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