Some HBO Max subscribers were accidentally able to access, 10 days before its premiere, an hour of Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021) before the movie was cut off. This is not a bad strategy. An hour at a time of this gargantuan abomination is more than any thinking person can bear. ZSJL reminds me of Ambrose Bierce's famous book review; “The covers of this book are too far apart.” It doesn't help either that half the movie seems to occur in slow motion.
Superman's quote-unquote death has resulted in the reactivation of the “Mother Boxes” and the appearance of Darkseid's servant Steppenwolf on Earth. Steppenwolf hails from Apokolips, a planet that exists on a different plane of existence from the regular DC Universe, in spite of which he speaks perfect English, and his name is a German word for an animal presumably found only on Earth.
Steppenwolf retrieves a Mother Box from Themyscira, following a battle of incredible proportions – not because it involves mythological beings and alien deities, but because the world of the Amazons is almost entirely computer generated, its scenery only slightly more sophisticated than an Age of Empires screenshot.
How can this movie ask us to believe in a place like Themyscira, when the film itself doesn't seem to have much faith in its existence? This is symptomatic of ZSJL, much of which takes place in a setting completely divorced from the real world – and my complaint is not that it's unrealistic, because ZSJL is fantasy after all; my problem is that it's not real. I mean, it's just not there.
Other than as childhood wish fulfillment, true-blue superheroes are very hard – sometimes even impossible, as with the immortal, omnipotent Superman – to identify with or care about; their physical and moral perfection renders them boring and predictable. ZSJL makes it even harder by placing them in front of green/blue screens most of the time, constantly surrounded by wall-to-wall CGI, and unconvincingly engaging enemies who are literally an afterthought – digitally added in post-production, and very poorly at that.
And speaking of characters that are nothing short of caricatures, there’s Flash (Ezra Miller). Barry Allen is annoying, irritating, obnoxious, insufferable, grating. He's like a very fast Jar Jar Binks. He's like the bastard son of Andy Dick and French Stewart. If he's so quick, why does it take him so long to get off my screen?
All things considered, there's nothing here we haven't seen in Avengers. Darkseid is Thanos, the Mother Boxes are the Infinity Stones, Batman is Ironman, etc., etc. The one difference is that Zack Snyder's Justice League is, though I would not have thought it possible, longer and more boring than any Marvel movie. The only thing that alleviates the overwhelming oppressiveness are the brief interventions of Willem Dafoe and Jeremy Irons, whose considerable talents are wasted on this debacle.