Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an empty room

The third Ant-Man is a deeply mediocre movie, a mechanism with almost no moving parts designed to deliver as little story as possible in two hours and four minutes. The overall effect is like taking a shower that never quite reaches the desired temperature: the shower does its job, but in a purely utilitarian fashion. By the end of it all you can definitely say that you got clean, but you certainly didn’t enjoy it. Much. Well, maybe a little.

The premise, such as it is: Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), aka. Ant-Man, is basking in his post-blip Avengers career. People recognize him on the street, he has a book out, and he’s more or less coasting on his reputation. Meanwhile, his daughter Cassie (now played by Kathryn Newton) is a young genius - does the MCU produce any other kind of child? - getting thrown into jail for attending protests. She’s taken the lessons of heroism seriously and wants to help the world. This is a source of conflict (sort of) between her and her father, who seems to have shrugged his microscopic shoulders at real-world injustice. All he wants now, after saving the universe, is to protect Cassie. Remember that character beat, because it’s going to come up a lot.

Meanwhile, the Pym-Van Dyne family - Hank (Michael Douglas), Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Hope (Evangeline Lilly, who may or may not have speaking lines in this film*) are all present. They all have something resembling character arcs, but the water never heats up on these three. They’re here to move the plot from one room to another, occasionally stopping to explain their motivations. The most interesting of the three is Janet, who’s withholding information about the three decades she spent in the Quantum Realm. The charge built up by these secrets is supposed to provide some juice in the second and third acts. It doesn’t.

Over pizza, Scott discovers that Cassie has built a portal into the Quantum Realm, and is actually sending a signal into the microscopic space in order to map it. This news terrifies Janet, but before she can explain the source of her alarm, they’re all sucked into the Quantum Realm. And here’s where the movie begins to fall apart in earnest.

The Quantum Realm, far from the dead subatomic realm of the second Ant-Man and Avengers: Endgame, turns out to be a thriving ecosystem of membranous flora and gelatinous fauna, as well as entire societies of weird creatures. It looks and feels like a Rick and Morty riff on Star Wars, probably screenwriter Jeff Loveness’ last gig was Rick and Morty. Loveness’ experience writing jokes for Jimmy Kimmel Live and the primetime Emmy specials also explains the constant winking humour (Quantumania even deploys the “Welcome Back, Kotter” theme song at strategic points in the film, which strengthens my belief that the MCU mutated into a massive sitcom somewhere around 2016).

The Quantum Realm also contains Jonathan Majors, playing the dimension-hopping villain Kang the Conqueror. He’s the secret that Janet van Dyne has been keeping from the rest of the family. You see, she befriended Kang and almost helped him escape the Quantum Realm, but then crippled his escape vessel when she realized he was a bad guy. This is the source of her shame, and you have to really squint to see this in the way that Quantumania requires. None of it works, because MCU protagonists are not allowed to do anything genuinely bad. The character is given the shape of a redemption arc without any of the content, and once she info dumps her shame to her family, they immediately forgive her. This is the end of Janet’s story, but there’s another of movie to get through, so now she’s there to stand around and provide stage directions.

Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly are given so little to do that their presence is baffling. Hank flies a weird gross ship and plays the jealous husband every so often. At one point he rushes in to save the day with a farm’s worth of ants, but I didn’t even realize that he’d gone missing at some point. As for Hope - the Wasp of the movie’s title - she has nothing, and I stress nothing, to do. She’s reduced to an exposition prompt whose lines mostly boil down to “Where’s Scott?” and “What’s going on, Mom?”

And then there’s Modok (or, pardon me, M.O.D.O.K.). Jesus, Modok. The running time of this movie could have been trimmed by a solid fifteen minutes, just by removing Modok.

Look, there’s a villain, there’s a MacGuffin, there’s a big fight and a happy ending. The movie tries to stuff some characterization into its giant empty spaces, but they’re so thin that they evaporate. The empty visuals of the Quantum Realm, which often consist of the actors standing a straight line or running around a warehouse with a Volume screen behind them, make a perfect metaphor for the movie as a whole. Given nothing of substance to interact with, Quantumania can only stand there, reacting to nonexistent spectacle and pretending it means something.

*I skimmed through the movie and jotted down every time Evangeline Lilly spoke. I counted fifty-two separate lines. None of them are about herself.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube 16: Artseid

Scene 15: Diana, Rogue Curator (47:48-50:54)

And now we come to the part where Diana raids a lost ark and demonstrates an unheralded power: the ability to drop at least thirty feet in expensive shoes without damaging the heels.

These three minutes are entirely dialogue-free and may be a groundbreaking example of what I’m going to call pre-exposition. That is to say, there’s a massive exposition dump coming up later in the movie, but this scene sets up the dump. It’s a visual suppository meant to loosen up the dense mass of information needed to understand the rest of the movie.

In this scene, Diana arrives at the temple where the flaming arrow of Artemis ended up. The most enjoyable part of this sequence is a series of quick cuts (quick for Snyder) as Diana assembles a makeshift torch: stake - rags - fuel - matches - lit torch. The camera doesn’t zoom in on the details, but the relative speed and fascination with process reminds me of Sam Raimi’s manic sequences such Ash making his prosthetic arm in Army of Darkness. These five shots are the closest thing you’re going to get to fun in ZSJL.

The next sequence also comes perilously close to being fun as well, but manages to avoid it at the last second. Diana drops swiftly from above onto an underground ledge. This temple has a genuine hidden cavern portion. We’re underground now, which means we’re about to get all Indiana Jones on Wonder Woman. Will she have to dodge darts or boulders or - nah, she’ll stick the arrow in a nook and a door will open into a room full of backstory-supplying murals. A missed opportunity.

The text on the temple walls appears to be modern Greek, so the Hellenophiles among you should be able to make out what it says. If not, Twitter user Unity_514 has a translation for you. It’s the story of the last great battle against Apokolips and Darkseid. Don’t worry though, it’ll all be spelled out later.

Compare and contrast: The theatrical release of Justice League does not contain three dialogue-free minutes of Gal Gadot walking around a temple, looking at a mural with increasing concern.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube 15: Monsters and how to make them

Profile of Cyborg, his face most covered by the hood of his sweatshirt. A wall-mounted lamp and bookshelf can be seen in the background.

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Scene 14: Introducing Cyborg, sort of (47:16-47:57)

And now, for your consideration, the first post-credits appearance of Victor Stone, aka. Cyborg. At only 40 seconds this is obviously a fragment of a longer scene, but it conveys a few crucial bits of information.

Silas Stone enters a dark apartment (seriously, has he never heard of electric lighting?), pausing as soon as he steps inside. Something off-camera is making him hesitate, but Stone’s body language suggests that he’s gathering himself emotionally for what comes next. Within the first second of this scene we sense that Stone’s home is a place of trauma and conflict. No wonder he works such long hours at the lab.

He swings the door shut. The alarm system mounted next to the door is dead. Not dormant or unarmed: dead. The camera pans left with Stone and we see a figure in the background dressed in grey athletic wear. He’s stock-still and planted facing the closet, like the unfortunate camper at the end of The Blair Witch Project.

Silas speaks. “Victor, the box isn’t safe here”. Ah ha! So that’s where the missing object from the lab ended up (a fact that astute viewers will have already put together from the credits sequence). The camera cuts to a close-up on Victor from behind. He raises his head, and the sound of servomotors hums beneath the soundtrack. Silas repeats his name, as if trying to reach some part of this person. He explains that people were taken at the lab by “some kind of monsters”. So now it’s plural. I suppose multiple abductees require multiple abductors.

Victor turns his head to the right so we see his profile in silhouette. A red glow illuminates the bridge of his nose and the curve of his hood. “You know a lot about monsters,” he says, his voice both human and mechanical.

The perspective moves into the closet to show a full body image of Victor. The camera descends and pulls focus as it does, going from Victor to the strange box. A red glow emanates from one eye, another from his chest, forming a vertical line like a surgical scar. One hand appears to be mechanical. As the focus moves to the foreground, we see elements of Victor’s life: trophies in a box, a football, and in the extreme foreground, the box itself.

Victor slams the closet door, echoing his father’s action at the start of the scene. Then for no particular reason, he turns his head to the left and grants us with another profile view. This time we get a better look at his cyborg-enhanced face. “Especially how to make ‘em,” he rasps. Again, astute viewers will recall the video clip of Silas and Victor from Batman v Superman, in which the closet box reconstructs Victor from an upper torso. Closet boxes: handy and horrific.

