You can be forgiven for the assumption – given that it is four hours long, functions tons extremely expensive footage just to make it a workable movie, and like specificy designed to say goodbye to DC Films’ broader superhero franchise ambitions – it Zack Snyder’s Justice League can be the director’s last word on this particular set of deeply saturated characters. But you will also be forgiven if you accept that the above thought was completely and utterly naive idiocy, because, hey: Have you met all this man from Zack Snyder? If you think he’s is going to stop printing his very specific, very violent, very gray version of the instant superherodom until he’s done with it, you lost your mother goat strength.
Hence a whole bunch of revelations from IGNFan Fest 2021 event today, including the news that Zack Snyder’s Justice League, despite undoubtedly being just as definitively a statement about the Justice League as any man possible hope to make will still end up on what Snyder called a A massive wreath hanger. ‘ This, despite the fact that Snyder know that DC has moved away from its efforts to Avengers his personal out superhero movie franchise, and that a Snyder verse Justice League 2 is almost never going to happen. But hey: someone paid for all this Darkseid CGI so they can use it just as well, right?
Speaking of CGI: Snyder also showed a “Motherbox” animated track that serves as a promo for the film, in what may be best called the spiritual sense. In other words that it contains slow, melodramatic pans over heavy metal images of Justice League members, while a Tom Waits song slides into dust in the background. It is, like so much of the material around Zack Snyder’s Justice League–Jesus jokes, the special “Justice Is Gray” version on the way for people who are overwhelmed by the unsaturated version of the new track, the pure Leonard Cohen-ness of it all-brilliant, in his total immunity to parody. How do you mock Aquaman’s anxious religious iconography that fights tentacle monsters? while playing sad folk rock? What aspect can you raise for comic effects? This is the critical equivalent of the rope-and-shell, which exhausts all ridicule with the blatant invitation to mock.
In fact ‘exhaustive’ (with a sequence of ‘exhaustive’) is the overall atmosphere of this whole project, and this latest press release on his behalf, from the speculation about who that big ‘hero-came’ Snyder was promising at the end of the film (Martian Manhunter is the easy moneyAlthough people with very short memories rather hope for the Green Lantern Corps), to the director’s repeated statement today (double on earlier sentiments) that Ray Fisher’s Cyborg is the core of the film, and the team. The latter comes even as Fisher and Warner Media were involved train another round of mutual attacks on each other today, with Fisher continuing to allege that Walter Hamada, DC Films, interferes with investigations into alleged misconduct on the set of Joss Whedon’s version of the movie, and Warner’s shooting back by touting a statement from one of the investigators involved, to defend the character and behavior of Hamada. Snyder’s defense of his star is admirable, but it also shows what a strange uniqueness this entire Snyder Cut project was, with a director actively engaged in the work of an actor who is now in an open war with the studio producing the film, for unclear and uncertain benefit or profit.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League releases on March 18th. Get up.
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