Noonan

Yup. And that falls on WB for not giving the characters proper intros before JL. They wanted to run to that superhero mega movie income as fast as they could.

IBJoel

No, it has to do with the writing of Justice League. I truly do not understand this mindset of "you need 4-6 solo movies before you can do a team-up". Ocean's Eleven doesn't have 11 movies before it. Neither does Seven Samurai, nor The Sandlot of The Fast and the Furious, for that matter. But those are all competently-written screenplays for ensemble pieces. You just need clearly demarcated characters and often a central protagonist to get the audience into "the world", if needed. JL has Batman as the ostensible main character, while also having the standard Hero's Journey for both Flash and Cyborg. Pick one of those characters to use as your viewpoint. That's not the fault of "didn't have a movie to set-up so and so", that's a problem of the writers/director neglecting to write the characters or structure the story well.

100% WB messed up with the mandated two hour runtime. But the Terrio's screenplays haven't been doing these movies any favors and Snyder et al are so concerned with their myth arc that they aren't willing to compromise in anyway. Look at George Miller's Justice League: that's a stand alone team film that totally works (at least as a screenplay).

Why So Blu?

Sure you do. Look at MCU. They had 5 movies in before Avengers assembled. FIVE!

So WB could have done:

Man of Steel
Batfleck
Man of Steel 2
WW
BVS
JL

Something similar along those lines. Here's the thing, going forward all of these standalone DCEU films are not sustainable. Fans are gonna want to see another JL team up and if they don't get it, it's over.

E Unit

OOH!! There wasn't Apollo 1 through 12 before 13! Yes!

IBJoel

Yeah, you can do solos to build up, and that's totally fine. But you don't need them, is my point. You just need to write a good screenplay and not worry about a greater myth arc or setting up five other movies in your one movie. You don't need to have seen any of the preceding MCU movies to enjoy Avengers 1. When Infinity War was coming out, I started my friend on Avengers to catch up quickly and she loved it.

fujishig

Why not both?

I don't think you absolutely needed a Cyborg and a Flash movie. For instance, Avengers didn't have solo Hawkeye or Black Widow movies (and Hulk was a fair bit removed). However they did at least introduce them earlier and reused the main villain. A MoS 2 could've helped for sure to at least flesh out the universe and introduce the big bad.

But in this movie, they had to:
Introduce 3 (at the time) brand new heroes
Try to give each of them a backstory
Have Bruce Wayne bring them together
Introduce a brand new villain and an army
Have that guy travel to two distinct places to get two pieces of the deus ex machina
Give the bad guy a backstory where there's an even bigger bad guy behind him
Give Lois some time
Bring Superman back from the dead
Have evil superman fight the good guys
Have lois bring superman back
Have the climactic fight with the bad guy
tie in the dream sequence from BvS

Like that is a ton of ground to cover. They could either have other movies to flesh things out, simplify the plot (I mean honestly not killing off Superman right before would've helped a ton here), or ideally both.

E Unit

Why not put all that in one 4 hour movie? Oh....nevermind.

IBJoel

I think the key is to make the first 30min-first half of the film a Cyborg movie. Maybe when Cyborg gives out his stimulus check, it's attacked. Cue Wonder Woman who takes care of the bad guys and recruits Cyborg. Then you have a solid protagonist who is tied to the conflicts and central to their resolutions. Have the other team members either already assembled or they all go as a team to recruit Aquaman and the Flash, allowing those characters to have their scenes, but remaining focused on Cyborg's POV. Cyborg helps revive Superman and the rest of the film plays out pretty much normally. I think it was wise to trim (or cut altogether) Superman vs. The League, Steppenwolf vs. Atlanteans, and Steppenwolf vs. Amazons, although they could be edited a little differently.

I love Batman, but he should not be the main character of all this stuff.

Mike86

I think it would have helped to have more movies personally. That was always one of my biggest criticisms. Go from a solo Superman film to the next film being a versus/team-up movie, and then finish off with a third larger team-up movie. It just all felt very rushed.

DJariya

FYI, if you own Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition on digital and have access to Apple TV, it's been automatically upgraded to the new remastered version.

It has a new introduction from Snyder and a new 24 minute documentary on the making of the Snyder trilogy, including the Snyder Cut. Again, you can only access this upgrade on Apple TV.

E Unit

Haven’t we been through enough...??

Abob Teff

I think the correct answer is either one can work ... but neither one works if you don't do it well.

Noonan

I'm OK if they don't want a solo movie for each character but in that case, don't make those characters so important to the story. Aquaman was fine; intro'd had some lines and action but that was it. Flash and Cyborg both played super important roles to the story, although I know a lot of that was cut for the theatrical vs. the Snyder cut. Hell, Cyborg had one of the 3 mother boxes. Didn't the theatrical give zero background on how he ended up with it?

