 It's funny when children swear because they think that's how you be an adult. Now folks, it's me, your old pal over at here on the hot take couch to record a video about a type of movie that I normally wouldn't talk about because I don't really review big movies on this channel because I think I'm too good for them because I'm a pretentious hack. Kind of like director Zack Snyder, except I have way better politics and also way less money and it's possible that those two things are related. I don't know, maybe I should learn to code. Anyways, I'm not really here to rag on Zack Snyder. Maybe I should be because he's a big Einran fan and I have a negative amount of respect for people who believe that this country and also the world at large would be better if self-obsessed psychopaths were given free reign to crush everyone under their heel instead of just the mostly free reign granted to them by a system of government that caters specifically to that type of person in part because it's more public-facing members are largely in that group themselves and so obviously just want to make themselves richer and more powerful at the expense of, say, the half million Americans who have died in the past year from the coronavirus. But at the same time it is genuinely funny to me that a man who clearly hates Superman and what he stands for as much as Snyder does has been given hundreds of millions of dollars to denigrate the symbol of hope's image. When I was younger I dug Snyder's incredibly bleak vision of things, not Sucker Punch obviously, but like after the release of Man of Steel I had lengthy conversations with people who genuinely care about Superman as a character and were infuriated by what he had become and I totally understood that and totally didn't care. Like when I was in my comic book phase I read manga and the occasional Batman collection or like Alan Moore classic but that doesn't mean a movie can't change my mind right? Like Marvel's film division has done a pretty dang good job of making me care about at least half a dozen characters I'd never even heard of. DC hasn't and is that largely Zack Snyder's fault? Sure, but what did they expect was gonna happen when they put Zack Snyder in charge of the DC extended universe? He has made exactly the movies everyone expected him to make visually sumptuous and overly serious with a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to tell a mature story and so it was overall probably a good thing when the DCEU fell apart. It's not great that actual garbage Joss Whedon took over the film after Snyder's departure from the project due to genuinely tragic circumstances but at least the movie he made pleased basically no one right? Like fuck that guy. I didn't see it. A lot of people didn't see it and that failure mixed with Wonder Woman's success meant that the films that followed haven't cared much about its continuity. I think that's a positive development and I think most people agree but underneath all of that bubbled the hashtag release the Snyder cut movement a virulent group who believed fervently that there was a finished masterpiece just sitting in a vault somewhere and that the way to see it was to harass people online for literal years. The movie did not exist of course there was no Snyder cut even a year ago because that's not how filmmaking works especially movies like these which are largely created in post-production but AT&T's corporate overlords looked at the harassment campaigns and calculated that those guaranteed eyeballs would be worth 30 million dollars and so that's the amount they gave Snyder to complete the VFX work on his incomplete cut as long as he released it exclusively on HBO Max of course. Now that 30 million dollar budget was more than doubled during the process but it was eventually finished. The Snyder cut did not exist but now it does and I've watched it and there's a pretty good chance that you have too so maybe AT&T's gamble paid off maybe. Now I'm gonna say up front I thought Zack Snyder's Justice League was fine like it's probably his best DC movie which may be damning with faint praise but there you go like it's fine. Perhaps more importantly the four hour runtime arbitrarily broken into six chapters plus a brief intro and lengthy epilogue for maximum pretension was much less grueling than I had expected. In fact I would argue that the story being told here needs to be closer to this length than it was to the original releases which was a mere 120 minutes. Not because the actual events that happen in the Justice League are so epic but because of the issues with the DCEU as it existed at the time and frankly still exists now. In stark contrast to Marvel which introduces characters fairly slowly and usually brings them all together only after we have an understanding of who they were and how they all fit together DC was just raring to get as many big names onto the big screen as soon as possible. That is why the second Superman movie actually introduced Batman and Wonder Woman and while Wonder Woman got her own film before the release of Justice League the other three characters who joined the team over the course of this film Aquaman, Cyborg and the Flash needed to be introduced and fleshed out enough to make their presence in this story matter at all and and not only that the movie also wanted to introduce Darkseid the big bad of the series and explain his whole deal while also giving some context for the little bad who serves as the antagonist of this movie specifically. It's a lot and frankly four hours wasn't enough to do it properly so it's mind-boggling that anyone thought they could do it too. Prioritizations had to be made and it is interesting to see what is given time to breathe and what gets rushed through like yeah sometimes it is excess for its own sake like the opening of the movie which is about five minutes longer than it needs to be but these really masturbatory moments are farther in between than you might expect given the runtime when it comes to introducing these new characters you know we get some scenes with the Flash and Aquaman seeing their abilities to move fast and swim good respectively alongside a little bit of background but frankly they're pretty straightforward and so all we get is all we really need to know. The primary focus here is on Victor Stone aka Cyborg. This makes sense both because his powers are a lot more complicated than the others and so require more explanation and also the development of those powers is directly tied to the actual plot of the Justice League and although it would make a lot more sense for him to just have an origin film that would have done a much better job of prepping us for this film I guess Zack Snyder shooting the highlights of what it could have been and then shoving them into the middle of Justice League is better than nothing is not nearly enough of course I was super confused by the timeline of Cyborg's superhero journey and also actually whether he does anything heroic at all like I get what he can do but not what he does do or why and for someone so critical to the plot I'd really want more and it should have come at the expense of the presence of Mr. Clark Kent aka Superman and his two biggest fans Lois Lane and Martha Kent. Look people will say that Snyder has no vision for Superman and that's why every time he's on screen the whole thing just kind deflates but I don't think that's quite right. Snyder made clear in Batman v Superman that he actually does have a long-term plan for the character and it is to go into a specific arc in the comics that I know of but obviously haven't