Five years in the making the complete Justice League movie has been released on HBO Max. Including the credits, the run time is 4 hours and 2 minutes. This is the whole DC enchilada. It felt like I was watching a 12-issue comic book series come to life.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League has a chaotic production story that few movies can come close to. It’s been written about ad nauseam and with this Snyder Cut (SC) release, even more detail has come out. For the sake of context, I’ll do an abridged version.

Around 2010, writer/director Zack Snyder was hired to take over the DC film universe after Christopher Nolan finished his three Batman films. Snyder is a love it or hate it director (I like most of what he’s done) and he has a unique look and take on themes and messages for his movies. In 2013, Man of Steel was released with mixed reactions, if on the more positive side. It did well at the box office, being the first Superman movie in seven years. That was the start of Snyder’s overall long-term plans for DC movies.

Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice is released in 2016 and gets trashed by critics and is very divisive with fans. It doesn’t make the money Warner Brothers expected. An Ultimate Edition with cut footage was released on home video that improved on some things but that film is still okay-at-best. This where the problems start and an avalanche of events and studio decisions are made. WB is now scared of what Snyder is doing. Afraid they are leaving money on the table with audiences with a too dark take on these superheroes, they want changes. Justice League is filmed under a lot of pressure and when Snyder’s daughter suddenly dies, he and his wife Deborah (who produces his films) leave the project because their priorities rightfully change. They choose their family over fighting with a Hollywood studio with a huge list of changes to Justice League. Writer/director Joss Whedon is hired to rewrite, reshoot, and finish JL for its original 2017 release date. The two-hour movie comes out with reviews that are just as bad and a disappointing box office. With reshoots and advertising, JL has been estimated to cost $300 million and lost $60 million. So no one is happy.

Online, #ReleasetheSnyderCut is started and goes on for years. Rumors about the production swirl, Snyder teases his original plans for the movie during all of this, and the die-hard fans don’t let up on their pressure on WB to let him finish the movie (and universe) he started. I never thought they’d give Snyder the greenlight to finish his movie. Too much was unfinished and director’s cuts like this rarely happen. A few DC movies are made using the events of JL as canon. Then, in May of 2020, it’s publicly announced the SC will be finished and released on HBO Max. The release date March 18, 2021. That was a week ago.

Yes, all of that was the abridged version. Much like the actual movie, everything about this takes a long time to talk about.

Direct and to the point as a review: Zack Snyder’s Justice League is absolutely better than Justice League. It’s now a coherent story with proper build-ups, links to the previous Snyder movies, and quality story payoffs. We get to spend more time with every superhero and they feel like less of a hodgepodge of special people standing in a scene together and more of a team. But, if you don’t like Zach Snyder movies, you won’t like this one.

The plot is exactly the same. Batman forms a team to defend the planet from an attack from an intergalactic conqueror. So why is this move an hour and half longer? All the main characters get their fair share of the spotlight. Nothing is rushed to get a story with a main cast of six superheros done in two hours. Victor Stone gets a legit story arc. Steppenwolf gets a purpose and you get to see him actually do his plan. Barry is built up a bit more and everyone in the Justice League gets to contribute something and change from what they experience. Side characters that were cut down or completely cut are now present. There are now way fewer gaps in basic storytelling logic. No new actions scenes but all of them are expanded with tweaks done in what we’ve already seen in the theatrical cut (no horrific red sky filter in the final action scene!)

Is it the best comic book movie ever made? Nope. Is it one of the best ones? I think so. For DC freaks especially. There is a ton of setups for future movies in this version. I think it’s like five or six. The story told here is the setup for a massive DC cinematic movie universe where a bunch of characters get their own movies and then come back for more Justice League. The SC is doing what Marvel did in reverse. Introduce a bunch of characters in one event movie and spin things off from there. Marvel did the individual origin story of a character, make some sequels that then tie into event movies. That formula has worked really well. What Zach wrote is much harder to do with theatrical movies. It’s a time issue. Snyder does three origin stories in this! That’s nuts! And Flash’s story is the most truncated of the three so it’s safe to say he left that for a solo Flash movie.

The SC isn’t really feasible for a theatrical release. Without HBO Max, what’s in this movie had to have been split in two and some changes made to make two separate but linked stories like Infinity War and Endgame were carefully designed to do. You need to make sure Part 1 stands together well enough to get people to come back for Part 2 of the story six months to a year later. At 3 hours and 50 minutes, this is more of a mini-series than a movie. Since audiences are so used to binge-watching these days, that’s not a tall order for people to do now. That’s why it fits so well on HBO Max. It’s a big honking chunk of content to watch.

Here’s what I don’t get. Snyder filmed about ten minutes of new footage for this. Subtracting that, his original version clocks in at about 220 minutes. That means the shooting script was damn near 220 pages. Why did WB greenlight a comic book opus like that in the first place if they wanted something two to two and half hours long? That a script of 150 pages, tops. Scores of people read this script and approved it. What did they think he was going to come back with? It’s impossible to cut a quality, coherent film from that much material.