So what have we got? First off, the Stone family lives in a surprisingly small apartment. If I were Silas Stone, the first thing I’d do after transforming the torso of my son into a resentful monster made of alien technology is buy a bigger place. Give your monster son more privacy to brood, Dr. Stone. There could be a commentary in here on Black generational wealth and the decades of unfair housing practices, but I doubt ZSJL has that degree of social awareness. It’s more likely the case that superhero comic book characters, by default, tended to live in apartments, which probably speaks to the living conditions of comic artists in New York. Suburban and rural dwellings often signify a retreat from heroism or an exploration of the conflict between heroism and family life. Mansions are the homes of villains and Batman/Iron Man. Imagine a tenement-raised Superman instead of a cornfed Kansan. Has anyone done a study on the architecture of superhero comics?

Secondly, we know that Victor is massively angry at his father for doing… whatever it is he’s done to him. The small, dark but decently appointed Stone apartment may as well be a cage or a ratty basement. The closet is littered with the relics of his past life and an alien object of which he seems to be the unwilling guardian. He’s even doing double duty as alarm system for the apartment, and I’m guessing he’s none too happy about that either.

Thirdly (thricely! huzzah!), Silas Stone is burdened with the weight of what he’s done to his son. We don’t know the specifics, but we see it in Joe Morton's performance: the hesitancy in his body language, the way he repeats his son’s name, the fact that he spends most of his time at the lab. It may even be that he’s afraid of his son. We never know what we’re in for when we raise a child, but our redemption or damnation is contained in their frame. Silas Stone is now a father twice over to one child, and it’s unclear whether the second time is a charm.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 14: Slamming That Sketch

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Scene 13 (and a half): Forget it Detective, it’s Xenoscience (45:30-47:15)

Remember last entry when I said that Zack Snyder could make a compelling and precise scene when he wanted to? Well in this scene, he doesn’t want to. This scene is mostly exposition, and it’s weird. Quietly, unobtrusively weird. It’s structurally backwards, confusing on a basic dialogue level, and seems to be two different takes on one scene spliced together in the wrong order.

It’s the morning after the encounter between Howard T. Janitor and the Parademon, and investigators are on-site. There’s a hole punched in the ceiling. Someone takes a shot of the damage and briefly checks the back of the camera to see the shot, a nice little post-analog touch. As the photographer crosses in the foreground, Silas Stone enters. “Ryan,” he says.

Cut to Ryan, who immediately assures Stone there’s “no damage to the electron laser”. Who asked you, Ryan? Why do we need to know about the electron laser? Glad it’s okay though. Do we have a cutaway to the free-electron laser? No we do not. Moving on - wait, is this Ryan Choi, aka The Atom? No sooner does the comics-savvy viewer wonder that when a detective walks up and says “Dr. Silas Stone? Ryan Choi?” Helpful.

Then begins a truly confusing conversation. I’ve watched this scene several times and I can’t quite put my finger on why the conversation unspools this exact way. A random guy stands next to the detective holding an empty padded steel box. Silas asks “Who did this? Did they steal anything?” and the detective responds with “Nah, they took whatever was in here [that is to say, the box]”. So nothing was stolen, except for the stolen thing. But Ryan clarifies, kind of: “That? That wasn’t stolen. Was it, Dr. Stone”.

On the surface it seems like Choi is delivering a simple statement of fact, but the “Was it, Dr. Stone” suggests some odd level of conspiracy, as if he’s saying Shut up about the missing item to his boss. “What? No, that was misplaced a while ago,” Stone explains, casually confessing to having misplaced a piece of classified alien technology. The detective asks what the item was, which seems outside the purview of the investigation, but Stone says “I don’t know”. So there’s a whatsit from the Department of Defense that Stone has not only misplaced but doesn’t even seem to be aware of? Okay. Unhelpfully, he clarifies further, spacing out his words as if the detective is unusually dense: “I. Don’t. Know. Which is why I was studying it”.

Again: what? There’s an unknown thing Stone was studying, but not closely enough to keep track of its whereabouts? Who’s running this lab? (It’s Dr. Stone) Clearly he’s either lying or he’s massively incompetent and attempting to evade suspicion by passing it off as No Big Deal. Unknown things under careful study go missing all the time, Detective. Geez.

To his credit, the detective isn’t buying it. “What’s your rank, Doctor?” he asks. Which gives Stone the opportunity to explain that he does xenoscience for the DoD. Then he leads them across the hall to show off “the Superman ship”.

Here’s where it starts to get weird. We see the ship from the detective’s perspective, looking like a colossal soapstone Tiamat. Then the perspective shifts to an exterior shot, cruising over the ship as a few CGI pigeons flap away, then craning down to show us Stone and the rest. It’s literally an establishing shot - a signature Snyder establishing shot, with the gliding motion and CGI elements - placed into the middle of a scene. It feels like a shot that Snyder couldn’t logically use to introduce the scene but really, really wanted to throw in somewhere. So here it is.

Or maybe it is an establishing shot? Because the scene switches into a different mode at this point. The confusing chatter about the empty box is gone. During that shot the detective tells Stone that eight people were abducted from the lab. Isn’t that the kind of information you should be leading with? I mean, I love talking about empty boxes as much as the next person, but eight missing people seems more important, right? Unless you’re Zack Snyder I guess.

Okay, here’s the weird bit. The detective tells Stone that they have a witness in quarantine on the premises (which really feels like something Stone should already know about), then a sketch artist in full hazmat gear slams a picture of the abductor against the window. Just slams it, then stands there with a look like he himself is the guilty party.

Two things come to mind:

One, the sketch looks absolutely nothing like a Parademon. In fact, it looks like Batman. It looks so much like Batman that you’d expect someone to point out the resemblance. Do we have a line for that? No we do not. I suppose this could have been a fake-out, but we’ve already seen a metric fucktonne of these creatures in previous scenes. Who is this moment for?

Two, why did Mr. Hazmat slam the sketch against the window and not just hold it up? It’s super dramatic and fits the general heightened tone of the movie, but it’s a bizarrely aggressive move. Imagine if this guy were a barista hurling lattes at his customers.

It’s all part of a larger pattern of inappropriate relationships with objects in this film. In Snyder’s world you don’t just pick up a sweater from the beach; you sniff it and sing a dirge. You have love affairs with briefcases. You slam your mop down on a grated floor. You whisper loving words to a giant arrow. And you prioritize an empty box over the lives of eight people. It’s a Zack Snyder flick, and everything is sacred except for people. The only sacred beings are the heroes and villains, who manifest inscrutable Divine Will. Slam! Also: what’s in the box?

Compare and contrast: There’s no comparable scene in JWJL (RIP Ryan Choi), but the Parademon sketch pops up in an exchange between Commissioner Gordon and a detective. This one is clearly a child’s drawing:

The chief difference is that this sketch actually resembles a Parademon, which makes it additionally hilarious when Gordon and the detective start going on about how much it looks like Batman. Which it doesn’t. How did both movies get this wrong from opposite ends?

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube 13: Backstory'd

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Scene 12: Two Statues, One Arrow (44:23 -45:29)

When you’re a Wonder Woman, what do you do when you’re not chasing briefcases and vaporizing terrorists in front of schoolchildren? You work at the Louvre as a preserver of antiquities, preferably in the most impossibly tight-fitting white dress possible.

I’m not mocking anyone here; Gadot’s all-white garb is clearly meant to align her with the historical statues that she preserves. It’s a call back to the supposed classical perfection of Greek aesthetics, never mind that those statues were actually painted in a riot of colours that would probably strike the modern eye as garish. You’d think Diana of Themyscira would be schooling her colleagues about this. But then, Snyder’s work is always about the signification of colour, which is partly why the desaturated tones and cobalt shadows of Justice League are so important to the movie’s effectiveness.

I also want to call attention to the opening interior shot of the scene: Diana and the statue (is it of herself?) in forced perspective in the the foreground, with a wide depth of field that keeps the background mostly in focus and lets us draw conclusions about the relationship Diana has with her colleagues (ie. separate, on a literally different plane). The dialogue, in which Diana quietly shuts down an inquiry about her personal life, reinforces the language of the shot. It’s a quietly excellent piece of cinematography: visually interesting, rich and detailed, an updated Gregg Toland bit of deep focus with enough shallow depth of field to emphasize Gadot’s profile and set her apart a little more from the background.

It’s also unusual for a Snyder movie to lead a scene with a shot this sophisticated. He tends to favour slow tracking shots of close-ups on objects and faces, mixed with tableaus of figures arranged on a parallel plane to the camera. Having seen this image in the theatrical release, I had assumed that this was filmed by Whedon’s crew, but here it is in the Snyder cut (not that Whedon would have come up with a shot like this either - his dialogue may be rooted in classic screwball comedy, but his visuals are mostly stuck in the world of ‘90s television).

