A Completely Biased Justice League Rambling Discussion
Normally I do blow by blow spoiler filled deconstructions of films for the purpose of solving them… for the purpose of making sense of them. Right? For example my Primer or my The One I Love reviews… I like to hope that people come away enlightened or ready to discuss after having read one of my reviews. But with this movie, hrmmm. I am just going to give a thoroughly biased review. And yeah, I’ll keep it fairly spoiler free, just because I’m in Haiti, and feeling fairly magnanimous presently. Actually, truth be told, I’ll keep it spoiler free because I really don’t know anything.
I am an enormous Bat fan. Think boxes of books that are still in my garage. Think, wife who would really like to have that storage space… and yet, nope. But since Christopher Nolan shot the Bat out of a freaking cannon, and launched the Dark Knight trilogy so high into space that no other super hero movie will ever touch it, I just haven’t been a fan of where DC has been going with their movies. Sure, Wonder Woman was nice. It was a pleasant movie. But a 2 compared with any of the Dark Knight movies. Just saying. So I went into Justice League with zero expectations.
But I HAVE to just stop everything and call Justice League out on something. And no, I don’t want to talk about Henry Cavill’s chin. There are plenty of hilarious meme shops that will do better with that than I ever could. I will say though that it is amazing how amazing our CGI is getting, and the fact that we can’t figure out how to cleft a bearded man? Just unbelievable to me. So no, not chin-gate, but rather that first song. THAT FIRST SONG! Don’t remember it? First, leave. Second… listen to this:
And for good measure? Listen to this:
Jog your memory? Gotta say that Sigrid (My current fav song of hers is Strangers if you are looking for more sweet tunes by her) was a enlightened choice to ask to cover the Leonard Cohen song. 1988 it was originally released on his album
- I’m Your Man
. But most importantly? Pump Up the Volume. Possibly one of the greatest movies of all time. And yes, we are not discussing this. But amidst the chin-gate, and the darkness, Justice League throws Everybody Knows in to commemorate the city’s mourning for the now dead demi-god Superman? What? I want to just rip this movie from limb to limb… and you pull a move like that? No, see, you have my attention now. And I had already heard Sia’s Cellophane, which was gorgeous, as all her songs are… but also haunted.
So the movie kicks off to an amazing start, the soundtrack is firing on all cylinders as the world mourns a dead Superman (never was a huge fan of Superman myself.) But then we get Companion Cubes? Companion Cubes from the game Portal? Like, literally in every way a companion cube. But these cubes are not for dropping on buttons, but rather for teleporting Steppenwolf into the movie? I am immediately not a fan of these particular boxes. And just like that, the movie, which had so much hope, denigrated into a Transformer movie. You know, MacGuffined into an inscrutably dense pastiche of excuses and hyperbole that allows writers to be lazy? That kind of a movie.
I’m mid-review on a zombie movie called Pontypool. It has like 5 actors in the entire movie. And yet? It is well written and makes sense. There isn’t a single MacGuffin in the entire movie. Primer? A time machine made out of pvc and some stereo wire… infinitely better than this Companion Cube excuse for a movie. I get it. Lots and lots of you love the MacGuffin-ness of superhero movies. I am not one of those fans. Which is one of the big reasons why Nolan’s Batman movies were so good. All of the “super heroes” could have been real. Better yet, all of the plot points, in each of the three movies could have been real. But this? Nope. MacGuffins galore and super heroes with even faster abilities than in their last movie.
So yeah, I walked out. I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t protesting. I wasn’t all holier than though as I walked. I just decided that if I was going to spend 2 hours in a theater, Pump up the Volume would be a better way to spend my time than some inscrutable, and totally indefensible melange. And when Pump started up I noticed the kid on the bus that commits suicide later, and my heart was immediately broken. A few minutes later Christian Slater is beseeching the airwaves encouraging his schoolmates to survive, to struggle, and I remembered… it was a fight that I could identify with. As opposed to a struggle for astral-macguffin-boxes and yet another coming technical apocalyptic armageddon.
Sure, I wanted to know how Superman comes back. Was it better than how they did it in the comics (because if you want to talk about inscrutable… holy cow)? Or did they follow that patter? And yet, I wasn’t going to wade through a bunch mindless drivvle in order to get there. So yeah, if you’ve seen the movie, and want to email me how he comes back, I’d consider it a favor. But no thanks. I’m not doing more mindlessness when it is so much easier for me to go find movies that think (Like Pump Up The Volume) as oppose to movies that don’t.
Don’t worry. If you disagree – and you loved Justice League, I get it. I would love to see DC one up Marvel for once. But really both are racing each other to the bottom of the pile at this point. Chronicle anyone? Primer? But for me, tonight? I’m sticking with a radio DJ that is encouraging kids to rise up and to speak truth to power. That is a super hero that I can understand.