Thanks, I Hate it: Justice League

You remember when God of War III had just come out on the PS3 and it opened with that super long cinematic where Kratos and the Titans attack Olympus? Imagine if that were an entire movie. Imagine it just kept going and going and happening to you, its greasy two-thirds-real cutscene graphics getting more and more alienating and impossible to connect to. Zack Snyder's Justice League is that, but without any good voice acting. It relies heavily on some of the worst CGI ever to grace a screen, untextured and stiff without even the illusion of tangibility. Its sets are equally ugly, from a rendition of Aquaman's underwater home like something out of a preset Windows 95 screen-saver menu to the lifeless brown smear of the climax's nebulous setting.

The film's dialogue, "punched up" by Avengers scribe Joss Whedon, is pure cud. Characters quip and declaim, action figure villain Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) demands access to "Mother Boxes", and the action is no better. There is no coherence to the film's presentation of physical space, no story in the camera's rushed cuts and jumping, jittering lack of focus. So much of the film's violence is pro forma only, neither advacing the plot nor informing its characters. It's Whedon's incoherent Avengers punchfests without even the bland visual slickness of Marvel's house style, and rather than delving into gonzo ugliness and boyish nightmare imagery as he did in Batman v Superman Snyder here pushes into something more akin to Gary's Mod.

It's hard to overstate the sheer ugliness of Justice League, perhaps the most visually uninteresting comic book movie of all time. It looks like Minecraft with the edges sanded off, like a SimCity 2000 map with real actors photoshopped in, like a 1980s Eastern Bloc home movie run through two different Instagram filters. There is the polished, intentional mediocrity of the Marvel films and then there is this. That the level of incompetence displayed in the film's camerawork, visual design, and post-production extends to virtually every other element of the thing should be all rights at least make it an entertaining train derailment, but Justice League's three-hour run time and sloppily redundant pacing (why does Superman fight the other Avengers after his resurrection? Why do so many of the characters have odd little subplots with their fathers but hardly any screen time spent talking to one another?) suck it dry of any true catastrophic pleasure. 

Justice League is a movie which exists solely because some suit said it ought to so that DC and Warner Brothers could compete with Marvel and Disney. It has no vision and no artistry, no reason for being other than to line pockets and build brand recognition. That it ended up a massive failure, one sufficiently financially punishing to its investors to delay another bloated, tedious wreck for at least a couple years, is one of the few small cinematic acts of justice to have come out of the 2010s. Its existence is an insult to every filmmaker, actor, tech, writer, and gofer ever to participate in the making of a movie.