So, Joss Whedon stepped into a quagmire right from the jump. I’m not going to get into his ideas for his rewrite or his alleged behavior on set but it’s clear WB told him to do two things. Make the story more light-hearted and get this as close to two hours as you can. The only way to take a 220-page script and get it down to 120 is by taking a chainsaw to it. Which is what he did. He did what he was hired to do and it didn’t make a better movie. He had to jury rig the basic plot into an abridged beginning, middle, and end while adding some nonsense no one wanted. What he did to Victor Stone/Cyborg (Ray Fisher) is awful. His story arc is the best part of Snyder’s movie and just about all of it was taken out making him largely uninteresting.

This movie has every Zach Snyder trademark in every single frame. He has no problems with his comic book movies looking like comics. He holds up superheroes to the viewer like they are all mythical beings. The type of color grading he uses is very deliberate as is his scene framing (I got used to the 4:3 aspect ratio in less than five minutes). His action sequences are totally awesome and you can pull frames that look exactly like a comic panel. He loves slow motion. Absolutely adores the technique. He sits on moments for as long as he damn well pleases. He’s an indulgent filmmaker and that drives a lot of people nuts.

I fall right in the middle of enjoying his indulgences. And because he got to do basically everything he wanted to, there are a lot. I have no problem with how he likes to desaturate the color in his movies. It’s like getting mad at Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino’s trademark looks. It’s how they see the world through their camera lens. He could absolutely let off on the gas with the slow-mo. When you have a character like Flash where his speed can require it, having it used so much elsewhere takes away the special nature of it. It becomes too far common and can have the opposite intended effect: lessen the impact of an action and wasting time. JJ Abrams took the criticism of his lens flare fetish to heart and I wish Synder would take this criticism in the future. There are also chunks of drawing out moments that simply don’t work. The most obnoxious is when Aquaman returns to the sea for the first time. The village women serenade him out while he finishes a bottle of booze, takes his shirt off, and walks down a dock with the ocean waves consuming him in slow motion. It feels like it’s a two-minute scene but it’s probably closer to a minute in real life. The point is, it’s bad to have the audience sit there and say “I get it” and wait for a scene to end to move on so the story of your movie can start again. There are a few pauses like this that just get in the way. If you were to edit out these moments along with the excessive slow-mo, I bet the movie would be close to ten minutes shorter and you wouldn’t miss a thing.

The added epilogue also isn’t necessary. Snyder has said that he added that scene because he could. And it shows. As much as I liked seeing Jared Leto getting another crack at being the Joker and succeeding at it, what happens doesn’t add anything. It reminds me of the final Lord of the Rings movie and its three endings where I couldn’t believe the movie was still playing. The main story ends, we get the stinger that was meant to set up the next Batman movie with Deathstroke and then this Knightmare scene is tacked on that only makes the movie longer. What you see happen is so far down the potential movie line (which I doubt will ever be made) there’s no reason to care about it. It’s more of a pointless spoiler than anything else with some DC name dropping thrown in for fan service. Multiple movies would have to happen to get to that point in the story we are being shown. We already have a Knightmare flash-forward scene in BvS and with Cyborg in this movie. So….”Okay, I get it.”

The SC has been reported to cost $70 million to finish. A new score, lots of SFX work, and an added epilogue don’t come cheap. The movie overall looks very good. Steppenwolf looks way better and it was worth the wait to see Darkseid. The Amazon’s are all badasses and Wonder Woman pulls zero punches. It’s night and day seeing her in this compared to Wonder Woman 1984. There are some sketchy visuals though.

Some really suspect CG backgrounds that look more blurry and flat than real and the most egregious visual is at the very beginning. When we first see the Amazon’s guarding their motherbox, the camera comes into the chamber from above and swoops down to the ground level to an Amazon. The motherbox and the stone platform it is sitting on are, for some reason, CG. And it looks terrible. I’m talking Playstation 3 era visuals. Blurry, low-resolution textures that have no right to be seen in a major production in 2021. I have no idea why both of those elements weren’t practical as they are so easy to make and use on set and the motherbox is seen being carried around by actors in the movie so you know they had one. And if they added CG to them in the few simple scenes, why on earth couldn’t they match the quality? Was it the last shot on the list (I know the time the FX studios had on this was very short)?

I had a good time watching this. The Justice League I saw in theaters, isn’t the Justice League I wanted to see. This is much closer to it. It’s a lot of fun seeing these characters in a movie, interacting with each other. The potential for Cyborg to become the next big thing in comic book movies was laid out here and likely isn’t going to happen now. There are a lot of fun action scenes with heroic moments, unexplained easter eggs for die-hard fans, and bizarre head-scratching logic choices that are in every comic book movie. I’m stoked that Zach Snyder got to complete this project the way he wanted to. And this movie (if you cut out the needless epilogue) ends on positive notes. The beginning is intense because the stakes are high. Characters are found in low places in their life and they come through the other side as better people. The messaging is one of a lot of hope.

Now we move on. Snyder might get to make more projects in his sandbox for HBO Max, but WB is going elsewhere with its direction for DC movies. The great James Gunn is delivering Suicide Squad very soon. Matt Reeves’ The Batman is done filming and many big movies are about to start filming (Flash, Shazam 2, Aquaman 2, Black Adam) among others being written (The New Gods, Batgirl, Superman, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Zatana, Justice League Dark(maybe)). There’s a lot to look forward to.