Like many, I decided watch the movie over the course of several viewings. I can’t imagine enduring that marathon in one sitting. There was a good movie in there somewhere, hindered by typical Snyderian pomposity and ponderousness. I estimate it could have been shorter by ½-1 hour simply by cutting some of the more egregiously long scenes and limiting the use of slow motion.
Case it point: when those terrorists took some schoolchildren hostage and were going to set off a bomb. We did not need to see them slowly walking through the long hallways and papers flying and climbing up the stairs and pointing guns at kids and opening the briefcase to show the bomb and turning the key to activate the bomb and the countdown timer starting to show that the bomb had been activated. We get it, these are bad guys. Whedon did well to cut most of that shit out.
When Wonder Woman does show up, Snyder demonstrates that he does know how to properly pace a scene. Some judicious use of slow motion, to show that she can dodge and deflect bullets. Otherwise, she moved in “real time”, and she moved fast. I daresay Snyder’s version, once the bullets start flying, was better than Whedon’s. Unfortunately, Snyder was so enamored by the technique of undercranking (i.e., slow motion) that every other time Wonder Woman did something cool like cutting Steppenwolf’s head off, he slowed the action way, way, way, way down, accompanied by that Greek wailing.
Even more egregiously: when Barry met Iris by rescuing her from a car crash. OK, so the convention when showing speedsters is to use slow motion. That’s perfectly fine and completely expected. But did we really need to see a hamburger falling in slow motion, dropping a sesame seed in the extreme foreground lovingly rendered in glorious CGI? No, no we did not.
@planetcory Holy cow, I forgot about that! Um. So, that’s a good observation. I can only say that not remembering the SS appearance, I think in both versions of JL, Flash does not come off as experienced. That’s why the One speech worked. I can only say that I don’t think that speech would work on Cyborg because the character is confident but a reluctant hero. (Flashbacks to the 80s RPG and motivations.)
I guess what this means to me is it shows Snyder’s lack of story telling ability?
I read his personality as being somewhat autistic as opposed to being a noob. He clearly has had enough adventures to master his powers and the effects they have on space and time.
I think that’s actually an issue with the Snyder Cut. In the Whedon Cut, he clearly has some experience as a hero - he has the Flash-cave and the NASA-level-tech heat-shield super-suit. But he’s pretty much the equivalent of the MCU Spider-Man - he’s had his origin story and some adventures, but he’s a local hero who’s tangled with street-level foes. Defeating a guy with trick boomerangs is consistent with saying that he doesn’t “do battle” and mostly pushes people and runs away, and is hesitant to engage murder-faced alien invaders.
In the Snyder cut, as you say, he’s clearly much more experienced and comfortable with his powers and the whole super-hero shtick. The climax where he’s got the internal dialogue about breaking the rules seems like he’s even reversed time before, or at least been in situations where he’s had to consider it. But we also get him tripping and crashing, multiple times, in the middle of a fight. He’s freaked out when Superman moves almost as fast as he does and doesn’t seem to know what to do with that. And if he is a well-established super-hero with a track record of defeating super-villains, why is the only trace of him or his activities that either Luthor or Batman can find is a few seconds of footage from a grainy convenience store camera?
Just to circle back to this, according to Mark Evanier, who was Jack Kirby’s assistant for several years, Kirby pronounced it “dark side.”
Also according to Mark Evanier, if Kirby ran into a fan who pronounced it “dark seed,” he would usually just go with that rather than correcting the fan. Kirby was nice that way.
See the first question on this page of Evanier’s blog.
I would love to be able to take a peek into the reality where this movie was completed as scheduled (and in a macabre sense I’m sure Zack does too…). Many of the complaints I’ve read here and online are centered around how long the movie is and how much the movie dragged. Obviously the movie wouldn’t have been 4 hours in the theater. How well would the movie have moved if it were trimmed to, say, 2:30 or even 2:45? I hesitate to say the reviews would have been good because it’s more hip to hate a Snyder movie than love it, but I feel the movie would have been received better than previous Snyderverse movies.
I like some Snyder movies (I thought Watchmen was really well done) and dislike others (I didn’t like Man of Steel or Batman v. Superman). It has nothing to do with being “hip.”
Well, yeah, if were trimmed, it wouldn’t have dragged as much. That’s pretty much by definition. Unless Snyder broke it up into two parts, which a number of recent blockbusters have done, in which case it might have been even longer in total.
Would it have been better? I don’t know…probably? The fact that it was a four hour slog was definitely a factor in my negative reaction. A 2:30 slog is less of a slog by definition. Maybe the edits Snyder would need to bring it down to 2:30 would also have, as you suggest, made it feel like it was better paced. If he kept all the humor and only cut grimness…well, the Whedon Cut kept all of Snyder’s humor, added some of its own, and it still felt leaden and ponderous at times. At least to me.