The camera starts to rotate, keeping Diana in the sharp-focus foreground (and perhaps getting a little leering as it shows off the neckline of the dress and her hip bones pressing against the fabric) while her colleagues unspool the necessary information. All told, the shot lasts about 48 seconds, but it’s subtle enough that you don’t see how much work it’s doing.

Finally it cuts to a shot from Diana’s point of view: a television screen with the Arrow of Artemis burning away. The angle reverses and pushes in on Diana’s face, looking from the point of view of her colleagues (or is it of the image of the burning arrow on the screen?). She says “Invasion” and that’s that. A scene with only four shots* that does what it needs to do and does it with unshowy virtuosity.

Compare and contrast: This scene appears in JWJL, but in a truncated form that robs it of its elegance. The establishing shot is missing and the camera movement has been edited out. It does its job but not particularly well.

*In order: an exterior shot of the Louvre; the minute-long shot of Diana and the statue; the television; Diana’s face.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 12: Arrow'd

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Scene 11: One Thing Happens (42:08-44:22)

INT. BOARDROOM - DAY

EXEC: So what’s happening in this scene?

ZACK SNYDER: Well, Connie Nielsen’s going to shoot this big flaming arrow.

EXEC: Cool. What else?

ZACK SNYDER: All the Amazons that Steppenwolf didn’t kill are going to line up and some badass warriors are going to bring the arrow in.

EXEC: Wait. So the entire scene is just Connie Nielsen shooting an arrow?

ZACK SNYDER: It’s the arrow of Artemis. It will reach the lands of men and alert Diana.

EXEC: So how do we know any of this?

ZACK SNYDER: One of the Amazons hands Connie Nielsen the arrow and says “The arrow of Artemis. It will reach the lands of men”.

EXEC: Doesn’t Connie Nielsen already know this?

ZACK SNYDER: Definitely.

EXEC: So -

ZACK SNYDER: She takes the arrow and says poetic stuff to it so it seems more interesting than just shooting an arrow. Then she lights it on fire and shoots it all the way to Greece.

EXEC: Uh -

ZACK SNYDER: See, the cool thing about the scene is that Connie Nielsen has to shoot an arrow, so she does that. The arrow starts a fire.

EXEC: How much did this scene cost?

ZACK SNYDER: The cool thing is that this movie is costing the studio around $1.5 million per minute, so this will run you … about $3,360,000.

EXEC: Oh my God.

ZACK SNYDER: The arrow is on fire!

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 11: Mop that Grate

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Scene 10: The Mystery of Howie’s Family (40:11-42:07)

This is a short scene, but it introduces the most mysterious character in the entire film: Howard the STAR Labs janitor. Who is this man? Because after having watched this scene several times, I refuse to believe he’s an experienced custodian. My best guess is that he’s a spy, hired by a rival company or foreign government, there to conduct industrial espionage.

Here is the evidence:

1. As Silas Stone exits his lab, Howard is mopping a grated floor (pictured above). I suppose grated floors get mopped in the course of events, but I can’t get past this. He’s just squeezing dirty water through the grates and soaking the subfloor. This must be a significant detail, because Snyder provides us an artfully composed close-up of the mop. Only seconds before we get an insert of a Sony dictaphone that plays an important role later in the film. So what is this shot doing, exactly? [Note: I know what’s it doing.]

2. As Silas Stone exits his lab, he calls out “Lab’s all yours, Howie”. Howard responds with “11:30. Early night for you, Silas” (note: it sounds like he says “Cyrus” here). This scene establishes several things: one, that the two characters are on a first-name basis, even if Howard seems to think Silas’ name is pronounced Cyrus; two, that the staffing presence will be down to Howard and maybe some security guards; and three, that Howard the Janitor is so attuned to the comings and goings of the head of STAR Labs that he knows exactly when he’s leaves the building and whether this is typical behaviour. Who the hell vetted Howard? Did they notice his obsessive logging of the boss’ behaviour and think “Wow, that’s dedication”?

3. As Silas Stone pauses in exiting his lab, he says, in the most awkward mannner possible, “Tell your family I said hello?” and Howard, I kid you not, responds with this expression:

This is not the face of a man with an actual family. I can picture two scenarios: one, that Howard’s family is dead and Silas has completely forgotten this detail; or two, that industrial spy Howard T. Janitor has suddenly blanked on his cover story, and he’s praying that Silas doesn’t bring up any names or that bat mitzvah supposedly coming up next week.*

Anyway, Howard is so put out or freaked out by the mention of his family that he turns his back on Silas and gets back to work. No goodbye, no friendly wave. We don’t even cut to a shot of Stone awkwardly standing there, until, confused and embarrassed, he strolls off down the hall.

Then Howard hears a noise, encounters a Parademon with gnarly hoof-claw feet (there’s a closeup!) and that’s that. Maybe he’s dead? Unclear at this point.

This scene is also our introduction to Silas Stone. His only character traits so far are a preference for dramatically under lit working spaces and a tremendous lack of tact surrounding Howard’s possibly dead/fake family.

*There is indeed a reason for his crestfallen expression, but it’s not made clear in this edit. The theatrical cut does a better job of dealing with this moment, as we’ll see below.

Compare and contrast: The beginning of this scene in JWJL is nearly identical, with Silas Stone shuffling through some notes as he prepares to leave for the day. It omits the insert shot of the dictaphone. However, the conversation between Howard and Silas is completely different. We establish that Howard has an unhealthy obsession with tracking Silas’ movements, but then Howard hesitantly delivers his condolences on the fate of Silas’ son Victor. Ah ha. There’s the reason he looks so unnerved when Silas mentions family in the Snyder cut; Howard feels awkward about a tragedy in the Stone family. The scene cuts to Silas walking away. It ends here, with no Parademon encounter.

The JWJL version of the scene is illustrative of the different ends that can be achieved with the same pool of footage. In Snyder’s Justice League, this scene advances the plot and builds a connection between Silas Stone and The Case of the Missing Motherboxes (canny viewers will recall from the credits that a Motherbox is currently slumbering in the back of a closet of a young Black man with a partially metal head). The theatrical cut uses the scene to build up the character of Silas.

But here’s the weirdest thing: in the theatrical cut, Howard’s name tag reads “H. Jensen” (or something close to that); in the Snyder cut, the name is difficult to make out but is clearly not the same. In both scenes, the photo on the security fob is of a completely different person. Just how bad is the security at Star Labs? As we will discover in both movies, really bad.

EMERGENCY TRIVIA MOMENT

Howard the Janitor is played by British character actor Anthony Wise, whose very first screen role was “Policeman 2” in the cult ‘80s movie Withnail and I (1987). I was crossing my fingers as this information came to light, and yes, my wishes came true: Wise is indeed the policeman who says absolutely nothing for 30 seconds until he screams “Get in the back of the van!” like a meth-injected terrier.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 10: I'm on a Plane

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Scene 9: A Close Shave (38:42-40:10)

The shot of cheese-grater Steppenwolf cuts to a shot of a razor being rinsed under a tap, in what may be the only visually witty edit in the entire movie. And what a razor (and tap) it is. A Google image search ignores the razor altogether but correctly identifies the other object as a tap. The “visually similar images” are downright queasy. Instead of razors and taps, we get near-monochrome photos of flowing smoke, steel hammers shattering glass, vapers slipping clouds from their mouths. It looks like a sequence of shots from an ad for some mysterious but very masculine product. This Is What Vaping 5 Gum Feels Like, maybe.

The razor belongs to Bruce Wayne, and the fancy tap belongs to his private plane. Bruce and Alfred are regrouping after his failure to recruit Aquaman and looking at other potential recruits. Functionally, this scene renders the earlier tarmac scene pointless, which is probably why Whedon adapted this scene and cut the other one.

This scene makes it clear that the stakes for Bruce Wayne are not global but personal. He feels that he must take up the mantle of saviordom to fulfill the promise that he made “him” aka. Superman. Alfred points out that there are no “barbarians at the gate,” which prompts Bruce to muse that “maybe the barbarians are already here”. Dun-dun-dun.

The phrase “barbarians at the gate” is, as they say, a tell. Although the classical Barbarians were Germanic tribes bearing down on the crumbling Roman Empire, it’s no great stretch to apply the term to the subhuman pagan monsters of 300 who sought to subjugate and feminize the manly Spartans of Frank Miller and Zack Snyder’s conjoined imaginations.

Compare and contrast: the Whedon scene, previously covered in this series, covers the same basic material but is startlingly different in its particulars. There’s the horrible colour grade, a visibly heavier and soul-drained Ben Affleck who could have benefited from the CGI budget that went to Cavill’s moustache, and more quippy Whedonisms than the scene can bear.

