Back in 2017, DC’s highly anticipated blockbuster, “Justice League” was released in theaters. Although DC hasn’t had the greatest reputation with its previous films, fans hoped that “Justice League” would deliver. It failed miserably. 

Fans, including myself were extremely disappointed with the release of “Justice League,” especially after all the hype it received. Later on, fans learned that the theatrically released, two hour version of this movie was not the original. The original version was a four hour film directed by Zack Snyder. Warner Brothers ditched Zack Snyder for Joss Whedon halfway through production, which completely messed up the 2017 version of “Justice League.” Luckily, the original version of the movie was all filmed before Warner Brothers had switched directors, hence the reason why we can see it today.

In “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” Bruce Wayne, also known as Batman, sets out to create a team of superheroes to defeat supervillain Steppenwolf. Steppenwolf attempts to conquer Earth, which seems like an easy task for him as he has conquered many other worlds, but Batman and his team won’t stop at anything to save the lives of the people of Earth. This movie features some of my favorite superheroes, including Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman.

It baffles me how any Warner Brothers producer, a professional, can possibly believe that the theatrically released version of this movie is even slightly better than Zack Snyder’s version. When I say that everything about this version is better than the theatrically released one, I mean everything. 

From the character development, to the dialogue and action, this film exceeded the theatrically released version in every way possible. I felt myself emotionally connected to characters like Cyborg and the Flash, who were practically throw away characters in the previous version. I sympathized with Cyborg as he dealt with the loss of his mother and brother throughout the movie. The Flash made me laugh while also being an important part of the movie, something lots of superhero movies fail to accomplish with certain characters. 

The acting from Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot and others contributed to the film positively and brought these superheroes to life successfully. Everyone playing a hero in the Justice League made me believe that they cared about their mission. The dialogue wasn’t forced or generic, which in my opinion can make or break a movie.

The only negative aspect of this film was that occasionally there were some unnecessary shots that felt like the director was trying a bit too hard to impress people and be “artsy.” This didn’t affect the film as a whole, but it did pop up every now and then to disrupt the feeling of the movie.

Overall, I was immensely impressed with the film. My eyes were glued to the screen the whole time, trying to figure out what would happen next. I was expecting this film to be boring and unwatchable because of the run time, but I watched the whole thing without getting bored once. I hope that future DC projects can live up to this one so they can crush their bad reputation of their previous films. 

“Zack Snyder’s Justice League”: ★★★★★