Maybe? Unlike MoS and BvS, the Flash at least added a bit of humor, and actual, y’know, heroism. I suspect, though, that it would have been received pretty similarly to BvS - a bloated CGI-fest with a barely coherent plot, a climactic fight to kill a massive, gray-skinned, spiky, alien CGI monster, and the introduction of a breakout character who was more interesting and entertaining than the leads.
By far the worst example was the scene where Robin Wright shoots the arrow that lands in Athens to start a signal fire for Diana.
IIRC, in the theatrical version, that’s accomplished in twenty seconds. She fires the arrow, it light a fire, Diana sees it on TV. Got it.
In the Snyder version, this scene just drags on and on. Four Amazon warriors carry out what you think is a coffin, but no, it just holds the magic arrows. Claire Underwood carefully takes out the arrow and she says a prayer (which is just blather, the kind of meaningless baloney you’d see on canvas in a gift shop next to the one that says “Live Love Laugh”) and she caaaaaaaarefully draws her bow and finally shoots it, and we watch it sail through the clouds, and sail some more, and sail some more.
EVERY SHOT in a movie must do one, and preferably more than one, of four things:
Advance the plot
Orient the audience (e.g. establishing shots) to prevent confusion
Advance characterization
Contribute to theme
What does this extended scene do in any of these regards that the original didn’t? Nothing at all. This is where an editor improves a movie. The editor was 100% correct to cut out most of that scene.
more importantly - you shouldn’t look at your watch - you should be amazed at ‘damn, that was 4 hours? feel like I just sat down’ instead of the 7 minutes feeling like 7 hours.
another way to put it - you should never have to look at the movie and say “would you just get on with it already? We get it - you like coffee - you like singing and watching the clouds, but there are enemys to smite and jokes to crack, lets do this thing.”
I figure if he didn’t stretch things out every time someone walked in a door or tied a shoelace, people would be less exasperated about fiery arrow rituals.
Here’s the “Wonder Woman saves hostages” sequence, one instance where Snyder’s version is better than Whedon’s. Wonder Woman moves fast to catch all the bullets:
By way of comparison, here’s Jim Gordon meeting the Justice League. Notice the gratuitous lingering shot of Batman (whom we’ve already seen several times by that point). Snyder doesn’t know when to end a scene either, and keeps showing us Gordon after the superheroes have already left.
So I’ve slogged through the first three parts and am into four. I’m trying to view it as a mini series streaming show. Long format storytelling. Enjoying it a little more in the that it is so bad as to be entertaining level than as something good. First bit that I enjoyed other than that was the Barry meets Bruce scene and Barry’s “I kinda need friends” line followed by Wayne’s summary of his superpower.
Cyborg’s backstory is in the laughably awful range.
Okay Alfred’s need to make sure the tea was made properly was also okay.
Here’s the thing though. Marvel so far is taking advantage of long format storytelling to develop characters as people we care about and are interested in and have us engaged. Whether it pulled you in or pushed you off WandaVision’s first several eps did it in a very creative way, and while Falcon and the Winter Soldier is less interesting to me so far I’m at least getting the sense of some characters with depth to them.
This? The long format is not used to any advantage at all, at least so far. These are not long scenes that create characters of depth that I care about. They are just long. Aquaman’s long walk drinking some brown booze throwing his garbage down letting waves fly over … funny in how serious it takes itself but just long. The villains here in particular are about as boring as it gets.
Well, my son just gave up on seeing the whole thing. He’s been watching it it 30min bursts here and there and decided this morning to just turn it off and watch Captain America instead. There was one point where I kept looking in on the movie and it just the gang standing around a table, talking, over and over again. I get it, you’re planning, now go do something.
I still have an issue with Snyder’s cut there; once WW blocks the first shot from the final bad guy, why (if she can move incredibly fast, as has already been demonstrated) does she give the guy time to switch his rifle from single-shot to auto?
And it’s not like that little snippet was in slow-motion; the guy stops, reacts, blinks a couple of times, then flips the switch on the side of his rifle. Took three or four seconds. WW apparently was fine intentionally endangering the life of the hostages just to prove she could block the bullets. At least in Whedon’s cut, it looks like she has to react to the full-auto capabilities of the rifle immediately to save the hostages before taking out the bad guy.
I thought I had posted about this movie, but maybe not …
I thought it was fine. It was better than Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice. It was wayyyyyyyy better than Whedon’s Justice League, which I found so boring that I remembered very little of it.
Snyder’s Justice League isn’t among my favorite superhero movies, but it was fine. It was very annoyed by the darkness and desaturated color. It made it literally difficult for me to see the movie.
I won’t say that Snyder’s versions of the characters are my favorite versions, but I think he told a cohesive story, emotionally speaking. I understood the villain and his motives, I felt the danger facing the heroes.
The tale and function of the motherboxes hung together more coherently. It made some sort of (comic book) sense that the one could bring Victor back as a cyborg as well as bring Superman back from the dead. The danger of using it was also more rational. Rather than some vague “Pet Sematary” notion that resurrection was wrong, they knew that activating the box would summon Steppenwolf.