Justice League

Beleaguered Leaguers

Justice League
2017 USA Directed by Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there will be some spoilers in this one, I think.

Okay, so let me just say up front that Justice League is not a terrible movie by any stretch of the imagination... it’s just not a very good one either. It has its great little moments and a whole bunch of problems but, out of the five films to date making up the story arc of this particular set of interlocking DC superhero movies, this is about halfway up the list in terms of being an effective and entertaining movie.

DC’s track record hasn’t been all that great since the fantastic last part of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night trilogy, it has to be said. Man Of Steel (reviewed here) was just dreadful. Batman Vs Superman - Dawn of Justice (reviewed here) was a fair bit better but ultimately not very well received by critics and audiences alike, it seemed to me. Suicide Squad (reviewed here) was... okayish but really wasn’t making people that happy either. But then we had ‘the movie’. Wonder Woman (reviewed here) isn’t just the greatest superhero movie of all time (and, yeah, I know that’s a brave and bold claim to make but I promise this is not a knee jerk reaction to it)... it’s also one of the best movies in the past few years, period. It’s also flattened all the competition at the box office for the forseeable future (or just maybe until the new Star Wars movie premieres next month) and it more than deserves its success.

The thing is, though, everyone was kinda hoping that Justice League would somehow live up to the almost impossible standard that Patty Jenkins set with Wonder Woman and, frankly, that would be hard to top even by her, when she comes to work on the sequel. So I guess it’s no surprise that this movie comes nowhere near as close to the dizzying heights that Professor William Moulton Marston’s amazonian princess scaled to in her own solo movie adaptation. A shame, though, that Justice League doesn’t come close to the Batman VS Superman movie either.

Now I’m not going to go into the production problems this film had, what with Zack Snyder leaving for very understandable reasons and Joss Whedon reshooting the thing in places... firstly because I would be no good at figuring out which bits were directed by whom and, secondly, because it’s the film we’ve ended up with, for better or worse. Given Snyder’s reasons for leaving, there’s absolutely no point in having an autopsy on why this theatrically released cut doesn't really cut it.

Okay... so lets look at the good stuff first and get that out of the way...

Well, some of the action was okay, especially the Amazon’s fighting the villain of the piece, Steppenwolf, near the start... and also in the bank scene where Gal Gadot’s Diana saves a bunch of people by doing some cool action stuff. That being said, I did miss the sudden glow of orange as the metal on her wrist bands cool down after a bullet hit, which was a nice detail in Patty Jenkins movie during the alley scene in London... itself an homage, presumably, to the alley scene in Superman The Movie. Gadot is just wonderful again here, as she was in her previous two movies with this character because a) she looks just like she could do all this stuff in real life and b) because she performed it in such a way that she doesn’t betray the character as set up in the previous two films.

Similarly, say what you will about Ben Affleck but I think he makes a brilliant Bruce Wayne/Batman and I really hope he doesn’t leave the role after this. I think he could really do well in a solo Batman movie and I would really like to see it.

Henry Cavill... well I hated Superman in Man Of Steel but that’s more because of the script than Cavill’s performance and I certainly warmed to him more in Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice. He’s great here too and you really believe in his character, who he portrays with the same kind of honourable presence as some of the great actors who have played the part before him... and I’m specifically thinking of Kirk Alyn and Christopher Reeve here. Now if they’d only bring back the ‘S’ kiss curl and the red trunks then the illusion would be complete.

Jeremy Irons as Alfred has about as much screen time as he did in the previous movie but I think his character makes a bigger impact here, with various ironic comments thrown at Bruce Wayne which I found fairly entertaining.

 It was also great seeing a Green Lantern in the sequence flashing back to a battle on Earth which took places many hundreds of years ago, too. It’s been suggested that the cloak on him was a reference to the original Golden Age iteration of the character in comics but, the people saying that might do well to remember that the original Green Lantern’s costume was red (yeah, I know that’s ridiculous but don’t blame me... I didn’t write those things).

And that’s mostly the good stuff.

Now we also have three new members on the team...

Ezra Miller does okay as a really bizarre and teenage angsty version of the silver age version of The Flash (aka Barry Allen) and he was getting a good reaction from the audience at my screening. Personally I didn’t find him all that easy to identify with and I could take him or leave him, to be fair. Then we have Cyborg, who was a member of the Teen Titans the last time I read of him (sometime in the early 1980s) so goodness knows what he’s doing in the Justice League of America (as the supergroup was always known in the comics... until maybe recently). He’s played here by a guy called Ray Fisher and, although he turns in a solid performance, I couldn’t help but think that the script wasn’t doing him any favours. He just comes across as a bit dull, to be honest.

Jason Momoa’s version of Aquaman is a more fun character but, honestly, is nothing like the Aquaman I used to enjoy reading about when I was a kid (I even had a little action figure). The clean shaven, blonde version of Superman with the blue eyes, orange suit and green legs and gauntlets has morphed into what is presumably a more contemporary comic book version of the character (well... at least he still has both of his arms here). Again... he was okay but I really would have preferred the version of the character I grew up with here.