That said, it’s not ineffective in packing in some needed exposition (we first hear the names Barry Allen and Victor Stone here) and while the stakes are not as specific as they are in Snyder’s scene, we get the sense of a Bruce Wayne who is still possessed by obsessive impulses but has channeled them into saving the world instead of beating up criminals or murdering Superman. Same Batman, different day. Insofar as that goes, it’s a subtle and understated bit of insight into the character, reaching into his psychological roots instead of a conversion narrative based in honour and faith. Freud over Jesus, if you will: New Gods over Old.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 9: "It's Toxic"

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Scene 8: “… That’s good” (37:37-38:41)

The unthinkable has happened: a brief and concise scene in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Steppenwolf pops up with the Motherbox in an abandoned cityscape. Nuclear cooling towers line the background. “It’s toxic… that’s good,” he says to no one in particular (I refuse to believe he’s making small talk with his Parademons). The scene cuts to the interior of a cooling tower, where he’s leveraging the power of the Motherbox to transform the environment into something more Apokolips-y. Apokoliptical. Apokolesque. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s gross and scaly, like a saurian reconfiguration of kudzu. Steppenwolf sends his skittery minions off to find the other two boxes, then mumbles to himself about an unknown agent whom he wishes to please. “He will see my worth again,” Steppenwolf says to himself, looking extremely contemplative for someone wearing a cheese grater bodysuit.

It’s a good bet (which is later confirmed) that we’re somewhere in Asia Minor, maybe in one of the Soviet Union’s secret nuclear testing facilities scattered amongst the -stans. Or it may be a fanciful version of Chernobyl. Astute moviegoers will be reminded of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and its use of a Soviet ghost city as the hometown of its villain and the site of the climactic/anticlimactic showdown/downshow. As stand-ins for the lacunae of Western consciousness, these ghost cities have the advantage of being uninhabited. It’s a great place for an avatar of evil to set up shop.

Also, who is the mysterious figure Steppenwolf wants so badly to please? It’s a mystery! Just kidding, we know exactly who it is. It’s Darkseid. This line is there to excite the fans who bought an HBO Max subscription so they could watch Darkseid going ham on humanity.

Compare and contrast: This may be a good time to bring up the most unloved addition to the theatrical release: the plucky Russian family. Instead of an uninhabited city, Steppenwolf has set up shop in a place with a few heroic peasants. It’s a good move on paper: show the world-in-peril stakes by introducing a small group of humans. It’s also a profoundly anti-Snyderian tactic. I like the idea in theory, but in practice it’s liked a smoked oyster in a strawberry milkshake. Justice League isn’t really interested in everyday people. Introducing them into the mix without developing their characters only highlights how bad a fit the Whedon sensibility is in this world.

Once the family situation is established, the sequence cuts to Steppenwolf in his cooling tower. This part serves as a dump site for the irradiated remains of Snyder’s plot, processed into highly toxic exposition. Curiously, Steppenwolf drops Darkseid’s name here, even though he will play no part in the actual film.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 8: Intertitle-ooza

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Parts: A Love Story

Oof. Let’s take a breather. Superman’s dead, Wonder Woman lost her briefcase and Steppenwolf just threw a lot of horses around. We’ve come a long way in only half an hour.

Let’s use our down time to think about the fact that this movie is broken up into chapters, or “parts”. With these divisions Snyder is making a claim about his film. He’s reaching for grandeur but perhaps suggesting that Justice League is somehow on the same footing as a work of literature. Or maybe he’s making a claim for that rarest of things: the blockbuster auteur.

There’s a tradition of using chapter breaks in contemporary film, and its best-known practitioners bear a striking resemblance to Snyder. Just like the director who put his entire name in the title of this movie, Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino are stylists above all else, carrion birds digging in the fields of cinema. Anderson pulls from the pre-blockbuster era of ‘60s European art house films. Tarantino assembles bits of grindhouse, samurai and Western genres into a pulp collage. Snyder, obviously, loves the aesthetic of Very Serious comic books. All three are obsessed with immaculate images and memorable moments, sometimes at the expense of coherence and pacing.

None of these directors has much to say about the real world, unless you count their studious avoidance of reality as a commentary on it (and I do). These are directors who are interested in the images that our culture produces - which is to say that they are charting our collective dreamlife.

Not everyone is on board for Snyder’s particular dreamscape. In interviews Snyder describes nearly everything about his work as “cool” or “fun,” even when Jimmy Olson is a bit player who gets brutally shot in the head. In what world is it fun to see someone get summarily executed? Relax, Snyder says. It’s all a dream.

Of course, I’m ignoring the granddaddy of dream film here: George Lucas, who divided entire movies into parts of a sweeping pulp saga that was pointedly set in an unreal world. And let’s not forget that David Lynch’s latest work has been labelled an 18-hour movie, and his storytelling structures are even more frustrating and obtuse than Snyder’s at times.

The aim of the division is not to make a claim to grandeur but to strengthen the story’s hold on unreality, to bring viewers into the dream. Snyder is both summoning and shaping that dream life, where titanic heroes live operatic lives while the rest of us dissolve into the landscape.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 7: Et in Themyscira Ego

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Scene 7: Monster, box, warrior women (25:50-37:27)

This scene. It is long. My god is it long. This scene is so long and weighty that not even Zack Snyder could bench press it. At 11 minutes and 37 seconds, it is half the length of a network sitcom. You can watch this scene twice over in the time it takes to watch an episode of Big Bang Theory.

It’s sufficiently long that you can break it up into several separate sequences.

Sequence 1: No words

From high above, crashing waves and sea foam. The camera swings to show a high cliff. A cluster of Amazons is gathered outside a building. Queen Hippolyta (a very non-Grecian looking Connie Neilson) strides into the building. The shot cuts on a subtle screen wipe and she’s walking down a long, long, long stone corridor to… oh, it’s circular room with the cracked box we saw in the opening credits! I know it seems like days since the credits, but you may recall a warrior hissing out “Alert the Queen!” Well here’s the Queen. But before she says a single word, she sighs. She sighs in a deeply weary fashion that communicates Oh, this fucking thing again. We later find out that the box has been quiet for thousands of years. For humans, it’s ancient history. For Queen Hippolyta, it’s last Tuesday.

Sequence 2: What’s with the box?

“Any changes today?” asks the Queen. “No my Queen,” someone answers. So it sounds as if the box has been cracked and glowing for a while now. Which makes me wonder why Hippolyta has bothered to show up. Does she drop by on a daily basis for box status updates? I have to say, I admire a queen with a hands-on approach to glowing alien technology.

The Queen’s companion says “The Mother Box has awoken after thousands of years”. This is likely not news to the Queen, but it’s helpful for us. We now know the thing is a) millennia old and b) called a Mother Box. They speculate on its reasons for being awake (again, very helpful for the audience) when the box suddenly goes quiet. An Amazon warrior (she of “Alert the Queen!” fame), who has clearly never seen these kinds of movies, wonders if it’s gone back to sleep. But the Queen, who probably has a huge library of classic horror flicks on laserdisc back at the palace, is not fooled. “Evil does not sleep. It waits”. The weird thing is that Hippolyta delivers this line not to the random warrior but directly to her companion. That’s a bit rude, Queen.

Predictably, things do not improve from here.

Sequence 3: The Rumble in the Rotunda

The Mother Box snaps back to life. The Amazons draw even more weapons somehow, ready for battle with whatever may come. A tube-portal thing (technically a Boom Tube* in Fourth World parlance) drops down from the sky. Flying troopers with weirdly delicate wings fly out. Finally the tube disgorges a gleaming monster with horns and shifting metallic armour. This is Steppenwolf. He’s supposed to look an uber-badass, but it’s hard to avoid the thought that he looks, as co-Destroyer Adam P Knave says, “like a nervous cheese grater”.

Wow, you think, what does this avatar of evil have to say? “I have come to enlighten you… to the darkness” is what he says, proving instantly that Steppenwolf is no Big Bad. He’s an edgelord flunky, desperately hoping that no one will call him on his bullshit.

Then the fight begins. I’d like to say that this part of the fight is cool, but it it’s largely a mess. Everything is a kind of 300-style brownish yellow, like everyone dipped themselves in ochre. Arrows and beams and parademons fly across the screen and it feels messy and dull. Your mileage may vary.

Things pick up considerably when the Queen’s companion is wounded. She takes an energy bolt to the chest and collapses, letting a scream of rage and despair. It’s the cry of an ass-kicker who does not fear death but resents it tremendously, because once death comes, there is no more ass to kick. Hyppolita recognizes that they’re on the losing end of this fight, and the only move now is to grab the Mother Box and run - but not before having the fighting Amazons seal themselves in the temple along with Steppenwolf.

