Justice League

Justice League stays true, for the most part, to what it advertised: a movie about five iconic superheroes who need little-to-no introduction getting together (right now, over me) in order to stop a villain who wasn't noteworthy enough to show up in the trailers, that may or may not have anything to do with Superman.  There has been several different marketing tools employed domestically across the world that both imply that he is in the film, and things that imply that he isn't, and a lot of it is fake and deliberately misleading in order to get people speculating.  So, out of respect to Warner Bros., I won't reveal whether or not Superman comes back or if they were gutsy enough to keep him dead.

With that in mind, what do you have?

Batman.  Everyone knows who this is. The only difference to this Batman that I think needs introduction is that his main schtick this time around doesn't seem to be his batty obsession with his dead parents, but a sense of guilt over Superman's death.  This is the first time that I've ever seen Batman depicted on film with friendship being a major part of his identity.

Wonder Woman.  Everyone's favorite character at this point.  The movie acknowledges some important parts from her origins movie earlier this year.

These two decide that they're going to start a team based off of cameos from previous films, consisting of the following three:

Aquaman: A bigger outsider than Batman ever was, and with a complicated backstory with Shakespearean family drama that's complicated enough that he's naturally the next one to get his own film.  He reminds me a bit of the brooding Superman from Man of Steel, but it does fit the character a little better.  However, he's the character who will probably endear people the least.

Cyborg: The most obscure  of these characters, but at the same time can be summed up in one sentence.  His father tried fusing him with alien technology to save his life, and now he's afraid of the technology that's taking over his body and possibly his mind.

The Flash: Barry Allen, everyone.  Probably the most famous superhero outside of the Big Three.  He says it as briefly as possible, that be got struck by lightning.  Now he's fast, can go into some alternate dimension, and has the Speed Force.  He doesn't have any friends, and it the most eager to join the Justice League.  It should be noted that he is responsible for all of the movie's best moments.

They must fight Steppenwolf, a cool-looking villain played by a Shakespearean actor who delivers his few lines very well.  He's of the  Marvel variety, a forgettable villain; however, I personally really enjoyed him, if only because I really enjoyed the actor's performance.  Steppenwolf's plan is to gather the Mother Boxes, an all-powerful force, and transform Earth into that red place that you saw in the trailers, which he would get away with if it wasn't for the Justice League.

That's it.  That's the film in a nutshell.  I think that it does a fairly decent job, and will keep people entertained.  It doesn't have the gravitas and level of excitement and payoff that The Avengers did five years ago, but I think that people will be more satisfied if they go in thinking of it as a pilot episode for a DC animated show, since it has about a similar feel.  There were certain moments that took me back to these kind of shows.  Even Steppenwolf, as underdeveloped as he was, reminded me of villains who show up in a pilot episode to get introduced as a larger series villain who will get  more development later.

I would also recommend this movie especially to people who haven't seen Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, on account of this film deciding to ignore major issues from them.  It's very clear that DC wants to do a course-correct and wishes that they never made the first two films the way that they did, meaning that they're not only changing tone, but they're changing characters to fit their beloved comic-book counterparts with no in-universe reason.

---

Other pros and cons:

Great cinematography.  Everything directed by Zack Snyder looks gorgeous.  In fact, I don't say this too often, but it looks even richer in 3D.

Poor sound editing.  There were times when sound played an important part in storytelling, and it really should have been edited to make the film far more immersive.

The editing!  This is where most  people complain.  It's very obvious that there are quite a few deleted scenes, because the scenes that remain, especially in the beginning, don't directly flow into each other and interrupt the momentum that the film is trying to build up.  However, each scene on its own is pretty cool.  The other editing problem is in Warner Bros.'s mandate to keep the film under two hours, including the credits.  So the film feels like it's about an hour and a half long (hence why I compare it to their animated pilots), and that just wasn't  long enough to build up some important conflicts and play off of character chemistry.  I feel that the second act in particular could have had several extra scenes to help build up to several key character choices.  The inevitable extended cut of this movie will probably drastically improve on this.  However, it would have been nice to see all of these extra story on the big screen.

