The biggest thing that everyone is talking about from the Justice League set visit recently is how fun the movie looks and how different it is from BvS. While the latter is probably a good thing, it’s worth noting that DC seems to be going a little too much Marvel.
Now, let me make this clear that this is not DC’s fault. Following the release of BvS, Snyder and co. got a tonne of backlash from critics and fans saying that the movie was too dark, for a Superman movie at least, and many have suggested that DC should start taking hints from Marvel. Snyder listened. And while that sentence deserves an entire article for itself, what’s worth noting is that Justice League looks like a total copy-and-paste of Marvel’s the Avengers. It makes sense that DC would want to follow in Marvel’s footsteps, since The Avengers is currently the fifth highest grossing movie ever, while BvS is far behind. When a movie led by Iron-Man, once a B-level comic character, outgrosses BATMAN AND SUPERMAN AND WONDER-WOMAN FIGHTING DOOMSDAY at the box office with better critical reviews and overall fan reception, well, it’s not hard to see what DC was thinking. And Civil War is raking in cash rapidly.
Here’s the official plot synopsis for Justice League:
“Fueled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman’s selfless act, Bruce Wayne enlists the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman work quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against this newly awakened threat. But despite the formation of this unprecedented league of heroes—Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash—it may already be too late to save the planet from an assault of catastrophic proportions.”
We also know that the movie will feature the Justice League hunting down Motherboxes, which are hugely powerful supercomputers that have an array of abilities as well as being able to open Boom Tubes, which can be used for teleportation. They’re the macguffins of the film.
Tell me these don’t remind you of the Tesseract used in Avengers. The Tesseract can also open portals to another dimension, allowing the Big Bad to come and conquer Earth. In fact, both objects are also “coincidently” squares. Yes, Avengers was released after Geoff Johns penned the New 52 Justice League, but as a movie, this just screams RIPOFF!
Oh, and a guy called Steppenwolf(LOKI!) and his army of Parademons(CHITAURI!) are hunting them down. Steppenwolf is a B level villain who’s obviously working for Darkseid(THANOS!)
You might have also noticed that a big part of this movie is focused on Batman recruiting the Justice League. While these scenes do look like a lot of fun, with Batman using a bunch of awesome-sounding vehicles to track the other members down, this, again, just feels awfully like a scene-by-scene copy of Avengers. I mean the similarities are uncanny. Batman seems like the last person who’d go around assembling a team, since his idea of the perfect vacation would probably be in an underground cave with bats for company, yet here he is, almost like he’s filling in Sam L. Jackson’s shoes for a Nick Fury type of character. They’re both experienced badasses with mentor qualities who the other heroes look upto.
The journalists who went to the set visit were shown a clip from the movie, in which Batman recruits Barry Allen for the JL.. Here’s a description of it by Devin Faraci of Birth Movies Death:
(In the clip Barry returns to his apartment, which is like a big warehouse space. There’s grafitti on the walls and a dozen TVs. He turns on a sparking fuse box to bring light to the place and the TVs jump to life. He walks into the main room and sees Bruce Wayne sitting in a chair.
“Barry Allen, I’m Bruce Wayne.”
“You say that like it explains why you’re sitting in my place in the dark in my second favorite chair,” says Barry.
Bruce, dressed impeccably, gets up and approaches the younger man. He holds out a printout of a screenshot of that Flash mpeg from
BvS. He asks if Barry knows who that is.
“That’s someone who looks exactly like me but isn’t me,” Barry says. “He looks like a very attractive Jewish boy. He drinks milk, though, I don’t drink milk.”
Bruce tells Barry he thinks he has special skills.
“Sure,” Barry says. “I can code. I know sign language. Gorilla sign language.”
Bruce looks at the Flash costume that is mounted right in the middle of the room. “And this?”
“I’m into competitive ice dancing,” Barry says.
Bruce notes that the costume includes ceramic plates, the kind they use to keep the space shuttle from burning up on reentry.
“Very competitive ice dancing,” Barry says.
Then Bruce spins around and throws a batarang. Everything goes into slo-mo except for Barry, who quite casually steps out of the way of the oncoming blade. He slowly looks at Bruce, at the batarang, and plucks it out of the air. Everything returns to normal speed.
“You’re the Batman!” Barry says. “Can I keep this?”
“You’re fast,” Bruce replies.
“I think that’s underselling it,” Barry says.
“I’m gathering people with special abilities. There’s a great enemy coming -”
“I’m in!” blurts Barry.
Bruce is taken aback. So quickly?
“I need friends,” Barry says.)
This scene actually looks great. It’s fun. It’s hilarious. The chemistry between both characters looks good. DC has seriously adjusted the tone of its movies. And I can imagine at least one of the characters smiling, which marks a big step in Zack Snyder’s evolution. However, this scene strikes me as an awful lot like the scene in Captain America Civil War where Tony Stark recruits Peter Parker, except that Batman is pretending to be Iron Man and the Flash is cosplaying Peter Parker.
While this movie looks to be a hell of a lot better than both BvS and Man of Steel, and it looks like DC has finally figured out how to do actual, proper fan service, I’m not sure if I really want to see a SnyderMania remake of the Avengers.
When asked about how the tone of DC differs from that of Marvel movies, Ben Affleck said:
“DC movies, by their nature, are a little more mythic than some comic book movies are. But
BvS was very dark and heavy because it was really rooted in
Dark Knight Returns which is a heavy, dark book. And this is not that. This is a step in evolution in that to bring together all of these characters who have had their origins. It’s about multilateralism, and it’s about hope and about working together and the kind of conflicts of trying to work together with others. It’s a world where superheroes exist, so there’s comedy in that necessarily, trying to work with other people and people trying to accomplish goals together is the root of all great comedy in my view. So there’s definitely, hopefully some fun in it. But it’s not unrecognizably these characters or these stories. It’s not turning it upside down.”
What do you guys think? Sound of in the comments below.
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