JUSTICE LEAGUE


BY Jaida Walker

Boy, oh boy. Where to begin.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Sydney premiere of DC’s latest film Justice League. Of course if you know anything about the Justice League you’ll know what the film is about, but for those of you who live under the rock; here’s a quick recap.

The film is set after the death of Superman and follows Batman (Ben Affleck) and his quest to round up a group of people with special powers to save the world. The said group of people within the film includes everyone’s favourite, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher).

I’m gonna be straight up and admit that I’m not a big fan of DC. I’m a Marvel gal through and through. And while I loved the recent Wonder Woman film, Justice League was not enough to convince me to swap sides.

It was decent at best. Good, but not great.

The film featured good dialogue, usually from The Flash, for whom Ezra Miller was the perfect pick. And occasionally Batman himself had a few good one liners. But that was pretty much it.

The fight scenes were decent. The character development also decent. And the film overall, yep you guessed it – decent.

There was a particular plot line within the film that did quite annoy me but for the sake of being spoiler free, I won’t go into too much detail. If you’ve seen the film, the plot line I’m talking about is the last person who is added into the league. Someone who was forced into it by a wake up call, if you catch my drift.

Another part of the film that really ground my gears was the severe under development of Cyborg as a character. In a film where two of the main characters (Batman and Wonder Woman) have already been well established within the DC universe, you would think that would give plenty of screen time for The Flash and Cyborg to really settle in. For audiences to get to to know them a bit more, if you will. And while I believe that was executed successfully for The Flash, I cannot say the same for Cyborg. His whole backstory and plot lines seemed severely under represented which was a shame because he has a lot of potential.

All in all, I felt a little bit let down by Justice League. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad film, not at all. But it had so much drive, so much hype, so much potential. And I can’t help but feel that it just went nowhere and resulted in an hour and a half of backstory, with a quick half hour fight scene to end. After seeing the Wonder Woman film I really got excited for DC – I thought that maybe this was DC regaining what it seems to have lost. But alas, maybe that was just wishful thinking.