Is The Snyder Cut More Than Just A 4-Hour Bandage?

I’m creating my own definition for the term “story gap.” I mean such a hard disconnect between one point in a story line and the next adjacent one that the viewer or reader has to build a bridge to connect the two sides of the gap themselves. The theatrical release of Justice League required so much bridge building that everyone who watched it should have been given a writer’s credit. The Snyder Cut builds nearly every bridge that was missing in the original release, which is just one of the many things the 4-hour long movie changes.

Explaining all of those changes would be giving out spoilers, and this is the spoiler-free review, so you won’t find any of those here. I will give my impressions of how those changes worked, and ultimately how much better or not the much-hyped version of Justice League that dropped on HBO Max today turned out.

First, let’s talk about the length. The Snyder Cut makes you feel every minute of its 4-hour run time. But not a minute more. It is surprising that a movie that I have seen roughly 60 percent of already and has been boosted to four hours long doesn’t drag at all. Some of the new bits do overstay their welcome, particularly early on when it seems Zack Snyder is in full self-indulgence mode. But the first time one of those new pieces became a story gap bridge, I was willing to allow the indulgences (which become fewer and less obtrusive as the movie marches on).

Visually the movie looks gorgeous, and not just because Henry Cavill’s face looks human again. Snyder relies on his typical grimdark color palette too much, but I’ll take that over the poisonous red techno-smear of the theatrical release. Speaking of grimdark, I was surprised at how much humor the Snyder Cut retained. That means that much of the funny parts of the theatrical release were in the original script and not Joss Whedon rewrites. It’s telling just what funny bits are not in this movie, which means they were Whedon’s ideas since Snyder has said not a single frame of Whedon’s reshoots were used in this new version.

Songs sung blue
However, without getting into any specifics, one Snyder indulgence I grew tired of fast was his overuse of lyric songs to hammer home emotional points. When that music is diagetic (used by characters in the movies, as in the Guardians of the Galaxy films) it is much easier to accept, but when someone is dolefully singing some new song every 30 minutes or so as part of the score — well, that’s an immersion breaker.

The additional content — that isn’t just restored scenes that make the movie make way more sense than the theatrical release — is mostly quite good and often about character development. Well, once the necessary exposition dumps of new content near the beginning are done. Refer back to how I mentioned some of the new elements overstay their welcome. Most of that happens in the early part of the movie, so be prepared to slog through some admittedly well done exposition. Not all of the story gap bridges are long info dumps, though. A number of times this is handled with the restoration of some missing dialogue, or possibly newly created dialogue.

The closest I will get to spoilers is commenting on the additional new characters. While I won’t mention any by name or talk about their scenes, you already know about the most controversial addition, unless you’ve somehow avoided all trailers and news coverage. That person isn’t the only one, and most of them are handled well, with the exception of a surprisingly clumsy one near the end.

Ultimately, the Snyder Cut of Justice League is worth your 4-hour investment of time, even if (or for most DC fans particularly if) you’ve seen the original release. It makes way more sense and is a more cohesive whole than that earlier version. The performances even seem to be better, which may just be a factor of the actors being tired of Whedon reshooting a big chunk of the film. I do have some problems with some of the changes though, but to explain them would require spoilers, so I am simply going to give it a 4 out 5 and suggest you give it a try.

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