After literal years of delays, conflict, tragedy, fan campaigning, editing, reshoots and everything in between, Zack Snyder’s true vision of Justice League will be available this Thursday on HBO Max. The recutting and re-release of a film like this is pretty much unprecedented, and now that reviews are out for the Snyder Cut—or as it’s officially called, Zack Snyder’s Justice League—we’re getting a sense of whether all the drama was worth it.
The answer seems to be … maybe. As of now, the film has about 90 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and it’s scoring 75% “fresh, which is certainly better at this point than the 40% rating the 2017 Joss Whedon-helmed cut of the movie ended up with (though that was counting over 400 reviews).
The reviews are strongly mixed. Alex Zalben at Decider calls the hotly anticipated film “just fine,” noting, “some of the never-before seen scenes are pretty excellent. Some are cringe-worthy and atrocious.” Chris Evangelista over on /Film is in the same boat, declaring it “a four-hour film that will thrill some and utterly exhaust others. Is it worth all the hype? That’s debatable, but it can’t be denied that whatever Zack Snyder’s Justice League is, it’s wholly Zack Snyder’s vision.”
Writing for Geeks of Color, Britany Murphy echoes another sentiment that runs through many reviews: that this version is certainly better and more cohesive than the Whedon cut. “Not only would this have been preferred by fans, but I also think it is something that would have been less maligned by critics,” Murphy writes. “Ultimately, what this version proves is that a cohesive narrative with integral story beats and character development was cut or reshot to make a film that was entirely removed from what was intended.” IGN compares the new version favorably to the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings.
Mashable’s Angie Han agrees that this is an upgrade, writing, “Snyder’s belated tinkering results in a movie that represents, on just about every level, a vast improvement over the previous edit. It still won’t be for everyone. ZSJL steers away from the sunnier, cutesier, ostensibly more relatable tone that the theatrical version had tried to infuse, and instead recommits to the more downbeat mood established by Snyder in his earlier DC efforts.”
Critics are pretty much in consensus that all the characters get better arcs and are more clearly defined in this version of Justice League, and across many reviews, the character who is being hailed as benefiting the most from the Snyder Cut treatment is Ray Fisher’s Cyborg. In a lukewarm review for Polygon, Joshua Rivera notes that Cyborg “has the closest thing to an emotional throughline in the film. Sometimes, it even seems like he’s the protagonist.”
In a far more positive review for Insider, Kirsten Acuna also notes how well the characters, particularly Cyborg, are better served by this version: “It’s clear Snyder understands these characters and their motivations in a way that Whedon and even Warner Bros. did not. The film reinstates diverse heroes erased from the original film. Ray Fisher’s Cyborg now has a fully-fleshed-out backstory, which explains he’s just as powerful as the gods he fights alongside.”
Our own Lyra Hale, writing over on Fangirlish, also says fans were right to fight for this version of the story, and that Cyborg benefits the most, noting fans “were right to trust their gut that there was more to the story of Justice League as a whole, more to Victor Stone’s story, more to the story of a Steppenwolf that actually looks sleek and terrifying, while still somehow being compelling.”
Other reviews are not as positive, with the AV Club’s A.A. Dowd lamenting the “loss of the genuine humanity Whedon brought to this world—a personality and vulnerability that just doesn’t square with Snyder’s conception of these characters as fundamentally godlike beacons of strength and power.”
Maya Phillips for the New York Times also bemoans the film’s dour Snyder-ness and overall hopelessness, writing, “The film seems to want more of everything except the quality that it most needs, and the quality that it seems to only comprehend in the abstract.”
Will fans be satisfied with Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Well, it certainly sounds like it’s as fully a Zack Snyder film as possible, and that kind of clear viewpoint is never everyone’s cup of tea. The people that really wanted to see this man’s version of this story will get what they wanted, and it sounds like it’s an improvement on the Whedon cut, though that’s certainly a case of damning with faint praise.
Even so, I’m interested to see this version and for almost academic reasons, and I’m glad, especially after everything we’ve heard about Whedon’s time on the film, that Snyder is at least getting a film out into the world that truly does his vision … justice.
(Image: Warner Brother/HBO Max)
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