I ranked all of Zack Snyder's Films Here

JUSTICE LEAGUE came in 5th.

Throughout his entire feature directing career, Zack Snyder has never really had to compromise. Of course, there are surely countless incidents where he acquiesced to one small thing or another behind the scenes, none of which his viewing public would ever be able to discern for themselves, but — on a macro level — he’s always gotten his way. Alas, making the Superman movie he wanted to put him in a bit of a hole, and making the Batman versus Superman movie he wanted to made that hole considerably deeper. By the time “Justice League” rolled around, the DC Extended Universe was in peril of collapse, and…

So, is it good? Please say it's good.
It's... okay.

Okay?
Yeah, not great, but not Suicide Squad-levels of bad either. It's safe. Decent. Generally watchable. Mostly enjoyable.

Unavoidable question: How does Justice League stack up against Marvel's 2012 big-screen team-up, The Avengers?
Justice League is like a messier, uglier Avengers: essentially the same plot with the same beats (Bruce = Stark/Fury, Superman = Hawkeye, Steppenwolf = Loki, Mother Boxes = Tesseract, Parademons = Chitauri, etc.) and the same humor, but with a weaker, paper-thin villain and—for (yet another) save-the-world-from-apocalypse superhero movie—strangely lacking of any urgent sense of impending doom whatsoever. Basically what I'm saying is, while they don’t quite nail most things, they at least get the titular characters…

holy shit they actually tried to frankenstein monster Batman v Superman into a beat-for-beat remake of The Avengers in plotting, tone and structure. a few scattered snyderisms to be found, that "keep it moving!" sequence is tight and the evil supes bit has a pulse + is the only scene where henry cavill's upper lip looks like it belongs to a human so it's safe to assume that was his, but they are all drowned in a sea of writerly quips and unnatural smiles (that one where superman delivers a cheesy one-liner at the villain and then cut to a close-up of batfleck grinning like a doofus behind the cowl is legit terrifying) that get further lost in translation by…

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Some thoughts on this strange, melodic team-up flick of competency:

- At the end of the day, Snyder stuff = good, Whedon stuff = bad, but the ultimate blockade from allowing this to truly flourish is WB's ultimate control over artists, whether they were first tasked with the project or brought on to 'save it'.

- For instance, Justice League isn't a clear-cut example of artists versus corporate entities, because the former have already lost. Marvel is about compromise within a system; DC is fascinating because there is none of the sort.

- As a result, blood is all over this thing, and it's entertaining enough, mostly imbedded with lean purpose and stunning green-screen computer paintings, but the seams…

What's worse than the tone-confused filmic style of a Zack Snyder movie? One that has been switched around to also be a Joss Whedon one. The movie is bright, it has humor, and the characters actually smile - like a number of times. But it's just weird... Verging on creepy, because we still have the Snyder-like ass-shots of Wonder Woman (like a lot of them) and muscley-dude ab shots (actually not enough!) but now people are also quippy. 

The biggest sin of this film is obviously the CG face they've glued onto Henry Cavill. The second are the even deeper cuts of trying to rewrite the dark, misanthropic - and yet human-exceptionalistic - attitudes that have permeated the last two…