And seal it they do, with gigantic hammers that bring down massive stone doors. I can only assume that Snyder roamed the length and breadth of the Earth for the most unbelievably jacked women he could find, because these are some fearsomely muscled people. When they swing those hammers and smash the pins that hold the doors in place, you believe it.

Hyppolita escapes by the skin of her teeth. The building tumbles into the sea. She gazes down in mourning at her sisters who sacrificed their lives to stop an apocalyptic evil, which is apocalyptic evil’s cue to come bursting out of its tomb.

Sequence 4: The Chase

Now we come to the best action scene in the whole damn movie. The Amazons are galloping away with the Mother Box, taking it to god only knows where in order to keep it out of Steppenwolf’s hands. There’s a palpable sense of the inevitable hanging over the sequence; even as they gallop at full speed and toss the box to other riders, it’s obvious that Steppenwolf is going to have his prize. He leaps through the air, smashing warriors and horses as he goes (note: it is not easy to watch horses’ bodies getting ragdolled around the screen). Parademons grab the box, Amazons retrieve it, but it’s no use. Steppenwolf comes out of nowhere, takes the box and smirks his way into the sky as a wave of mounted Amazons crest the hill. So long MacGuffin number one.

`Now that they’ve lost the battle, there’s nothing to do but use “the arrow of Artemis” to alert “the world of men”. Of course, it’s not men they are alerting.

Compare and contrast: This scene appears in JWJL in its usual truncated form, and it is by far one of the worst parts of the film. Steppenwolf appears with no buildup in tension (and he looks like he popped in from a nearby Ren Faire), the temple doesn’t fall into the sea, and Steppenwolf’s leaps look more like a video game bad guy sproinging around a badly rendered map. It’s such a failure of execution that I’m amazed it made it out of the editing bay in that form.

*Dedicated Jack Kirby fans (such as co-Destroyer Adam P Knave) will note that Zack Snyder’s conception of Boom Tubes is woefully unimaginative. In ZSJL, Boom Tubes come from the sky like a standard World Destroying Energy Beam, but there is no “above” in this scenario. The tube isn’t connecting to a spaceship in orbit or anything. Kirby’s Boom Tubes flout the rules of physical space and linear perspective, coming in at weird angles and making your eyes cross with their sheer Miskatonic weirdness. Snyder’s vision has no room for things that break Euclidean geometry into pieces.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 6: What's in the case

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In my last entry I wrote about the torrid love triangle between Wonder Woman, a group of terrorists and a handsome briefcase (someone call Chuck Tingle). Since then I’ve chewed over the presence and uses of that briefcase a bit more in the context of the film and Zack Snyder’s whole Weltanschauung.

The case is brought into the frame by a self-described “group of reactionary terrorists who want to turn back the clock”. As the leader says “Down with the modern world - back to the dark ages”. The case flips open to reveal wires, explosive and a timer. Why a timer? There is absolutely no reason for this bomb to be on a timer. Press the button, the bomb goes boom. The only conceivable reason for the timer is to give the scene the dramatic tension of a ticking clock while Wonder Woman is briefly distracted with the task of hurling bodies into walls with titanic, organ-pulping force.

Make no mistake: force, and the right to force, is what’s at issue in this scene. On one level the briefcase is a MacGuffin, an interchangeable object that compels characters to converge. It has the magnetism of pulp action. But it contains an obliterating, annihilating power that (according to the terrorists) can reshape the world. Wonder Woman’s role is to regulate and enforce that right to power. Are a small band of humans authorized to wield such power? No, says Wonder Woman, and kills them with the barest effort. She spends more time communing with the force contained in the briefcase than the people she is ostensibly there to save.

After the briefcase is dealt with, she drops back down into the building and saves the schoolchildren from execution by stopping a hail of bullets. The remaining terrorist, awestruck, whispers “I don’t believe it”. “Believe it,” Wonder Woman says, and utterly annihilates him with her own force, blasting out the wall and showering the police in the street with glass and masonry and bits of terrorist. Her force is legitimate. It asserts itself by destroying the bodies of humans who would aspire to ape her power. A hat floats down to the street. A police chief gazes at the destruction, stricken. A young girl gazes up in Wonder Woman in worshipful adoration. She smiles beatifically at the girl and reassures her that she too can one day murder a room full of villains.

The scene has no direct connection to the main storyline, but it is vital to understanding the worldview of the film (Whedon liked the scene so much he placed it immediately after the credits). Who gets to wield force and shape the world? Who gets to use the briefcase? The Motherboxes are pure potential, cubes of infinite force. They can rebuild a human being, “turn smoke back into a house,” and remake an entire planet in the image of their master.

The monsters of Apokolips may have the raw power to use the Motherboxes, but they are outsiders, beings of corruption who dominate and enslave the universe. In Jack Kirby’s original vision, the “New Gods” of Apokolips embodied the worst impulses of 20th century post-war humanity; they may live on a different planet but they unquestionably emerge from the collective psyche. in Snyder’s view, they are completely Other. The Justice League feels like the scrappy Wolverines of Red Dawn, striking out from the shadows against an evil outside force. In the dystopian “Knightmare” visions, that is exactly what the League becomes: hard-bitten mujahideen fighters trying to outmaneuver an evil Superman in thrall to uber-baddie Darkseid. Why doesn’t Zack Snyder remake Red Dawn? He’d be a shoo-in.

Authority is the central preoccupation of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. In the theatrical cut, our heroes fight to preserve the world as they know it. In ZSJL, they are living gods making a claim to the world against threats from above and below.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 5: That Leather-grained Object of Desire

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Scene 6: Wonder Woman and the Briefcase Affair (18:00-25:50)

This is it. This scene is your litmus test for Zack Snyder’s Justice League. You will be pumping your fist in triumph or howling with derisive laughter. No other response is possible if you’re going to make it all the way through this thing.

This scene introduces Wonder Woman to the world of ZSJL, aside from the brief shot of her in the credits. It has no connection to the film’s plot and could conceivably have been cut, but then you’d be deprived of watching Wonder Woman absolutely kick ass. The intent is clear: to show us a Wonder Woman who is 1,000 times faster, stronger and violent. She throws bodies into walls and turns villains into pulp.

But she’s not the focus of the scene. Instead, it’s all about a briefcase. This scene is Briefcase: The Movie.

White vans snake their way through London streets, eventually pulling up in front of a museum (the second favourite target of comic book villains after banks). Well-dressed black clad men emerge, shooting anyone they encounter. The leader is identifiable by his smart black hat and his menacing black briefcase.

For the next eight minutes or so, nearly every shot will contain this briefcase. It sets off the metal detectors, which spurs even more violence. The camera dips down and follows it up the stairs, keeping the briefcase in the extreme foreground. At one point it appears as if people are running in terror from the briefcase itself.

Up on the third floor, the black clad terrorists have corralled a group of schoolchildren. The moment we’re all waiting for arrives: he opens the briefcase to reveal a somewhat quotidian set of explosives. What, no weird green fluid that will mutate everyone into monsters? Do better, comic book movie. Anyway, the children scream, even though none of them are close enough to get a clear view of the briefcase’s contents. Maybe they believe, like everyone else in the room, that the briefcase is the protagonist of the movie and the terrorist is injuring it.

Wonder Woman breaks through the doors and it’s full-on Snyder time. Extreme slow motion moments are followed by bursts of power and speed. Black clad bodies get flung across the room at bone-shattering velocities. Wonder Woman is willing to get to the thing she loves most in this world: that damn briefcase. But as she reaches it, she realizes that teh briefcase doesn’t really belong to her it; it belongs to the world. She snaps it shut and jumps through the ceiling and into the grey London sky. She throws the briefcase high into the air, but the camera slows down, holding her and the beloved briefcase in a frieze. Goodbye briefcase, she whispers.

The briefcase releases its power and is no more. End of scene? No. Like a zombie, the scene must shamble on, disposing of its human element. Wonder Woman drops back down, saves the children, annihilates the remaining villain in a blast of force. Chunks of stone and glass and villain rain down over the police at street level. A hat floats down. A policeman reacts, slowly. The scene is not over yet.

Inside the building, Wonder Woman is reassuring the children with an “It’s all good,” which is strange choice of words for a 5,000 year old goddess, but whatever. A young girl remains kneelilng. With shining eyes she asks “Can I be like you some day?” With a smile of infinite kindness, Wonder Woman says “You can be anything you want to be”.

Shame on you, Wonder Woman, for lying to a little girl. She cannot be a goddess. And she will never be a briefcase.