Okay... let’s get to the really bad then...

So much of the dialogue between Batman and Diana feels forced and, bearing in mind the amount of times that Steve Trevor’s name is bandied about, it somehow seems disrespectful of the truly marvellous solo Wonder Woman movie what came out earlier in the year.

Another thing which felt out of place was that the background story about the ‘mother boxes’ seemed like it came completely out of the blue and Diana never once goes to Thermyscira to consult with the Amazons. Indeed, she even goes so far as to say that they cannot leave their island... which is a completely redundant and contradictory idea in terms of their purpose on Earth, to be honest. This film so badly needed a scene between Diana and her mother and it similarly needed ‘the amazon horde’ to come galloping in for the somewhat bland (as it is here) action finale too. Especially since their own battle with Steppenwolf near the beginning of the movie was a heck of a lot better.

The way Superman is brought back to life is really stupid Doctor Frankenstein stuff and I couldn’t help but think it all seemed just a little too optimistic and contrived. “Gee whiz... wouldn’t it be great if we could use this mother box technology to bring Superman back to life with?”... well, okay, it wasn’t quite like that but it was pretty close. It felt like the whole thing was written by a small child at this point. What was worse than that though was... Superman and Batman were allies by the end of Batman Vs Superman. In fact, Batman saved Superman’s mother’s life. So why the heck would the newly woken Superman be so aggressively hostile to Batman and the others and try to kill them all? It made no sense. It was like watching that truly dumb scene in Superman III where he splits into two and the evil and good halves fight. It just made no sense.

And then they trot out Amy Adam’s Lois Lane to calm him down? Honestly, it felt like her role was really pushed to the back in this and the scene where she and Diane Lane as Martha Kent were talking in the newspaper offices felt like it was shot quickly in the director’s favourite room in his house one afternoon. The set dressing and feel of the scene seemed to be completely unconvincing.

The music is perplexing too. Danny Elfman has been tapped for this one but I felt like either Hans Zimmer or, especially, Rupert Gregson-Williams (who had provided real emotional depth to the Wonder Woman movie) should have got the gig here. Instead, Elfman uses various themes from films gone by to weave a new musical direction for the franchise and... it just felt wrong. Okay, so he uses Zimmer’s Superman theme from Man Of Steel at one point and he similarly uses Zimmer’s “Is She With You?” theme for Wonder Woman in a less striking arrangement (but without using Gregson-Williams gorgeous thematic material). However, he also uses John WIlliams' Superman music at one point too plus... he even uses his own 1980s Batman theme for some of Ben Affleck’s Batcentric shenanigans. None of that really made sense... what’s he trying to evoke here. It’s a nice enough score, when you can hear it over the noisy sound effects but... it doesn’t knock it out of the park like some of the films in this series do.

Okay, last thing I’ll highlight here is the running time. This is the shortest of the recent DC movies, clocking in at one minute shy of two hours. But you are dealing with six superhero characters, not to mention the big bad guy and the introduction of the mother box on the narrative. How do you cram all that into two hours without losing sight of something? Short answer... you don’t. This film feels like it should be a lot longer and, I dunno, less flippant and somewhat darker in tone considering the events that have birthed it in the previous films. Things felt somewhat rushed... especially when it hurtles to a climax that is less than interesting.

Also... you have continuity errors like the mother box being used to bring Cyborg to life being in the previous film, which makes no sense. Or the fact that the third mother box was found during World War I when, if you check out the epilogue scene included on the home video version of Wonder Woman, you’ll know that Etta Candy and the others were tasked with the mission to find it after the end of the war depicted in that film. Thins like this just seemed a bit like sloppy writing to me, it has to be said.

So, yeah, that’s my review of Justice League. All in all I’m glad I went to see it... if for nothing more than to see Gal Gadot totally slaying it as Wonder Woman. However, the film didn’t blow me away, for sure and it certainly felt a little more anti-climactic than I was expecting. All in all, if you loved Wonder Woman then you’ll probably want to see this one anyway. I can’t really recommend it to anyone on any other basis though so... make of that what you will. Old school DC comics fans, though, would do well to look out for the first of the two post-credits scenes if they want to see a familiar homage and... don’t miss the end if you want to see what happened to another character from a previous movie in the series.

The Cabin In The Woods

Cabin Fever

The Cabin In The Woods

USA 2009 (released 2012)

Directed by Drew Goddard

Playing at UK cinemas now

Joss Whedon wrote this movie.

Now I don’t know much about this guy, but I’ve seen the first few episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and thought the dialogue writing was pretty good. Similarly, I have seen the feature film Serenity and all the episodes of the TV show it comes from, Firefly, and loved them both. Whedon is a pretty good writer in my book... although his writing style is very specific to him which, while it’s to be applauded as the sign of a true artist, also leaves him open to being a little predictable in the way things are expressed.

