500 Word Reaction – Justice League

I’m not a DC fan, but I’m not not a DC fan, if you see what I mean. I’ve watched both Superman and Batman films before, though not recently – they had begun to be a little too po-faced for me. But I enjoyed Wonder Woman a lot, so I thought I’d go and see if Justice League was my cup of tea. (We have a new cinema recently built near my house, so now I don’t have to plan a day trip around a visit.)

What to say? I enjoyed Justice League perhaps more than I enjoyed Thor: Ragnarok. The story was very thin, and the villain was sooooooooo predictable and overdone. Blah blah, generic ugly semi-supernatural bad guy with the frankly ridiculous name of Steppenwolf.

Every time someone said Steppenwolf, I thought of this:

Blah blah, generic horned evil dude with his legion of undead minions wants to take over the world. Almost 100% of the time spent on the bad guy was wasted time. We have seen this exact same thing in every film for the past ten years, and I could predict his every line of dialog from start to finish. Blergh.

Surprisingly, though, what this succeeded in doing was to make me interested in the heroes. Me, a confirmed villain fan, rooting for the good guys!  See, all you have to do is to give your heroes more personality than the villain and even I will come around to the cause.

I think that was this film’s great strength in contrast to Thor: Ragnarok. It actually took the time to build the relationships between the team, and between each hero and the people who were important to them. Or at least, it did this for Cyborg and The Flash, who were – probably not coincidentally – my favourites. I didn’t honestly care about them saving the world, Batman and Aquaman were too po-faced for me to feel particulaly engaged with, but these two young men just coming into their powers were the heart of the film for me and I will admit to welling up at their scenes with their dads.

There was a great subplot where the audience was invited to regard a Russian family as their civilian Everymen.

I also welled up at some of the bits with Superman, though that was balanced out by the fact that he seemed a bit ridiculously overpowered. Isn’t Wonder Woman a goddess? I feel like she should have beaten him, or at least fought him to a standstill.

(I had to laugh at yet another appearance of the random fanservice of “lets make all our heroes fight!” “Who would win in a fight?” is the fanboy equivalent of “Who do you ship?” It made no sense, and they had to strong-arm the plot to get it, but by God they wanted it and so it was there.)

tl/dr: A solid movie with good heroes and a bad baddy. Now let’s please give Cyborg and the Flash their own film!