WHY THE SNYDER CUT IS A LOVELETTER TO COMICBOOK FANS

Zack Snyder's Justice League is a love letter for a DC fan and cinephiles too. It honors these characters who we have loved for generations from the comics to animated shows and video games. It respects and enriches them with good storytelling. This movie has a long and troubled production history and we had the atrocious Frankenstein version of Justice League (2017) before this cut. This movie is the quintessential DC movie for me. It takes these characters and gives them compelling journeys in this movie and from previous movies with struggles and sacrifices and in the end it has a great payoff that rewards this audience who have followed this journey.

This movie has a long runtime and it uses it adeptly to its own advantage and builds these characters and it gives a mythological epic feel to it which is exactly what I craved for a live-action Justice League movie. It takes the plot threads from the previous movies and wraps them into a satisfying conclusion especially for Ben Affleck's Batman, Henry Cavill's Superman, and Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman. This movie is a great origin story for Jason Momoa's Aquaman, Ray Fisher's Cyborg, and Ezra Miller's Flash. Ray Fisher's Cyborg is the standout for this movie according to me. Zack Snyder and Chris Terrio's writing and Ray Fisher's performance make Cyborg the most likable and humane in this version of Justice League.

The story flows much better in this version and it is a well laid out plot for setting up the protagonist's motives and also our antagonist's (Steppenwolf) motivations. The first half feels like a slow burn for introducing the new characters and setting up their character's journeys for the rest of the movie. The second half is payoff and payoff and payoff and it feels satisfying as an audience following their journeys full of life and tribulations and it feels like a comic book crossover issue with six chapters. Ben Affleck's Batman is great and he is my fav Batman of all time and his redemption arc is completed in a satisfying manner in this movie.

The CGI done by Scanline VFX is incredible considering it was being done during the pandemic which was a difficult time for the film fraternity. The cinematography by Fabian Wagner is colorful and stylistic compared to Larry Fong's jumpy and bleakish texture of cinematography. It fleshes out this universe incredibly well and is huge in scope and scale. The score by Junkie XL is metal as hell. It has some quiet moments when it is needed to and has some metal and badass themes when the Justice League fight Steppenwolf and his minions.

Overall I believe it is a 4 hour Zack Snyder film with a movie about Gods and Demons with mythological themes, but also has scenes with badass metal music for our favorite characters. It is an epic and it was his vision for which fans have been clamoring for four years and it is a grand restoration of an artistic vision that was crushed by studio business for a studio-mandated product four years earlier.