‘Justice League’ (2017) (7/10)

Though the 2021 version of Justice League is a long and sometimes exhausting four-hour watch, it feels appropriately like Zack Snyder’s vision. His name is still attached to the two-hour-long 2017 version, though he stepped away from the project before it was completed, with various re-shoots and re-edits morphing it into a very different (and much worse) movie.

If anything, what happened with the 2017 version of Justice League might be even worse than getting a (hypothetically very advanced) A.I. program to rewrite and re-edit a movie: it seems that many changes were enforced by studio heads. More humor, more color, and a faster pace all felt like creative choices that were made without much passion, and purely for mathematically increasing the film’s chances of having mass appeal. Unfortunately for Warner Bros., it backfired.