Compare and contrast: This scene appears in truncated form in JWJL. It also appears much earlier in the theatrical cut, right after the credits and before the Icelandic village scene. It cuts down substantially on the violence factor. Wonder Woman punches and throws the bad guys around, but she’s not killing anyone. It’s not as visceral but not nearly as ridiculous. The scene cuts away just as she dispatches the last bad guy. The only clear loser in JWJL is the briefcase, which gets only a fraction of the screen time and an indifferent send-off.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 4: Mourning and Music

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Scene 2: Martha (14:28-15:30)

No matter how cool the DC universe may be to Zack Snyder and his fans, there is always the inconvenience of ordinary people. What do we do with these non-supers, these remainders who stubbornly persist in being characters? I dunno, let’s have them stand around in a graveyard at night.

That’s where we find Martha Kent. In Batman v Superman, she existed to be kidnapped and terrorized in order to push Superman into a cage match with Batman. Her name becomes the catalyst for their friendship.

In Justice League, though, there’s no Superman, so there’s no real reason for Martha Kent. Now useless except as a sponge for excess sentimentality, she stands over her son’s grave at night, her pickup truck’s headlights illuminating the scene. She doesn’t even turn off the car; she’s not here to stay.

A U-Haul wagon is hitched to her truck. A dog named Dusty (not Krypto? Oh well) waits for her. We will never see Dusty again. On her way out of town, she passes by her home, now for sale by the bank. Goodbye Martha. That was a good 90 seconds. We’ll see you again in a few hours.

Compare and contrast: This scene does not exist in JWJL, but a few shots appear in the opening credits.

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Scene 3: tarmac (15:30-16:25)

Bruce Wayne lands in a helicopter and recaps his conversation with Aquaman. He walks from the helicopter to a plane. The scene ends before he boards the plane. Aside from the introduction of Alfred, there is no reason for this scene to exist. Alfred mentions that Wayne is “nought for two” when it comes to recruiting people for his team. Fans can safely assume that the first prospective recruit was Wonder Woman, but there is no way of knowing that if you’re coming into this movie fresh. A useless stub of a scene that accomplishes nothing. It’s probably the best argument so far against the existence of ZSJL in its current form.

Compare and contrast: This scene does not appear in JWJL, but there’s a scene that clearly takes place after Bruce and Alfred have boarded the plane. Wayne mentions that he put a tracker in Aquaman’s coat, “but he left without it. It may in fact not have been his coat”. He’s also shaving, which is a nice bit of visual shorthand for “getting back in the game”. They pack in an infodump on Barry Allen, Victor Stone and drop Diana’s name. It’s mostly exposition. Best described as serviceable.

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Scene 4: Lois (16:25-18:00)

I wonder what Zack Snyder thinks of baristas. Specifically, effete coffee-slinging men with man buns, struggle beards and soft T-shirts. Do these foam finaglers even lift bro? The one who serves two lattes to Lois Lane in this scene isn’t singled out for mockery, but he falls so far outside of Snyder’s usual character gallery that I can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for the guy. He probably dies off screen later. We barely knew you, barista guy.

At any rate, Lois gets her two coffees and exits. As she leaves an anonymous hand steadies the door behind her. The camera briefly shows the name of the establishment on the window: Fred & Ginger Coffee. It turns out that this is a real coffee shop located at 38 High Street, Kings Langley in the United Kingdom. Lois Lane is a long way from Metropolis.

Also of note: a Daily Planet headline that says “Security Bank of Manhattan Seeks New Architect”. The camera lingers long enough that it is clearly supposed to have some significance. My guess is that it has nothing to do with the DC universe (“Manhattan” is a bit of a giveaway) and is probably a wink to The Fountainhead, which Snyder reportedly wants to adapt as a feature film.

The second coffee is for a policeman named Jerry whose job is to guard the Superman memorial. Jerry is played by Mark McClure, who also played Jimmy Olsen in the first four Superman movies and 1984’s Supergirl. “You don’t miss a day, do you?” Jerry quips. “Like it here,” Lois responds.

As she approaches the memorial in extremely slow motion, the mournful tune that has been dogging her for the last thirty seconds catches up to her and overwhelms the scene. It’s Nick Cave’s “Distant Sky,” a beautiful piece that Snyder somehow ruins by matching it to this scene. This is Zack Snyder’s real talent: taking great songs and making them embarrassing with his signature artless deployment.

Compare and contrast: This scene doesn’t exist in JWJL, but footage of Lois at the memorial appears in the opening credits. Mark McClure is recast as a prison guard in one of the Barry Allen scenes.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube 3: A Sweater Sniffing Good Time

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Scene 1: 09:30-14:25

At last we have left the credits behind. Here, at last, is some Justice League. But first, we get the intertitle “Part 1 - Don’t Count On It, Batman”. With this, Zack Snyder joins the pantheon of filmmakers who have divided up their films into explicit chapters - Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson come to mind. It’s a bit affected, but it’s not unwelcome when you’re dealing with a four-hour runtime.

But really: why the hell not. Zack Snyder, you’ve been given carte blanche to do whatever you want here, and your die-hard fans are going to eat up whatever you throw on the screen. This movie could have been ten hours of you lifting weights and there would still be three hour YouTube videos screaming about your artistic triumph.

This first scene seems straightforward on first viewing but baffling on second thought. Bruce Wayne has come to an icebound Icelandic hamlet to locate Arthur Curry (“the Aquaman”) and persuade him to join his band of heroes. Bruce believes that “invaders are coming from far away” and that Curry can help.

If only the scene unfolded in a way that made any sense at all.

As the credits close, Wayne is heading towards a building, surrounded by a crowd of hearty fisherfolk. In the first scene, he is in the building along with everyone else in the village. A man in a watchman’s cap fiddles contemptuously with Wayne’s business card. What business do business cards have in this pure embodiment expression of the volk?

Wayne explains that he is looking for a man - a stranger - who comes on the king tide when the people are hungry. “He brings them fish,” Ben Affleck somehow says with a straight face. Have these villagers never heard of hákarl, or even harðfiskur?

Serving as interpreter for the villager in the watchman’s cap is a man who can only be described as a barely human titan. He is a towering Polynesian man with milk-white pupils, an easy command of English and an American accent. It is glaringly obvious that he is the person Bruce Wayne is tracking down. There is absolutely no reason to drag out the pretense, unless Bruce Wayne wants to look like an absolute idiot. At one point he offers the villagers $25,000 American to speak to Curry, which draws derisive laughter from the room. Ha ha, Mr. Wayne, these chthonic specimens of pure humanity do not need your money! They take it anyway.

Here is how the scene could have gone.

WAYNE: I’m looking for Arthur Curry, the Aquaman.
CURRY: There’s no one here by that name.
WAYNE: It’s obviously you.
CURRY: No it isn’t.
WAYNE: You have an American accent. You look nothing like anyone else here. Plus I literally have footage of you poking things with a trident under the sea.
CURRY: Uh… deepfake.
WAYNE: Oh fuck off.
CURRY: Ya got me.

Cut to an exterior shot. Curry, who has admitted his true identity, has immediately moved on to making fun of Wayne for his Batman identity. He shucks his coat and peels off his magnificent sweater to show off his more magnificent upper body. “A strong man is strongest alone,” he tells Wayne before sinking into the water.

Here’s where things get weird. As the ripples of his disappearance spread outward (kind of like Superman’s death cry?) the villagers begin to sing. It’s a mournful dirge that seems to mark their sorrow at Aquaman’s departure. The song is a traditional Icelandic tune called Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu, an 18th-century poem written by a young woman mourning her unrequited love. It’s a piercing and beautiful tune. In the context of the movie, it’s a moment of batshit insanity.

A young blond-haired woman steps forward, still singing. She picks the sweater up from the beach where Aquaman left it, fondles its knots and sniffs it deeply. It would almost be an erotic moment if it weren’t so subordinated to ritual worship.

The sweater raises so many questions - did he swim there in that sweater and just dump it on the ground? Seems a bit rude. Did he show up shirtless and borrow some clothing? If so, it seems even ruder to toss it on the ground. Then again, these villagers don’t even know how to preserve fish, so they’re probably not up on etiquette either.

Compare and Contrast: This scene pops up in sharply truncated form (as most of these scenes do) in JWJL. The trajectory is largely the same, but Whedon inserts footage here and there that mostly consists of Bruce Wayne cracking extra jokes. At some points it feels like he’s actively making fun of Chris Terrio’s original screenplay by having Wayne point out the ridiculousness of Aquaman’s lines. At the end, after several extremely obvious soundstage-set inserts (Aquaman’s eye colour and Bruce Wayne’s hair visibly shift from shot to shot), Aquaman makes an awkward backwards leap and rockets off, leaving a CGI disturbance in the water. The villagers do not break into spontaneous song. No one sniffs the sweater.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube 2: The Credits

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Credits: 00:30-9:30

I have no idea what the world record is for the longest credit sequence, but at nine whole minutes, ZSJL surely has a claim. Measured out like a time-release lithium drip, it’s the template for the next 3 hours and 50 minutes. You like overlong shots and glacial edits? Have we got a film for you!

