong characters. Aquaman is introduced pretty much as a dumb dudebro with a devil-may-care attitude. His snarky dialogue is fine, but when you try to have Crazy Steve the focus of a joke, it falls flat since he's a killer and an asshole and the levity doesn't feel right. There's a little tingle on the back of your neck from how awkward it is when someone makes a joke and then there's this awkward silence afterward because the movie assumes you need a minute to laugh. No, movie. No. If you want a joke to land, you need either timing or context. Pointing out the fact that Crazy Steve wears a batsuit isn't inherently funny. You need context. The "I'm rich" line is a better example of a joke that should have landed, but didn't because it was in the trailer. That has context. That is humor. Just having The Flash say things out loud that he sees isn't funny. Having him be awkward around Crazy Steve isn't funny because the two of them don't know each other and Crazy Steve is mostly straight-faced and so the lines slide off of him like dung. Diana is a better example, as she gives off a very warm presence. For example, Cyborg remarking that Diana needed to keep the merman off him almost landed because the two of them have at least held a conversation and so it feels natural that he might finally make a joke around her. It also landed better because Diana is definitely the only one who appears to have a heart. Everything else is just a vain attempt to lighten the mood, but it just clashes with the deadly serious tone everything else is shot with.

-Not explaining the mythology. Jesus Christ. I'm one of those people who believes that you cannot make a film and just sneer at your audience and go, "Oh, just read the comics if you want to know what's going on!" No. You are not allowed to do that. Film is not an add on. In a film, you are charged with telling a comprehensive story with characters who develop and change over the course of their adventure. That is storytelling 101, and this movie utterly fails. It does just like Suicide Squad where it just starts throwing names at you and not telling you who anyone is with the assumption that "only comic book nerds are watching this anyway" or "well, there are only children watching and they don't care to know who everyone is, they just want to see things get smashed." Wrong. You are wrong. We don't know Steppenwolf, we don't know Darkseid, we don't Apocalypse, we don't know Lanterns, we don't know Atlantis, we don't know jackshit as an audience! And yet they just jam all these names down your throat and expect you to be able to pay attention when you have about ninety thousand questions in your head during the course of the fucking movie. Films should find common ground with the audience. Some mystery is good. Throwing in small cameos or references can feel like a nice garnish to the mythology, but this movie just glosses over everything and thinks it's fine. None of this stuff has been established aside from Krypton and Kryptonian technology. You're doing everyone a disservice by refusing to lay the foundation for the villain and the premise of the plot.

-The effects are mostly atrocious. Out of everything I've cited here, this makes the least amount of sense to me. This is WB, for God's sake. Time Warner. You have all the money in the fucking world and this is the best you can do? I mean, the Dark Knight trilogy alone should have you funded for every superhero movie for the next ten years, and yet we get Henry Cavill's Uncanny Valley mouth as a result of the childish fucking dispute over his mustache, we get CGI that looks like it's from the goddamn Spawn movie at times, and then every single thing is shot from an obvious green/blue room that it feels like the fucking Phantom Menace all over again. I never felt like anything they were doing was real. I mean, to me, it felt like the only set in the whole fucking movie was the Batcave. They are so obviously on a soundstage the entire time and none of the backgrounds blend, and they don't even bother with smaller things like having the wind blow or the colors change or the shadows move to trick your brain into accepting the CGI. Oh, and why Digi-Bat? I'm flabbergasted as to why 80% of Crazy Steve's scenes are digital. He's the non-powered team member. Why wasn't it just a stunt guy? Was Ben Affleck really that fat and lazy that he didn't want to do any fight scenes? It was like watching a freaking PlayStation 1 game whenever he fought someone. My guess is that this project got rushed after shooting and reshoots and so instead of going over the effects with a fine toothed comb and adding layers onto them so that the scenes felt real, they just gave up and only touched them up. Now, I'm not talking about things like Cyborg where it was a front and center integrated effect. Even though I still hate his design (to me, he looks like a Black Ken doll head on a Terminator body), I believed he was there and moving around. Aside from him, though? Nah, bruh. I didn't believe anyone was doing anything.

