Justice League made it's money back, but with only a little bit of "fun money" for profit. I liked it, but I liked Wonder Woman and Batman vs. Superman, but not Man of Steel and kinda lukewarm towards Suicide Squad, so I wasn't insistent on some fidelity to every element of what came before.
Beat for beat, this Justice League movie seemed to be replicating plot points from Joss Whedon's first Avengers film, even borrowing the same auteur for reshoots/band-aids to inject doses of humor/empathy from its stars, as if to keep it from looking like a video game. I'm not a fan of the Avengers films - those two movies look like an assembly of well-paid, attractive people wearing/posing in various costumes and reciting patches of dialogue during an expensive photo shoot. The audiences collective imagination did all the heavy lifting and applied context behind the magnitude of what we're seeing...I'm going to go on record and say the one film I truly enjoyed from Marvel Studios was Thor: Ragnarok.
It wasn't false advertising - we did get all of DC Comics best-known superheroes and Cyborg (again, lagniappe, though he's appeared a lot in cartoons, so he's not obscure), PLUS...a lot of Gal Godat, looking phenomenal and memorizing. We also get Ezra Miller as The Flash, looking like the son of Jimmy Fallon & Carrie Brownstein and unintentionally pissing off hardcore fans of Grant Gustin, the TV Flash, but I think Miller's performance does a better job at selling the character's humorous side..maybe to the point where he might've been better-cast as Plastic Man, but that character wasn't in the cards. And how is Ben as Batman? Much has been texted around the net about Affleck looking like he'd rather be elsewhere nowadays, but I think they're misreading his performance...and he's not bothering to clue anyone in. Ben's Batman seems to act more at-ease when he's wearing the batsuit and more tightly wound in civilian clothes, as if he needs to overcompensate for not wearing a batsuit in Bruce's dealings with others. It's a subtle thing that's completely ignored, but it makes his Batman/Bruce Wayne more interesting than Christian Bale or Clooney and Kilmer. Michael Keaton's Batman has an added gravitas; modern reception to Adam West's Batman has a lot of goodwill. And Kevin Conroy just has the quintessential voice you want Batman to have. Affleck's Bat seems a little closer to something iconic mired by appearing in ambivalently-received films. Pity that his next appearance might be a supporting role in Flashpoint, since it's the same rut with Mark Ruffalo not appearing in a solo Hulk film. I do wish Affleck had just gone ahead and filmed his script for The Batman as initially planned. As some consolation prize, we got a cameo by Joe Manganiello as Slade Wilson (Deathstroke), who would've been the main villain in Affleck's film.
I want to say the fault lies with the story. If you don't want to have the guys fight Darkseid just yet, then, instead of Steppenwolf (which sounded like a missed opportunity to feature music from the rock band with the similar-sounding name) have them fight a psychotic mind-controlling starfish, instead. I'm not kidding - the first-ever Justice League of America adventure featured a battle with Starro, a massive alien starfish. The first Avengers film aped the first issue of that comic book by featuring a battle against Loki, so why didn't the Justice League fight Starro? Would it be too silly-looking? Heaven forbid. The only really interesting element of Jack Kirby's Fourth World concept to me were the Mother Boxes, because they foresaw the invention of miniature computers: pocket calculators, digital notebooks, laptops, smartphones, iPads..etc - except in this film, where they'd depicted as big, clunky cubes. I also enjoyed his parody of Stan Lee's public image with the Funky Flashman character..and about 45% of Mister Miracle, but...The King was a really clunky writer..
I had no problem with the cast, the crew or the shorter length of the film..but I do believe it suffered from the lack of a dazzling story beyond an apology for trying to make Superman a darker character over the last decade and just having the big guns...come together. I don't know if fighting a giant starfish or a gang of thugs dressed like playing cards would've been better, but it would've offered more-appealing visuals that cued audiences about what the movie was going to try to be...
Fun.
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