Saturday, June 23, 2018

5 x 5 movie review: Justice League


1. So, right off the bat (heh) I am going to say that I liked this a lot more than I had expected to. Based on a lot of stuff I had heard, and my general disappointment with the way DC has been handling its movie properties,  I didn't rush out to see this in theaters, but watching it at home on our new fancy-schmancy HD TV, I had a ball. Of course, I would have liked to have seen the Original Seven, but one thing I realize is that the comic book version of a thing and the movie version of a thing are not the same thing, and that's okay. It's not hard, really; just think of it as an Elseworlds. And on that level, this was a fine superhero movie.

2. Even if I am okay with Cyborg in the Justice League (which honestly still feels a little weird given his connections in my mind with the Teen Titans), I was not down with his angular, multi-faceted chrome appearance: it just seemed way too fussy. I had a similar response to Flash's segmented and wired outfit; I got the in-story explanation but it still had an overall clunky effect. On the other hand, I thought "The Aqua-man" look was a great interpretation.

3. I often go on about how this type of movie often gets too big for my tastes, how the stakes and the action are unnecessarily high; I didn't have that problem with this movie for two reasons. The first is that the Justice League, both in the comics and in this movie, was formed specifically to deal with world-threatening events; it is pretty much their brief. The second reason may seem like a technicality, but I think it is important: the League's mission was not to fight off an entire invasion, but to eliminate a device that would have made the success of that invasion a guarantee. The target, the goal, the macguffin if you will, was graspable and manageable.

4. The movie was also appealing to me for how much it captured the feel of the animated series - for example, the use of parademons to give Batman something to fight  while the heavier hitters fight the big bad.

5. Am I the only one who didn't notice Henry Cavill's CGI-ed out mustache?


Closing with this image just because I liked it so much.

1 comment:

  1. The Joss Whedon pre-segment of the kids talking to Superman recorded on their iPhone is where the CGI'd mustache appeared and it was so off, even though Cavill's mouth is odd-looking even without pixels. That people were posting unCGI'd Cavill as examples of the issue just shows how shallow and incompetent the vast majority of online work s.

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