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Martin Scorsese having tears in his eyes, opens his notebook and scratches out a single word:

n̶o̶t̶ cinema

Review by davidehrlich ★★

the only thing i am emotionally prepared to say about The Snyder Cut at this time is that it contains a shot of a computer-generated sesame seed flying off a hot dog bun* in ultra slow-motion, so i think ~the real fans~ will feel like this was worth the wait.

*maybe it’s a bagel? i can’t . more importantly, it’s not for me to say - let the fans decide.

……okay okay i'll say this: the first hour actually made me appreciate what Snyder was going for. the second and third hours reaffirmed just how misguided it was for ~anyone~ to make a Justice League movie without setting up The Flash (REAL bad), Cyborg (reeeeeaALL bad), and Aquaman (my man!) first. the fourth hour is the superhero movie fan service equivalent of the fox from Antichrist eating itself alive in real-time. when chaos reigns, it pours.

36

the interesting thing about snyder is that he always swings big: whether it results in a colossal whiff or a home run just depends on the particular project, amount of creative control, and audience reception. but he always puts his unique style into it, and for that reason i’ve really grown fond of his stuff. his involvement in the dceu has kept me interested, and i still have fun with both their best content or biggest flops. too often nowadays blockbusters, and especially franchise films, fall completely in the middleground and feel a bit too safe creatively, and the effect makes me feel empty and bored. the mcu is guilty of this, and the original cut of justice league suffers…

Review by Matt Singer ★★★ Liked

Two seemingly contradictory things are true of Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League:

1. It is vastly superior to the theatrical cut that was finished by Joss Whedon after Snyder left the film in the middle of production.

2. It was probably unreleasable in this form, and it makes total sense that Warner Bros hired Joss Whedon to rework (and especially shorten) it.

Full review at ScreenCrush.

43

93

2017's Justice League featured glimmers of potential amidst a dying skeleton of clashing ideas, tones, and images. Watching it on release, I saw the vision of Zack Snyder, no matter his usual doses of absurd heft and mythological self-seriousness. But it was buried in the edit - tired re-shoots, major sequences truncated and scrambled, and a lazy change from Snyder's operatic excess to Whedon's quippy team-up adventure. That version might've worked if they hadn't spent two previous films smothered in Snyder's worldview. So it was doomed to fail, rightfully so. If you've never seen the 2017 film, there's no need to, unless you're curious or interested in the vast differences on display. But this version, excitedly reclaimed as Zack…

1

- ben affleck is a good batman. I genuinely believe that he is filled with enough self-loathing to dress up like a bat & beat people up for 20 years
- it unironically rocks how bad at acting gal gadot is. forcing her of all people to be the narrator of the entire lord of the rings sequence is true galaxy brain thinking and we must all respect it
- it would’ve been so cool to get ang lee’s crazy high frame rate movie about the rumble in the jungle with ray fisher as Ali
- glad they moved away from the weird bubble talking thing in aquaman. I get why they tried it but it never works. on the other…

Review by matt lynch ★★★ Liked

A whole hell of a lot. Snyder fully commits to big, sappy emotions and weird grandiose gestures, and the result is that this is bizarrely most interesting in its first half with all the shoe leather of bringing these now much more fleshed out characters together. Unfortunately a lot of the reconstituted footage is riddled with shoddy VFX and the action beats remain mostly unchanged crummy digital smears, only now they go on much, much longer. Still it's a ridiculous miracle of sorts that this even exists at all, so unwieldy and sincere that it frankly transcends good and bad and becomes purely artifactual, and I never thought I'd say this but I'm mildly bummed he's not going to get to do more of these.

9

This is the best possible version of the worst possible thing

18

"They told us our gods would outlive us... but they lied."

Feels in many ways like a culmination of Zack Snyder's interest in superheroes as genuine myths; in their iconography, their abilities, and feelings. It takes less than a minute to see what it was that WB loss confidence in and less than five to see how wrong they were. Unlike the Whedon version which opened on cellphone footage of Superman being a good little boy followed by a "Superman is dead :(" montage Snyder opens on a twirling slo-mo close-up of Superman's ugly, Christlike spear wound, the reverberating screams of his bloody sacrifice from BvS at first being shown felt by the immediate people in his surroundings, then the…

18

“now THIS is cinema”                                
                  - Martin Scorsese

_______________________________________________________________

WOW... ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE may just be the DCEU’s BEST film yet. With an epic scope, Snyder’s vision transforms the film into a bold & stunning classical epic with heart. Ray Fisher shines too, alongside super action setpieces and a cameo that will leave you begging for more!

I actually was quite mixed on Snyder’s previous work, but this is something special. Thanks to WB for the early screener!

14

ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE is a miracle of a movie when you take into how we got here & how great the final product is. A four-hour epic with dazzling visuals, a grand score, more consistent character development & tone. Justice has been done & Zack Snyder can be proud.

9

Better I guess?