Justice League

***First thing I have to get out of the way before I start really talking about the movie... (I assume it's not a spoiler since it's in the trailers). Henry Cavill (Superman) appears in some flashbacks in the movie and it's extremely noticeable that the mustache he has in real life is being digitally removed in the movie. It's very distracting and weird and once you notice it, you can't look away. It really annoyed me to see this happening and kinda took me out of the movie a little, so that's why I had to mention it. Not sure why Cavill's other film he was working on didn't let him shave it off so he could be more professional and save the studio a lot of money, but anyway!***

Back in 2013, Warner Bros. started a new series of DC comic films that would be connected to each other and bring together our favorite characters. Man of Steel was the first of these movies and it wasn't a great start. It really divided people, as many loved and defended it and many others disliked it. From that point on the DC movies would continue to divide movie goers and spark lots of debate about the films being good or not. Critics always bashed the films, as they got low scores on many websites including the popular Rotten Tomatoes. Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad both were financially successful, but critical failures. Personally I found both movies to be huge messes, with lots of wasted potential from great actors and their characters (Except Jared Leto's Joker, which was the worse Joker of all time). 

Everything changed in 2017, when the first female lead comic book film Wonder Woman was released. It was everything that DC needed, especially with Justice League only a few months away. It was the first movie in this new DC series that was loved both by fans and critics. It ended up being the biggest movie of the summer, even past the also great Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 and Spider-Man. Now Justice League has the job to keep that momentum going and keep audiences and critics both entertained. Now that it's out, did it do the job? Yes and no...

Right from the start, the critics gave it bad scores with only 37% on Rotten Tomatoes and audiences didn't go turn up as much as Warner Bros. hoped they would. Is Justice League really that bad? No it really wasn't that bad, so it's confusing to see these numbers and low sales on it's first weekend. Justice League was by no means a great movie, but it was enjoyable throughout it's whole run-time.

What makes Justice League a good movie are the characters that we get to spend time with throughout the movie. Every character is played well by the actors and are given good dialog with each other, that were funny and charming. Some characters are given more time than others, but it works for the most part. To me, the only character that I think needed some more time was Aquaman. Aquaman was great in the parts that he was in, but I don't think the movie did a great job showing us who he really was, besides just a badass mer-man. Cyborg had some problems too, mostly that I don't really understand his powers all that well from what they showed. It seemed like his powers just helped in whatever was convenient at the time, so I didn't really fully get what limitations he had.

Everything else in the movie was just fine, the cinematography was better than Batman V Superman, and things felt a lot less dark and dull in this movie. Every location felt like it needed to feel and look like it needed to look. Of course the ending is much like any of these comic book movies, with the hundreds of generic enemies fighting our heroes and lots of CG. The CG was good though, with the exception of a couple things, mainly Superman's mustache and Cyborg's overly CG body. The action was fun to watch though, and all the characters got their time to shine.

The story wasn't anything special either and the villain was about as good as your average Marvel movie villain. Evil guy with short flashback backstory wants to destroy earth because he is evil for some reason. He controls an army of monsters that are about as threatening to our heroes as a paper-cut. The villain doesn't matter and serves just to bring everyone together.

I didn't go into this movie expecting to be blown away and left in awe. This movie didn't need to do that to be successful, (though it would have been nice) it just needed to establish the new characters and continue to build the characters we already know. At the end of this movie, I really loved every member of the Justice League (except Superman's CGI Mustache, which could have a movie of it's own at this point) and I can't wait to see more of each character in their own movies. Thanks to Wonder Woman earlier this year and now Justice League, the DC movies look like they are going to be going to great places and we should be excited as fans of the DC characters.

Overall Grade: C+