Why Is Justice League The Worst DCEU Movie?

Director: Zack Snyder

Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Ciaran Hinds, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, J.K. Simmons, Connie Nielsen, Amber Heard

Genre: Action, SF

After Marvel slowly and patiently started building their cinematic universe and making a lot of money with their movies, DC wanted the same and they wanted it fast. But they didn’t have the patience to implement the same strategy (introducing characters through standalone movies) so after just one standalone movie, Man of Steel, we got Batman v. Superman which felt like five different movies crammed into one and the result was pretty bad. Suicide Squad was even more awful but for different reasons.

Justice League is a follow up to BvS which unites some of DC’s famous superheroes like Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Cyborg, and Superman.

In Justice League Batman and Wonder Woman are working together to recruit a team of superheroes to fight against a new threat, alien supervillain Steppenwolf who’s, with his army of parademons, threating to destroy the world.

You may read that Justice League is a flawed movie but still watchable and fun and with some good things in it. And that is better than BvS and Suicide Squad. Well, in my humble opinion Justice League is an awful movie and on the same level as BvS and Suicide Squad.

Where to begin? Well, I expected characters,  story and script would be weak and they are. But the rest of this movie, like action, visuals, and humor, is nothing better. Once more it is a story about a very mean villain who wants to destroy the world (very original :)) and the script is filled with laughable dialogs and bad jokes. Speaking of villains, why the crew behind this movie didn’t put just a little bit of effort and created a memorable characters? Because they don’t care; it is evident from almost all of their (DCEU) movies, that they don’t give a damn about a good and coherent story and dialogs, character development or stuff like that. It is easier to write some generic story with stupid lines just to fill the time between action scenes.

Steppenwolf is just terrible, a CGI villain who wants to destroy the world. Period. He’s just babbling some stupid shit and is not interesting at all. His army of parademons is nothing better, generic CGI characters who look really stupid (like some flying bugs).

And regarding our superheroes – characters are paper thin without any real development. Wonder Woman and Aquaman are ok-ish, Cyborg is just bland, Flash desperately tries to be funny (and fails) and Batman just looked pathetic and like he doesn’t belong in this movie. And he doesn’t. You just can’t combine all these heroes with different superpowers, like enhanced strength, flying, super speed and laser eyes, and an alien villain like Steppenwolf with Batman, who’s just a regular human being without any powers (except cool gadgets and vehicles), and expect it to look convincing.

And from movie expensive as this one, I expected at least it would look good and CGI would be satisfying. Wrong. Visually movie looked terrible. I didn’t like the look of the movie at all, from colors to locations, everything looked artificial, like a video game.

Action scenes are just boring, I don’t know if there was at least one standout action scene. And some of them, with Snyder’s famous slo-mo, were laughingly bad. That is maybe the worst thing you can say about a movie like this – it’s just so boring and I wanted to exit the theater after 40 minutes.

Director Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 300, Dawn of the Dead remake, BvS, Man of Steel, Sucker Punch) stepped down from Justice League this spring due to the family tragedy. So Joss Whedon (Firefly, Serenity, Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron) stepped in and did some reshoots. I can’t say if a movie would be better if this didn’t happen. Or would it be even worse without Whedon’s intervention. I didn’t like Whedon’s Avengers very much, but at least they resembled real movies. So I think it’s Snyder’s fault, together with heads from DC and Warner Bros. I just don’t get why they didn’t hand out their cinematic universe to be helmed by a more capable director. Someone that cares about story and characters. And why they didn’t hire better screenwriters? I mean, Snyder blew it with Man of Steel, then they gave him second chance with BvS which turned even worse and now this.

After Wonder Woman, who wasn’t anything special but it was at least ok, it seemed DCEU learned their lesson. Turns out, they didn’t. Justice League is an awful movie with weak story and script, paper-thin characters, unfunny jokes, awful villains, terrible visuals and boring and generic action sequences. Probably the worst movie I saw this year.