read in which Lois Lane dies and then Superman turns evil. We saw premonitions of this in Batman v Superman and we get more of those here because Snyder is champing at the bit so hard to just have evil Superman that he cannot make this movies where Clark Kent is a good guy without showing us that God is fallible and will in fact fall eventually as long as Snyder keeps being given hundreds of millions of dollars to make these movies but he can't do that yet so instead we get a really boring super strong man and his boring fiance who the film keeps cutting to because everyone really wants us to think that Lois Lane is very important the key in fact but every single time she popped up on screen I was surprised because I forgot she was in the movie because she's so disconnected from the main story that her presence is just always a non sequitur but as frustrating as all of that is it's not really the fundamental problem with Zack Snyder's Justice League. Back in 2017 I reviewed Batman Arkham Knight for The Daily Beast. I lamented the fact that the game was rated M because it was and I quote the video game equivalent of two children standing on each other's shoulders wearing a trench coat. Just because it's bloodier and has more bad language doesn't make it more mature and arguably it does the opposite. That rating points to a game whose target audience is 15 year olds who want to feel cool for breaking the rules. Oh wow this game is rated M but I can handle it because I'm super mature age is just a number man you know it's like how I felt the first time I played Grand Theft Auto 3 it was so transgressive but now I'm an old man who has had multiple surgeries because his body is falling apart and I can see how ridiculous that all of this was and still is. Zack Snyder's Justice League is that but worse because at least those games sometimes gesture its storylines with slightly more complex and possibly even mature subject matters even if they're not handled particularly well. This movie doesn't even do that it is R for really big kids. You know those movies on the Carter crew channel where they make things R rated by adding blood splatters and stuff that is basically what we're dealing with here. CG blood abounds in places where so technically there would be blood if this happened to a person and it's probably worse for society for us to show bloodless violence than the real carnage that results from battle but also these aren't real battles nothing about the violence in this movie is realistic you remember when Batman asked Superman if he bleeds and we're all like wow so gritty I love it yeah I didn't need to know the answer to that for any of these folks and anyone who feels like they did needs to grow the fuck up by the way I know that I used a bad word there but it's okay because I don't want children to watch this video in fact I have to press a button specifically saying that this is not made for kids every time I upload a video Zach Snyder over here made a movie in which giant monsters argue over space zoom about something called the anti-life equation with serious albeit computer generated faces and if that's not dumb shit for babies I don't know what is like I know that's not Snyder's name for it and it's like a canonical thing but it's canonical in a series of picture books for children like Marvel dealt with mass extinction in a way that didn't require Tony Stark to say the phrase I will fucking kill you but that's what Batman says at one point I laughed really really hard when he did so Justice League is more obviously ridiculous than any of its grim dark predecessors which makes its continued commitment to douriness often funnier than the actual jokes and like there are jokes the flash speaks mostly in quips and Aquaman is half there and while this doesn't entirely cohere it isn't as jarring as I would have expected not like the weird girl power stuff that shows up every once in a while and feels incredibly unnatural like there's this moment where the bad guy tells his minions to back off of Wonder Woman because she's mine and her response is I belong to no one what I don't even know where to start with that shit so I'm just not gonna bother fuck it oh that's next aspect ratio yeah let's talk about that look so I watched this movie on a 65 inch OLED television in glorious Dolby vision I don't feel like doing the exact math but that's probably around a 40 inch diagonal image which is still a fine size though I think I would have been annoyed were I watching on something smaller because it is very clear that this movie was not actually meant to be presented in 4x3 like obviously this stuff that was shot in iMacs would have looked like this on those screens but even that doesn't feel like it was the only way it was meant to be seen something I noticed seeing Batman v Superman and iMac 70 millimeter was that Snyder doesn't like changing aspect ratios within scenes where Christopher Nolan will shift from shot to shot as he has it Snyder will crop iMac's footage to match whatever surrounds it and so it is hard to know how much of this was always intended to be 4x3 versus what just happened to have been in 4x3 versus what was actively cropped to be 4x3 most of the time it doesn't really matter and it only genuinely bothered me during some of the group scenes towards the end as well as during horde type fight scenes like when the league is all together trying to plan out the final fight it's it's a little odd because you can only ever see one or two of them at a time even though it feels like three or possibly four were supposed to be in the frame additionally while some fight scenes emphasize their verticality most don't they're spread out and the way it's framed makes it hard to keep track of where characters who aren't literally fighting side by side are in relation to each other you feel like there must have been more at some point and it's just been cut off for the sake of it but other than that honestly that looks pretty good and I have no doubt that seeing it in IMAX would have been spectacular but I'm not so sure I would have wanted to do that and be in that crowd especially on opening night because as we've established the folks who made the Snyder Cut happen just aren't good like Zack Snyder's Justice League is an interesting pop culture artifact and I'm glad I've seen it since it exists but I am not glad that it exists this is not a movie that will placate anyone anyone just looking for a Justice League story won't be satisfied and the people who wanted this Justice League story were calling for a return to the Snyderverse at large even before they saw its multiple wide open endings and those calls will get louder and angrier because there is only one lesson that these people will have learned from this whole ordeal if they kick and scream loud and long and had enough people studios will ultimately bend to their will and maybe that's true I hope it's not but it kind of doesn't matter the box has already been opened and the Snyder Cut sure as fuck isn't going to close it thank you for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons my mom hammer and marco cat Zarakata benjamin schiff anthony Cole magnolia dentin eliot fowler greg lucina Liam night cojo phil baits willow and iron the sword like this video that's great if not I don't care fun fact this is the last video I will be shooting in this apartment it'll probably be a few weeks before I'm settled in at the new place and have another setup with which to shoot whatever video will be next but at this point that is nothing new in any case I hope you'll join me then bye