-The fight scenes were worthless. Again, I'm confused as to how this was even logistically possible. Let's recap: we've got a guy who can run faster than the speed of sound,  a dude who can swim on top of Great White Sharks and punch craters into the ocean floor, a kid who has rocket boots and an arm cannon, a woman who can deflect bullets and shoot sonic blasts with her bracelets, a guy who can shoot lasers, fly, use ice breath, run faster than a speeding bullet, and is stronger than anything ever, and lastly a man who knows every martial arts style known to man on top of having a belt with endless nifty gadgets on it. Put that all together. You should be shitting amazing fight scenes, and yet everything last one of them was bland and forgettable. The true lack of passion in the film is what is on display with these boring fight scenes. It's so repetitive. Aquaman throws his pitchfork. Wondy swings her sword or hits her bracelets together. Batman swings. Flash runs and pushes. Superman punches. That's it. Are you fucking kidding me? I can name about a thousand different cool scenarios that we could have seen with these unique powers, and yet we saw the same moves with no creativity to them. Want an example? I personally thought the Wonder Woman movie was just okay, but I at least commend them for using her agility and her invulnerability properly to create excellent visuals for how powerful and capable she is. She smashes. She grabs and throws and uses combat techniques that a warrior race would know. It is very clear when she fights that someone gave a shit and wanted to make you feel like you were a part of the action and to give you something stunning to look at. Granted, I wasn't stunned because I've seen better, but if Wonder Woman had come out in the 90's before I had seen better, then it would have blown my socks off. The JLA movie's fight scenes are tired as hell and like the movie itself, it feels like they are just checking shit off a list. It's an afterthought. There's so little effort involved, and it matches the overall tired tone I was getting out of it all. I want to believe in these heroes. I want to be dazzled by them. I want to be inspired by them. I want the feeling I used to get when I watched the Nolan trilogy--where I knew Bruce Wayne as a character and as a person and I knew his limitations and his passion and his drive, but I also know how and when he was gonna kick some ass and that I was going to be able to enjoy the different creative ways I got to watch him kick some ass. Justice League does not have any of that vigor or wonder or splendor to its fight scenes. They are as thoughtless and calculated as the rest of the movie felt. You want examples? Pop in the first few episodes of the Justice League animated series. I implore you to sit down and watch the way that the team came together, even though we had the history of Batman and Superman previously. Then I want you to move forward to Justice League Unlimited. Watch those. Watch how they use their powers and personalities to not only provide fun, colorful, exciting fight sequences, but how the chemistry between the team members enhances the urgency of the fight and the overall enjoyment of the fight. That's what this movie is missing.

I can write another five pages' worth of criticism, but when I boil everything down to a single point it is this--the Justice League movie is a rushed, soulless attempt to cash in by manipulating the fans into accepting the massive lowering of their standards in our post-Dark Knight Trilogy years of DC/WB.

And I am begging the fans who have done this, accepted this movie and put on blinders to its problems simply because you love DC and you want to say that they made a good movie, please stop it.

I'm not saying you're wrong for enjoying it. If you did, good for you. But what I want you to do is stop letting them play you in this fashion. Because that's what they're doing. They know your heart. They know you have characters that you love that you want to see on the silver screen because they are important to you for whatever reason, and so you are purposely ignoring massive flaws so that you can enjoy what they are sloppily slapping into your eyeballs. I'm saying that you deserve the effort. You are worth the effort of making a movie worthy of these heroes we all love so much. I just want you to know that. You deserve a movie where everyone has a storyline and is developed. You deserve a storyline where the plot makes sense and the team has chemistry and a reason to be a team in the first place. Don't lower your standards so that this movie glides above them. Hold it to the right standards and demand that they do better next time. Don't give them a passing grade. You do have other options. You have the animated films, you have the television shows, you have comic books by the bucketload, and you can make a difference and demand that the filmmakers do these characters justice (cue rimshot) by telling them that this movie is a disappointment and refraining from going to see it again or from buying the DVD. Money talks. Hollywood will laugh off reviews, but that box office shock gets them every time. After all, even though the jokes were last second and tacked on, the fact that we all hated BvS made them change something to try to course correct. You did that. You made a difference. And you can do it again. You can help force them to give you the movie you deserve. You should want that. You should want that for yourself and I want that for you as well.

So if you gotta fight me, fight me. Fine. I'll rebutt you to the ends of the earth if you feel the need to go that far. I'm not trying to trash a thing you love. I love it too and I want them to put some fucking effort into these films and make them as amazing as they should be.

Until that time...I guess come at me, bro.