Giantrobo

80+ year old Comic Characters who are part of Pop Culture all over the world don't need 10years of Set Up Films. Sigh...

fujishig

I think this interview was posted earlier because I remember the quote about him not seeing the Whedon version, but this Esquire interview has a bunch of other stuff about what could've been:https://www.esquire.com/entertainmen...gue-interview/

The John Stewart part seems cool. Having a trilogy where the heroes failwith a middle movie about a nihilistic alternate reality that they have to fix seems... i dunno, I think I'd have a hard time sitting through that. But again, for those that want something like that, Justice League Dark Apokolips War is right there.

Giantrobo

DC Films Squadcast

They do a great job of breaking down that interview with Ann Sarnoff. It's a good listen.

milo bloom

First, I ain't reading all that shit

Anyways, to start, I'm barely through the MCU movies, we haven't even touched the DCEU films (except Shazam, which was awesome, but I understand isn’t part of this storyline) but the podcast group I'm with is going to be talking about this so the family and I watched it over the past two nights.
Our background is that my wife and I grew up watching the Superfriends cartoons in the 80s so we know most of the characters, and then also the Reeves/Keaton Batman films, so we're generally aware of the overall DC universe, just no deep lore. I knew of Darkseid but not Steppenwolf, that kind of thing. My kid knows these characters from the Lego games and that’s about it.

Anyways, to start, the negatives:
- ok, it was a smidge too long. I understand that the Whedon cut was a smidge too short, but this could have been easily cut to 3:30, or even two 1:45 films.
- The aspect ratio - OK, IMAX is a thing, but this could have been done at something like 1.66 (what the old European artsy films were done at) and it would have given Snyder the "height" he wanted but also trimmed some of the excess head and foot-room.
- some odd music choices - if you're going to put in modern songs to make it relatable, then use more well-known songs. The scenes didn't have the impact on me because I just didn't know the songs (I had a similar issue with Into The Spider-verse, but that had a lot more positive aspects helping that one).
- maybe a few too many slow-mo scenes

-I didn’t always understand when it was a flashback, there could have been more cinematic language pointing that out (like the wavy line thing from Wayne’s World).


So, going in basically blind and expecting a shit-show....


... this was just stupid fun.

I mean it, Batman putting together a heist team to steal an alien artifact and a body to bring Superman back to life is just dumb fun and I’m here for it.

To start with Batman, again, I haven’t seen the other DCEU films so this was my first exposure to Bat-fleck and I can’t hate him. I even somewhat enjoy him. I even enjoyed his Batmobile scene where he pulled the parademons away from the tower to give the others a better chance. He knew his strength was using tech and using his car as bait made perfect sense.

Ray Fisher’s Cyborg – my previous exposure to the character was the animated Teen Titans (the first one, not Go!), so this was all a revelation and it was… okay. It was an interesting story, and I can see how being cut out of the Whedon cut would have made him kinda pointless, but I liked his interactions with The Flash, which brings me to –

The Flash, this movie was so grim and dire and this young fella absolutely brought some life and fun to the story. His joking was just enough and his Iris rescue scene was (almost) as good as the Quicksilver scenes from the X-Men movies. I don’t know what the TV version is like, so I can’t compare, but this was a much needed “bright” character for the movie.

Superman, not enough screentime to really tell, but the scene where he blocks the axe and just smirks at Steppenwolf was an absolute gem.



Aqua-Man – Second only to Gal (see below), his presence and gravitas really helped the film. Yeah, he’s powerful and could help but he enjoys whiskey and fish dinners so whatever. And I can see why folks find him attractive, he’s muscled but not in a gross way)

And finally Wonder Woman. The absolute anchor. Gal Gadot was acting circles around the rest and now I really want to see her solo films. Her opening rescue scene didn’t really seem to be part of the main plot except to remind us of how good WW is at kicking ass. And she does.



Are there plot issues? Yeah, why didn’t the humans bury their Mother Box deeper. Why do the Amazonians have it in a weird temple like that? Why didn’t Darkseid’s organization remember the anti-life equation being on Earth already? I know there wasn’t an explanation of the anti-life equation that might have thrown casual fans, but to me it’s a case of “does exactly what it says on the tin”, so I didn’t even bother to Google it.



So, I’ll definitely be going back and rewatching the DCEU films. I guess I’m going to be the weird one with preferring the X-Men film saga and possibly this series over the MCU films.

So, as I was I telling my friends on Slack, this is was bloated and self-indulgent and masturbatory... and I am here for it.

DJariya

If you want 4 more hours of fun. The Black and White Justice is Gray version is supposedly dropping at 12am PT/3am ET tonight

Michael Corvin

You're not the only one but we are definitely a small group. I'm not looking forward to Marvel's homogenized X-Men series.

Draven

Shazam! is in the DCEU, isn’t it? That’s supposed to be Cavill at the end.

Runaway

It is, but more in a Agents of SHIELD kind of way.

DWilson

It's there.

fujishig

It is but there's plausible deniability there. I'd actually love to see Shazam in a Justice League movie, though.

I mean, they couldn't even bother to use "modern editing":

Abob Teff

I suppose my biggest gripe was the unnecessary name change for the MacGuffins of the movie. We really did not need to keep beating the same drum by changing the names to "Martha Boxes."

Why So Blu?

Yeah, Justice is Gray version is live!