It’s a common ailment of many writers, no matter what medium they are writing for (it’s especially common in novels), for all the characters to be “speaking from the same place” so to speak, rather than having their own, very different ways of expressing themselves. Usually, when the writing is filtered through a set of different actors, this helps lose that kind of familiarity with the patterns within the words... but when you have someone as genuinely outstanding as Joss Whedon... the writing tends to come through more and take you back to the fact that all the characters are written by the same person.

It’s not particularly a big problem... it doesn’t ruin the experience for me and just reminds me of the basic artifice of the events I am reading/watching. Woody Allen’s writing does exactly the same thing and, frankly, Jean-Luc Godard would approve of all this kind of “showing of the wires” which good writers sometimes inadvertently let happen... so it’s not really a big deal.

I say all this because The Cabin In The Woods is actually, despite all the hype and good word of mouth it’s been getting, quite a predictable film. I don’t think its particularly a fault of the dialogue or even the story itself... I think it’s more to do with the main premise (which is a fairly common one to horror films but dressed up in the trappings of modern technology) being quite good but fairly unwieldy. You can’t really fail to tip your hat as soon as you start drip feeding the little clues as to what’s really going on in the movie... and they do that right from the opening, pre-credits sequence. So I just want to say that if you’re going to see this movie because you want to be surprised to an extent, there’s a good chance you probably won’t be if science fiction, horror or fantasy fiction is your kind of thing.

Similarly, the trailer works against the likelihood of having a “twist ending denouement” because you know certain things about the movie from that too, but let me tell you that you won’t get the whole picture just by watching the trailer. The trailer will, however, spoil the movie to an extent for you because you’ll know from the footage included in it that one of the characters who you thought was dead isn’t. I won’t reveal that one here but if you’ve seen the trailer... you’ll know it when it happens.

And don’t worry about the poster with the three floor, Rubric’s cube style twisting layers... it’s a pretty misrepresentative advertisement for the film. Nothing like this in any way happens in the movie and the cabin, although perhaps a bit of an iceberg from a certain point of view, is a single floor cabin... so pay absolutely no attention to the poster.

The film starts unconventionally and starts giving its secrets away right from the start and, after the opening (and bizarrely “jump scare” title sound and typography), we are introduced to the kids who typically make up these kinds of “red neck slashers in the woods” tales. Although, I have to say, that there’s no really terrible character in this lot, like you would normally get in one of these kinds of movies... yeah, you know, the one you can’t wait to get killed... these five are all pretty likeable people you maybe could stand hanging out with yourself... so you will be rooting for this lot when the killing starts.

I don’t want to say too much about this movie because it’s best to go in fresh (I wish I hadn’t seen the trailer) but I will say that this is certainly a genuine horror movie as opposed to the serial-stalk-and-slash fest that some kids are calling horror movies these days... seriously guys, serial killer movies are thrillers... not horror. There are also quite a few shout outs to the history of horror in film and literature which people familiar with the genre will be happy about. It’s a very diverse and large horror net this film eventually reveals itself to be casting and, though you will figure it all out ahead of time, half the fun is seeing how the idea is executed in this one. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker, to name just two, will be happy with some of the homages in this one. There’s also a beautiful little J-Horror tribute in there... and the final shot of the film almost reminded me of something Jack Kirby might have drawn back in the 70s. Postmodernistic eclecticism is definitely the order of the day on this movie.

I think, the thing to remember with this one is that it’s a fun film. It’s really not trying to take itself too seriously, as you will soon learn from Joss Whedon’s typically witty and intelligent writing... coupled with some “more than competent” film-making from the director and his crew. This is horror comedy which a lot of people will really like, I suspect, in terms of the core audience this film is aimed at. What I would say, though, is that I wished that towards the end of the movie it hadn’t suffered from the same problem that plagued the brilliant Monsters VS Aliens animated feature a few years back... in that, I wish that the producers would just have spent some money to secure the rights to some of the “characters” that pop up in this movie... rather than having to parody them and hope the audience “gets it.” Of course, the characters I’m talking about wouldn’t be cheap and the aim of these kinds of movies is to make them relatively inexpensive so the investors can see a big return on them. Horror movies with excessively large budgets are a rare commodity these days, it seems, and who can blame the producers when an 18 rated film means half your intended target audience aren’t even going to be allowed in to see the picture.

At the end of the day.... The Cabin In The Woods is quite a joyous movie but not as remarkable as many might have you believe. It is, however, a fairly fresh look to this particular kind of material (don’t want to spoil it by saying what kind of movie it really is) and horror fans, in particular, will probably have a good time with this one. I’m sure it will pull in the money and I’m sure there will be demand for a sequel... although, I don’t think even the great Joss Whedon could magic up a sequel to this one without quite an elaborate bit of writerly sleight-of-hand... would be interesting to see him write himself out of that corner.