Justice League (2017)
Directed by Zack Snyder
Fuelled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman's selfless act, Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince assemble a team of metahumans consisting of Barry Allen, Arthur Curry and Victor Stone to face the catastrophic threat of Steppenwolf and the Parademons who are on the hunt for three Mother Boxes on Earth.
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As such, "Justice League" stands on "Wonder Woman’s" shoulders to leap into infinity, and you’ll leave it believing "Aquaman," "Flashpoint," "Wonder Woman 2," "Cyborg," "Green Lantern Corps," "Batman," "Man Of Steel 2," can take the DCEU into the beyond.
Kudos to Danny Elfman, who went back to basics for his score, drawing heavily on his own theme from Batman (1989) but not ignoring the previous work of other composers (both recent and not-so-recent).
Justice League begins by awkwardly reintroducing two of DC’s marquee characters: the ageless Amazon warrior-princess Diana (Gal Gadot), better known as Wonder Woman, and the billionaire Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who dons high-tech armor to fight crime on the industrial rooftops of Gotham City as Batman.
Some of that is down to Danny Elfman, Tim Burton’s former composer of choice, taking on scoring duties, and weaving both the ’89 Batman motif and John Williams’ ’78 Superman riff into the fabric.
But it suggests the Affleck Batman’s past is far closer to the Tim Burton films of yore than the straight-faced Nolan trilogy; a notion only reinforced by composer Danny Elfman (replacing Hans Zimmer) sneaking back a snatch of his original, ’89 Batman theme.
Barry Allen and Victor Stone both have daddy issues — the former with his incarcerated father (Billy Crudup, an inspired choice to play the progenitor of Ezra Miller’s cheekbones), the latter with his obsessive scientist dad (played by Joe Morton, in a possible nod to his character from Terminator 2: Judgment Day) — which are themselves echoed in Bruce Wayne’s relationship with his butler/surrogate-father/aide-de-camp Alfred (Jeremy Irons).
With Henry Cavill’s Superman dead, Ben Affleck’s Batman has to convince Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman to quit laying low and help him recruit the metahumans hinted at in earlier DC movies – the aforementioned Flash, Jason Momoa’s King of Atlantis Aquaman and Ray Fisher’s human-in-a-space-robot-body Cyborg – to help battle Steppenwolf and his legion of rejects from “The Walking Dead.”
As it turns out, the arrival of these Parademons has something to do with a generic horned villain named Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), who’s looking for three magical MacGuffins called Mother Boxes, which were entrusted for safekeeping thousands of years ago to Diana’s fellow Amazons on the hidden island of Themyscira, the aquamen and aquawomen of Curry’s sunken Atlantis, and “the tribes of men.” (Snyder’s penchant for shameless quotation mostly goes unexercised in Justice League, but he stages this bit of backstory as a hilariously studious tribute to the opening minutes of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship Of The Ring .)
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While it was mostly die-hard Superman fans that took umbrage with aspects of that film, both audiences and critics alike derided the 2016 double whammy of "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice" and "Suicide Squad."
In a clear response to the critical reaction to the franchise's 2016 entries Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, the doom and gloom feels supplanted in Justice League by a palpable sense of fun and raw adventure.
That's until Dawn of Justice became a paradoxical smash/flop , causing WB to scramble, retooling the in-production men on a mission David Ayer joint, Suicide Squad, so that it better resembled the first Guardians picture - a set of somewhat obscure funny book misfits, banding together to battle a cosmos-threatening force whilst tossing out one-liners and practically bobbing along to the needle drop heavy soundtrack.
Also symptomatic of contemporary event movies, Suicide Squad wastes time connecting its story to the larger DC cinematic universe, referencing events from Batman v Superman and alluding to next year’s Justice League , which will feature Batman, Superman, the Flash and others.
His heart belongs to little daughter Zoe (Shailyn Pierre-Dixon), a sweetie who, during an early fight scene, pleads for the life of a vulnerable Batman (an uncredited Ben Affleck), so he can go make the next stand-alone Caped Crusader adventure after appearing in 2017's "Justice League."
With all these moving parts, and a studio edict that Suicide Squad fit into the storylines of the failed Batman v. Superman and the forthcoming Justice League, it’s no wonder writer/director Ayer often seems adrift, lacking the realism, rigour and pacing he’s brought to his previous dramas, End of Watch and Fury among them.
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