Justice League (2017)

While watching Justice League, I couldn’t help comparing it to The Avengers. The two films are trying to do very similar things with their respective teams, and they both have very similar story beats (not unreasonable to expect given Joss Whedon’s heavy involvement in both). Honestly, that comparison does Justice League a lot more favors than you might otherwise expect: they both are fun, entertaining, bombastic blockbusters with characters the audience can get behind.

Of course, Justice League is not in a vacuum, and neither is The Avengers. And that is where the problems start to show.

The biggest problem I have with Justice League is its lack of character development. Now, this actually doesn’t come from this film itself, as all of the new characters (Cyborg, The Flash, and Aquaman) are enticing as presented here. The problem is that we haven’t had the prior experiences with these characters that we had in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before The Avengers came to us. That is a huge problem with what DC is trying to do in this film: I can’t care about these characters as much as I want to because I don’t have any history with them. To make this film better, there needed to be about twenty minutes of character development, and it just isn’t there. The lack of prior world-building and character backstory in the franchise makes this film feel like it’s missing something critical. It also gives the film very little room to breathe, forcing every scene to somehow move the plot along.

Another problem with Justice League is the villain, Steppenwolf. He just isn’t compelling in the slightest. I can forgive this a little as the film undoubtedly wants to focus on the ability of the League to come together over the force they have to overcome, but he’s just boring. His whole objective in the film is to be a big bad guy with a disposable CGI army that wants to destroy the world. There’s no creativity with it at all, and while this doesn’t surprise me, it definitely felt lackluster.

Speaking of lackluster, my last big issue with Justice League is its visual effects. Wait…what? Yeah, it’s true: the CGI in this film is wildly inconsistent. Steppenwolf looks like he came from a video game, and some of the green screen effects have trouble blending the actors into the backgrounds. It’s surprising to see these issues in a film with this much money and talent behind it, but somehow, they’re here.

Besides those issues, I don’t have a lot of bad things to say about Justice League. The performances are good, there’s little to no visible tonal issues for me (something a lot of other critics see throughout), and the action sequences for the most part have excellent direction (even if they CGI isn’t always the greatest). I also loved how we see the entire DC universe in the film, especially with the integration of Themyscira and the teasing of future films in the franchise (looking at you, Green Lantern).

Unfortunately, these can’t overcome the flaws the DC universe has had so far, and Justice League, while offering some potential in its overall lighter tone, doesn’t serve as a large enough course correction to restore my full faith in the franchise. The way they went about building this world was risky, and it appears that it hasn’t paid off, at least not yet. I hope that somehow the next couple films show more promise, but being optimistic about DC’s film franchise is becoming tiring.

My recommendation: I hate to say this, but…skip it and hope next time DC gets their act together.

My rating: 41/100