Justice League

There’s an obscure character from the DC Comics universe called the Patchwork Man. He’s basically a Frankenstein rip-off character who is stitched together from different parts of people who were of varying sizes, shapes, colors, etc. He’s a shambling, pathetic creature who is meant to be pitied because of how his various pieces don’t line up. I was thinking about the Patchwork Man as I watched another DC Comics creation, the new Justice League movie.

The film means to be a big franchise tentpole that brings together already introduced movie versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman while also introducing new potential franchisees like the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman. About half the film is a “getting the team together” story and the other half is the team battling against extensive CGI animation.

Famously, director and head DC movie universe architect, Zach Snyder, had to leave the production with quite a bit of work left to do due to a family tragedy. Sadly, Snyder’s daughter took her own life last spring, and the director decided he needed to step away from work in order to spend time with his other children.

Warner Brothers tapped Joss Whedon to take over. Whedon, of course, is no stranger to sprawling, special-effects driven superhero team films, having helmed the first two Avengers movies. He had the skills and experience to finish work on a project of this type, and in that sense, was the ideal choice.

The Patchwork Man came to mind as I watched Justice League because of Snyder and Whedon’s dramatically differing tonal and stylistic approaches. Snyder got his start in music videos, and it shows. Like his spiritual brother, Michael Bay, he’s all about the image, the picture, and the story and the characters are secondary at best. Visually, he likes cold palates, indulgent slo-mo, and lots of showy, overpowering CGI imagery. Whedon, on the other hand, is a writer first and therefore loves character, dialogue, and intricate plots that build over time. His visuals are fine, but he’s more of storyteller than a picture-maker. Whedon’s tone is almost always light, snarky, playful, and ironic – a huge contrast to Snyder’s usual solemn, wannabe mythic tone.

So even though Whedon had the skills to continue the work Snyder began, it was the equivalent of asking a folk singer to finish a half-written song by a heavy metal band. Consequently, the finished product is tonally uneven and narratively conflicted. Snyder is the guy who turned Superman, the purest hero of them all, into a neck-snapping killer and who actually killed Superman off. Some of that grimness and nihilism remains in Justice League, but at the same time, it also features Batman, of all characters, dropping sassy one-liners, which is clearly the work of Whedon. With footage guided by one director stitched together with extensive rewrites and reshoots by another director, the film never settles on one tone or approach.

Narratively, it would seem that Whedon shifted the entire story of the film. Snyder’s version was reportedly meant to lead up to a second film featuring a cosmic super battle against intergalactic bad guy, Darkseid. My guess is that Whedon thought that was too similar to what the Marvel movies are building toward with Avengers: Infinity War and so, changed the film’s focus to a single standalone villain who is conquered at the end. There are vestiges of Snyder’s story left in the film that are never developed or even explained. Though certainly not a complete flop, the film has underperformed at the box office. I can’t help but think that its lack of resounding success has a lot to do with its disjointed nature.

A Justice League film by either Zach Snyder or Joss Whedon would probably be pretty interesting, but this one by both of them fails to cohere into anything other than a patchwork mess.