The very first image is a streak of electricity lazily traversing a gritty dirt-brown DC logo. A chunk of something crosses the screen - a piece of dirt? a meteor? There’s no scale yet to help us understand what we’re looking at. And then a thing. What is this thing? Seriously: what is it? Is it a piece of pipe? Part of a space ship maybe? The jaw of some monster? Why is the very first shot of this film an incomprehensible shape? Show us a ticking clock attached to a bomb or a newspaper headline, something the mind can hang its jacket on.

Within seconds, the ambiguity clears up as the camera rotates around a frozen moment: an out-of-focus Superman impaled on a pipe (it was a pipe!) with an out-of-focus Doomsday impaled on a Kryptonite-tipped spear. There’s a nice bit of symmetry there. Eventually Superman comes into focus, dying and screaming out in pain. His cries radiate outward in a visible shock wave. The title “Warner Bros. Pictures Presents” comes up. The entire sequence takes 30 seconds.

Snyder’s love of frozen moments and shallow focus, along with his fondness for softly lit tableaux of handsome titans, makes me think that he isn’t so much a filmmaker as he is a still photographer who ended up shooting video. Story, motion, arcs - it’s all material that he needs to deal with to get the next cool image, the next moment. One day he’s going to release a version of Justice League as a series of Viewmaster reels.

Lois Lane, Wonder Woman and Batman look on. For people who have seen Batman v Superman, this moment will register immediately. For anyone else, good luck - you’re thrown into the middle of a scene from a movie you haven’t watched. But the chances are good that if you’re watching this movie, you’ve seen every one of Snyder’s previous works.

The sound waves travel outward, somehow not losing their power as they go. The wave strikes a man in a grey hoodie sitting at a table. He turns, exposing a cybernetic eye. It’s Cyborg! Hey Cyborg. The title “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” comes up. A sickly light shines from his closet. A strange alien box jitters and glows for a moment before abruptly going dark. Uh oh.

The death cry moves on, over Superman’s memorial. Lex Luthor, waist deep in a Kryptonian plasma pool, is watching an alien PowerPoint presentation or Zoom call of Steppenwolf showing him three boxes. Wait, we just saw a box. Will we see two more boxes before these credits are over? I’ll tell you what we don’t see: any further indication that Luthor is involved with Steppenwolf or the mysterious boxes. In fact, we don’t see him until the last few minutes of the movie. Guess that’s all for a sequel.

The death cries dip underwater and reach Atlantis. A second box is perched on a stone column. A few Atlanteans surround it, because box guarding is presumably their steady gig. The sound wave hits the box and it begins to tremble. Amber Heard, who is there, looks concerned. We’ll check in with you later, Atlantis.

From there it’s on to Themyscira, the island of the Amazons. In a squat, rounded building at the edge of a cliff, dozens of warriors surround yet another box on a plinth. How long have they been there? Like the Atlanteans, is surrounding a box with weapons drawn just part of Amazonian shift work? Did they get news of Superman’s death and intuit that their box might react?

I did a quick bit of math to estimate how long an undecaying sound wave would take to get from Metropolis, assuming it’s a stand-in for NYC to Themyscira, again assuming it’s somewhere around the Aegean Sea. The distance is approximately 4900 miles. At a constant rate of 4.7 miles per second Superman’s death rattle would hit the third box in around 17 hours. It’s possible they’ve been keeping an eye on the box for the last day and a half.

At any rate, their box doesn’t just rattle. It cracks. “Alert the Queen!” intones one of the Amazons. They’re going to do a lot of intoning in this movie.

We’re done with the boxes. So we’re done with the credits now, yes? Ha ha, no. We’re only halfway there.

The scene shifts to a shot of a kettle on a campfire. A man and a horse are crossing an icy mountain pass. Cruel spires and crevasses of ice unfurl endlessly. The man eventually reaches a stone outcropping high above a seaside hamlet. He removes his hood and goggles for our benefit. Holy moly, it’s Bruce Wayne. He has a light furze of beard, so we’ve moved forward in time by an unspecified amount. Wayne comes down to the village, where a bunch of white people are standing around outside in a small crowd. Have they come out to greet him? Are these villagers, like the Atlanteans and Amazons, prone to standing around? He passes through them, heading towards a squat white building with a stylized arch in the manner of a whale’s jaw, or an “A”. “Directed by Zack Snyder” appears.

The screen cuts to black. Credits are done! Finally.

Despite the absurd length and slow pace, there’s some heavy narrative lifting going on. It establishes that Superman’s death has immediate consequences. The weird boxes that no one likes are doing things. Everything that happens from this point onward is contingent on his absence.

Compare and contrast: back in 2017, I was certain the credit sequence in the theatrical release was Snyder’s work. It had everything a Snyder fan would expect: a Leonard Cohen cover, mournful shots of grieving people, a slow-motion sequence of a random thug terrorizing a family of bodega owners, and policemen in uniform subduing said thug. Lois Lane and Martha Kent appear, dealing with grief. The focus is still on Superman’s death, but it focuses on a society mourning his loss and the two most important people in Clark Kent’s life. ZSJL is focused on the cosmic scale of the unfolding drama; this one is more interested in humanity. It’s pouring Whedon ore into a Snyder mold.

Zack Snyder's Justice Lube

Bad movies. What’s with those things? (What is up with those baaaad movies?) I don’t mean movies that offer scuzzy pleasures in the vein of Commando or Road House - the cinematic version of a “Don’t argue with your wife, dicker!” T-shirt - but grand follies, born from an obsessive, earnest vision and a complete misunderstanding of that vision’s worth.

Enter Zack Snyder’s Justice League, riding the corpse of a Parademon through a CGI building and walking away unscathed. It’s not just a folly; it was a folly averted and buried, replaced by mediocrity, awoken by the death cries of Snyder fans and now disinterred and shambling across the screen. It is bloated, bizarre, bad and amazing to behold.

So I thought: hey, why not look at every scene of this mishegoss and see what we see? Expect digressions, speculations and plenty of half-baked film analysis. Maybe I’ll get bored partway through. Maybe the experience of watching every scene of ZSJL will defeat me as Steppenwolf’s axe defeated a dozen Amazonian necks. But if we’re lucky, I’ll defeat ZSJL in the exact manner Superman’s body defeated Steppenwolf’s axe. I’ll stand there with an axe blade on my shoulder and say “Not impressed”.

That’s one of Superman’s lines, by the way. It’s not the longest line he gets in the movie, but it’s close.

So what’s going on here?

Glad you asked. This is a scene-by-scene examination of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Every so often I’ll be comparing it to the 2017 theatrical release, which I’ll be referring to as Joss Whedon’s Justice League, or JWJL for short. I’m being a bit cheeky, but I’m committed to this bit so I refuse to back down now. The truth is that the theatrical release is no more “the Whedon cut” than it is the Snyder cut. Whedon is a director for hire here, a script doctor-turned-creator charged with reproducing The Avengers movies inside the dark womb of the DC franchise. It is not a good fit, but there was obviously no good solution here. Justice League is a fascinating mess, and the Snyder cut could only exist in this age of fandom and streaming money.

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00. Introduction (00:00-00:30)

In keeping with Zack Snyder’s maximalist tendencies, the movie is preceded by a short intro - in other words, you’re getting even more movie for your streaming dollar than you expected (depending on where you watch it, you may not get this little intro - I confess to downloading a copy because my streaming service refused to stream). Snyder is seated on the stage of a movie theatre, facing the wings in a direct address. There’s something odd about adding a frontispiece set in a theatre to a movie than can only be viewed at home, in the manner of a cardboard coffee cup with an illustration of a demitasse on its side. Snyder’s palms are pressed together in a gesture of gratitude. His sleeves are rolled up show his many tattoos. He looks a little drawn and tired, as if the process of finishing the movie and bringing it to the screen has worn him down a little.

The clip starts mid-sentence, almost arbitrarily, as if someone had forgotten to hit record (although it’s more likely that Snyder reviewed the footage and decided, for once in his life, that less was more). Snyder thanks “the fans” for bringing his vision to life, even though it’s more accurate to say that HBO Max calculated that the release of Justice League would entice the fans to the streaming service and put them on the path to 150 million subscribers.

