A much better movie than the theatrical cut, but still not a great movie.
This was still a four-hour long movie and I felt every. single. minute. of it. It felt like a 4 hour long movie. Since this version was already broken up into five chapters, that was the perfect opportunity to make it into a five part series spread out into weekly episodes, like Marvel is doing. I think that would have been a better approach since it would give us all time to break down the differences between the two versions.
As it is, I seriously doubt that I'd be able to ever just watch this whole thing again in one sitting like I did last night. It was just so long.
And this was very much a Snyder movie. I think at least 30 minutes of slow-motion and long, lingering scenes could have easily been trimmed out of the first 2 or 3 hours.
They were able to change one of the worst villains in a comic book movie into a pretty decent one. One nitpick about the new bad guys were that Steppenwolf, Desaad and Darkseid all sounded pretty much the same. There was very little distinction between the voice actors.
Of all the things that Whedon put into his version that was removed for this one, there was one sequence I actually liked and missed in this one: during their first outing as a team, Flash is scared sh*tless about facing off with the parademons ("I usually just push people and run away"). So, Batman tells his to "save just one person." This gives Flash the confidence to be a bigger hero. I thought that was a cool thing.
I thought the scenes between Desaad and Steppenwolf were good and Darkseid was impressive to see onscreen for the first time. However, they have now set up a sequel that we will never get, because Darkseid was quite clearly on his way to Earth with his armada. Like....they were preparing to board their ships and hit the road. If they had the capability to use their 'boomtubes" to transport their ships, they could be here within days.
The entire epilogue needed to be scrapped, IMO. Even the Martian Manhunter bit. That was just a weird way to end the movie. In the Knightmare scene.....that whole thing was weird. It was weird seeing Deathstroke in the original post-credit scene with Luthor and then seeing him moments later aligned with Batman. It just felt....jarring. And Jared Leto's Joker was just bad. "You sent a Boy Wonder after me and I killed him!" "Yeah, well Harley Quinn died in my arms!" Just a weird exchange. And, they had a five minute conversation out in the open when everyone else had to be thinking "maybe we could do this later after we get off this highway overpass before Superman sees......oh, wait. He found us and now we're dead. Thanks, a-holes."
All in all, I'd give this a solid B+. A very big improvement. This whole experiment could have been a complete disaster, but I think it actually produced a good movie that makes me question what WB hated so much that they scrapped it and had it re-shot.
