$300 million was spent on this. All the good $300 million could have done, and Warner Bros. threw it at Joss Whedon, who took over after fellow hack Zack Snyder dropped out after the loss of his daughter (he is credited as the director as he helmed the principal photography). Warners turning to Whedon to complete a film featuring Wonder Woman after he was blasted on social media when his rejected Wonder Woman script was leaked unto an undeserving world was an irony lost on them, I'm sure.
The beef I have with superhero movies (aside from idiot studio execs throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at hacks) is NONE of them are faithful to the original origin story: the Kents adopted baby Kal-El from an orphanage; Diana competed against the other Amazons to become Wonder Woman; Bruce Wayne saw a bat come through his window as he was brooding in his study. Here, Snyder and Whedon "outdo" themselves by trashing not one but two superheroes: Aquaman is now a tatted-up boozer who can't communicate with fish, and The Flash is now a whiny Soy Boy who exclaims "Oh, snap!" And like the rotten cherry on top, the Villain has an Oedipus Complex!
Then, there are the plot holes. Yeah, a superhero movie just isn't a superhero movie without tons of plot holes. But Whedon and co-hack Chris Terrio (who won an Oscar; how in God's Name did THAT happen?!) seem to take a perverted delight in trying to out dumb-and-dumber Snyder: God-awful CGI; slow-motion sequences which will make you beg to be waterboarded; ripping off nearly every Si-Fi film from the past 20 years ("The Matrix", "Lord of the Rings", "Thor"). Barry and Victor exhume Clark's grave in the dead of night? Superman has memory loss after being brought back to life? The henchmen of The Villain With The Oedipus Complex tear through Russia, but can't tear the salt box a family lives in to shreds? Did The Villain With The Oedipus Complex set up shop at a defunct nuclear reactor in Russia so that the little girl who lived in the salt box could play with a flower on a radioactive LSD trip? Makes as much "sense" as anything else in this tripe!
But the real crime against humanity is Dumb and Dumber wasting the charged chemistry Ben Affleck and Gal Godot unleashed in "Batman v Superman". I was anticipating Batman and Wonder Woman hooking up (or realizing they are soulmates, at the very least), but in "Justice League", they act as though they hardly know each other -- and don't want to!
Seeing how Whedon has made a second "career" out of his seething hatred of Trump, I'm surprised he didn't manage to shoehorn some jabs at Agent Orange. Perhaps he did, but his overlords decided that was a Bridge To Nowhere Too Far (Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central opines Snyder's "Man of Steel" and "Batman v Superman" predicted the Trump presidency, but he gives Snyder way-too much credit for brains AND talent!).
At any rate, I don't blame Whedon (or Snyder) for this as much as I blame Affleck, who has managed to do the impossible: make George Clooney the second-worst Batman ever! One of the producers, Affleck hired Terrio to write "Argo", for which Terrio won an Oscar (how in God's Name did THAT happen?!); no doubt, he convinced Warners to tap Terrio to pen "Man of Steel" and "Batman v Superman". After the $75 million Warners had to eat when Affleck's opus "Live by Night" arrived in D.O.A., why the former Mr. Jennifer Garner hasn't been tarred, feathered, and run out on a rail is beyond me!
As Shakespeare would have put it, this "is a tale, told by an idiot (in this case, three idiots), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
That whirring sound you hear are the Warner Brothers spinning in their graves!
The beef I have with superhero movies (aside from idiot studio execs throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at hacks) is NONE of them are faithful to the original origin story: the Kents adopted baby Kal-El from an orphanage; Diana competed against the other Amazons to become Wonder Woman; Bruce Wayne saw a bat come through his window as he was brooding in his study. Here, Snyder and Whedon "outdo" themselves by trashing not one but two superheroes: Aquaman is now a tatted-up boozer who can't communicate with fish, and The Flash is now a whiny Soy Boy who exclaims "Oh, snap!" And like the rotten cherry on top, the Villain has an Oedipus Complex!
Then, there are the plot holes. Yeah, a superhero movie just isn't a superhero movie without tons of plot holes. But Whedon and co-hack Chris Terrio (who won an Oscar; how in God's Name did THAT happen?!) seem to take a perverted delight in trying to out dumb-and-dumber Snyder: God-awful CGI; slow-motion sequences which will make you beg to be waterboarded; ripping off nearly every Si-Fi film from the past 20 years ("The Matrix", "Lord of the Rings", "Thor"). Barry and Victor exhume Clark's grave in the dead of night? Superman has memory loss after being brought back to life? The henchmen of The Villain With The Oedipus Complex tear through Russia, but can't tear the salt box a family lives in to shreds? Did The Villain With The Oedipus Complex set up shop at a defunct nuclear reactor in Russia so that the little girl who lived in the salt box could play with a flower on a radioactive LSD trip? Makes as much "sense" as anything else in this tripe!
But the real crime against humanity is Dumb and Dumber wasting the charged chemistry Ben Affleck and Gal Godot unleashed in "Batman v Superman". I was anticipating Batman and Wonder Woman hooking up (or realizing they are soulmates, at the very least), but in "Justice League", they act as though they hardly know each other -- and don't want to!
Seeing how Whedon has made a second "career" out of his seething hatred of Trump, I'm surprised he didn't manage to shoehorn some jabs at Agent Orange. Perhaps he did, but his overlords decided that was a Bridge To Nowhere Too Far (Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central opines Snyder's "Man of Steel" and "Batman v Superman" predicted the Trump presidency, but he gives Snyder way-too much credit for brains AND talent!).
At any rate, I don't blame Whedon (or Snyder) for this as much as I blame Affleck, who has managed to do the impossible: make George Clooney the second-worst Batman ever! One of the producers, Affleck hired Terrio to write "Argo", for which Terrio won an Oscar (how in God's Name did THAT happen?!); no doubt, he convinced Warners to tap Terrio to pen "Man of Steel" and "Batman v Superman". After the $75 million Warners had to eat when Affleck's opus "Live by Night" arrived in D.O.A., why the former Mr. Jennifer Garner hasn't been tarred, feathered, and run out on a rail is beyond me!
As Shakespeare would have put it, this "is a tale, told by an idiot (in this case, three idiots), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
That whirring sound you hear are the Warner Brothers spinning in their graves!