There is also the mention of the AFSP, or American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. In early 2017, Snyder’s daughter Autumn committed suicide, which precipitated Snyder’s exit from the film in post-production and its subsequent reshoots by Joss Whedon. The resulting film contained relatively little Snyder footage. Snyder has reportedly never watched the theatrical release.

Comparison time: Bizarrely enough, JWJL has an intro of its own, an iPhone-ratio recording of Superman being interviewed by little kids. “What do you like about humans?” the children ask. Superman, flustered, cannot answer. His grotesquely, digitally depilated upper lip twitches in consternation. He doesn’t invite anyone to watch the movie. He is frozen in place, lightly constipated. It’s 100% Whedon and already wrong.

The Many Missions of the Fast and Furious

AIDAN: Here are the Japanese titles of the first seven Fast and the Furious movies:

Wild Speed
Wild Speed X2
Wild Speed X3 TOKYO DRIFT
Wild Speed MAX
Wild Speed MEGA MAX
Wild Speed EURO MISSION
Wild Speed SKY MISSION

ADAM: SKY MISSION! HOLY SHIT

AIDAN: I know! I can't wait for WILD SPEED: SPACE MISSION

ADAM: TIME MISSION

AIDAN: KITCHEN MISSION

That's Vin Diesel's cooking show.

ADAM: MISSION MISSION - they have to rob a Spanish mission.

AIDAN: FISSION MISSION - They get stuck in a cyclotron.

ADAM: OOOOoooo! IMPOSSIBLE MISSION - they have to kill tom cruise.

AIDAN: Can Dom and the crew catch up to Tom Cruise running full-tilt?

ADAM: And then as they start to catch up, Will Smith laps them.

AIDAN: Then Chris Evans.

ADAM: hahahaha this is the best worst idea ever.

Equals: Joe Silver

Actor: Joe Silver

Role: Felix Dzershinsky, aka. The Guy No One Cares About Except For The Equalizer

Episode: 1x03, "The Defector"

Best known for: As so many of us know, Joe Silver played Captain Jet in Space Funnies from 1955-1960. He also appeared in David Cronenberg's Rabid as Murray Cypher, a name so Cronenbergian that I think Cronenberg had to fight Don DeLillo in an arena on a distant planet to get it.

Did he appear on Law & Order?: Joe Silver died in 1989, which puts him just outside the L&O umbrella.

Robert Urich check: Silver was a guest star on Spenser: For Hire as Guzman in "In a Safe Place". Speaking of Guzmans, Luis Guzman showed up as an unlicensed cab driver on the very next episode of The Equalizer after "The Defector." Coincidence? Well, yeah. Obviously.

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Every episode of The Equalizer is a smorgasbord of incredible guest star talent (except that you may not eat the talent, as you'd except from a smorgasbord of anything). The toughest part of this column is just picking one out of several great actors that seem to pop up constantly. Just by way of example, in episode four alone I had the pleasure of choosing between Luis Guzman, Adam Ant and Lori Petty. Or J.T. Walsh.

In the case of "The Defector," though, it was immediately clear that the subject of Equals should be Joe Silver. I mean, look at that face.

What can I say? That is the face of Joe Silver, the actor who got his start in a role in "Tobacco Road" and worked in shows like "Mr. I. Magination" (Imagine trying to get a show with a name like "Mr. I. Magination" on air nowadays. Mr. P. Laytime? No, let's not do that. Mr. F. Unnibal? My god, what would a funnibal even be?). He was described by a radio announcer as having a voice "so low that when he speaks, he unties your shoelaces." That strikes me as a bit of a nuisance, but it's a great line.

In "The Defector," Silver plays Felix Dzershinsky, a minor functionary at the Soviet embassy and former CIA asset. In the opening moments of the episode, Felix spots a high-ranking KGB agent and contacts his old handler to pass on the information. His handler is - you guessed it - The Equalizer, who now has to convince his former boss to pay attention to Felix and help him defect.

To The Equalizer's disgust, nobody cares about Felix. Every other character in the episode refers to him "a little man" or a "nobody," which infuriates The Equalizer and drives him to recite bitter monologues about the many moral compromises he's had to make over the years.

As for Felix, he dies. 

There he is, dying. In the first act. Just as he's about to defect, a Soviet agent wielding a shotgun takes him out.

The question is: does this make The Equalizer really angry? You bet it does. It also drives him to rescue Felix's daughter Irina (Melissa Leo!) from certain abduction. It leads to a shootout in the country where Soviet heavies are hit by bullets and respond by flinging themselves through glass doors and tumbling abruptly down staircases.

If Silver and Leo weren't enough, the show also shoehorns in Robert Joy as a young CIA agent who first draws The Equalizer's scorn, and later, his grudging admiration. Joy's sunken eyes and shelf of a forehead are one of the great pleasure of late 20th century television.

Look at that cocky young Turk, thinking he can face off with The Equalizer.

Having Felix die so quickly is an unexpected and bold move. This is only a guess on my part, but Silver may have already been suffering from the liver cancer that would kill him a few years later. In the first scene, he is visibly winded from climbing a set of stairs, and he looks pitifully thin and shrunken in his suit. Silver's obvious illness lends a strange sense of tragedy to the repeated insults heaped on his character.

Along with the Le Carre-esque Cold War plot, "The Defector" throws in a B-story about a kid (a spectacularly bad J.D. Roth) getting bullied by a group of unconvincing high school thugs. After some false starts and black eyes, the kid stands up for himself with a few Equalizer-taught moves and the group of bullies folds. Somehow, both his father and The Equalizer are on the scene (there's some serious dream logic at work here) to witness his transition from shy child to aggressive young man. The Equalizer even gives him a thumbs-up, but it looks a little odd because the angle of the camera places his thumb directly in front of his nose. It makes The Equalizer look as if he's subconsciously embarrassed by his own nose, and it suggests that his nose is part thumb. Or maybe he got a little careless with the superglue and now he's in permanent thumbs-up mode.

Imagine Edward Woodward being so pleased with your conduct that he glues his nose to his thumb in your honour. We should all be so lucky.

Equals: James Russo

Welcome to Equals, the ongoing series that takes a frankly unhealthy interest in the guest stars and brief players of '80s television series The Equalizer.

Actor: James Russo (as "Jim Russo")

Role: Police Detective

Episode: 1x02, "China Rain" (1985)

Best known for: James Russo has appeared in 85% of all television shows and movies produced over the last 35 years (generally playing The Last Guy Some Unlucky Loser Tied To A Chair Ever Sees), but viewers may recognize him as the delightfully named Dicky Speck from Django Unchained or Axel Foley's hapless friend Mikey Tandino from Beverly Hills Cop.

Has he appeared on Law & Order?: Astoundingly, no. But he's popped up on modern science-hero investigator franchise CSI as "Sinclair" and its ginger spinoff CSI: MIami as Joey Salucci. 

Robert Urich check: Again no. But I'd like to think there's a field in Eternity where Russo is playing endless games of Red Rover with Robert Urich and Avery Brooks (to be clear, Russo and Brooks are not dead, but everything that will happen in Eternity has always been happening, will always happen, is happening now, dissolving the very notions of time and duration dissolve usw).

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If you've watched any movie or television show that requires gritty Italian-American cops or criminals, you've seen James Russo. His characters tend to have names like Joey Salucci, Papa Lullo or Vince Hood (really). But in The Equalizer, he appears as Police Detective (sadly not Police Justice). Russo gets a couple of scenes with dialogue, where he mostly functions as a foil to say "Your plan sucks" whenever Robert McCall opens his mouth, but his main role is to provide a sense that Yes, these are police detectives doing police-type things. So he fills in that texture: holding a newspaper with a hint of impatience, lighting a cigarette with a slight Fuck it, might as well grab a smoke note of insouciance, or staring aggressively at whoever's speaking. He's a background character, in the sense that he's in the middle or background of nearly every scene.

Russo only comes to the foreground once or twice, when he has something to say. I'm not going to trouble you with the plot of "China Rain," which revolves around a botched kidnapping, Chinese gang members and a whole lot of Orientalist stereotypes, but Police Detective's lines all seemed geared to point out that The Equalizer's plans are a pile of horse dung.

His IMDb bio claims that Russo is "possessed of a stare that bring shivers down one's back," which makes you wonder who the hell writes those bios, but you can see a trace of it here. His chief character note seems to be I'm Police Detective and I'm putting in for a transfer to a precinct where the lieutenant doesn't hang out with some overdressed vigilante chump who shows up at a kidnap and tells the cops what to do. Does anybody else think this is ridiculous? Anyone? No? Man, what a bunch of crap.

For further reference, here is a rundown of firearms that James Russo has used in film and television.