The music pleased me.  Greatly.  They distanced themselves from everything having to do with Hans Zimmer and embraced a lot of their more classical music that I hear from their television shows and their video games, and it took me to a nostalgic place.  You hear hints of the original Batman theme, and the original Superman theme, and Wonder Woman's theme gets a makeover so that instead of playing on an electric cello, she makes her entrance to trumpets, which I think takes her good theme and makes it great.  The best new piece of music easily belongs to the Flash.  It plays whenever he goes into speed mode, and I truly loved it.

The costumes were great.  The Flash once again gets my praise, because his costume is almost exactly what I always imagined that it would look like.

I will defend this film against comparisons to The Avengers, since most of the comparisons being made stem from similarities in the comics.  Steppenwolf is compared to Loki on the basis of them both having horned helmets, but they both had those in the comics.  The Parademons have been compared to the Chitauri, but the Parademons have been in the comics longer.  The Mother Boxes as a generic source of power has been compared to the Tesseract, but again, this is ancient comics stuff.  Most other comparisons after that come off as stretches, for me.  Like, the fact that Wonder Woman knows who Steppenwolf is, and Thor knows who Loki is.  Ahem, that's lame.

Anyway, I enjoyed it enough that for whatever reason I watched it twice on its own merits.  I like these characters especially and it's pretty awesome to finally see them depicted on film.  Especially the Flash.  Goodness, can't you tell that I liked everything with the Flash?

Thor: Ragnarok

People said that this was going to be a buddy cop film, but it really isn't.  I have no idea how people came up with that description.  I didn't even get that impression from the trailers, and now that I've seen the film, I can definitely say that it isn't that type of film.

People said that this was going to be a Planet Hulk film, but it really isn't.  There's not a lot of time spent exploring the world of gladiators so much as joking about it.  The world is still pretty cool, though.

People said that this had the most jokes out of any Marvel film, and I can't really verify that without painstakingly going back and taking a tally of every joke ever told in each Marvel film.  It could very well be, though, since there are a lot of jokes.

Previous films said that this was going to go a certain way and...yeah, here's where there was strait-up false advertising.  That post-credits scene from Doctor Strange was pulled out of context and gave me a very different impression of what sort of film this would be.  I also find myself having a reason for disliking Avengers: Age of Ultron because that one scene was unnecessary.

The actual trailers, I think, did much more to make people want to see this film than any easter-eggs from other films.  I think that most people are going to be satisfied.  It's funny, visually pleasing, has that techno music that  got everyone excited, has some decent action, and it has Thor, Loki, and the Hulk all in one movie, all with nice chemistry.  It's a recipe for success.

But this is where I admit that, for the most part, was disappointed with the film.  I'm not really sure if this is a sequel to the last Thor movie or the last Avengers movie.  As a means of capping off the Thor trilogy, I actually think that it's a bad film.  "What?" you say.  "You're calling this a bad film?"  Well no, not entirely.  It just doesn't really serve the Thor trilogy all that well.

For starters, there's Jane Foster, a.k.a. the beautiful Natalie Portman, a.k.a. the women I'd turn to the Dark Side, pledge my allegiance to a Satanic megalomaniac, and kill a thousand younglings for.  The first two films set her up, and I was curious to see where they would take her.  It turns out, she's not in this film.  All that buildup — nothing.  Perhaps she'll appear in some future film, but she most naturally belongs in the climax of Thor's personal story.  Without her, I don't feel like you had a complete story arc for Thor.

The storyline with Odin is also pretty underwhelming.  I just expected something far more satisfying, but it was hardly there and made almost no impact.  And then the villain arrives, and her arrival wasn't really built up to and didn't feel quite as foreboding as you'd expect.  Somehow, emo Cate Blanchett with awesome-thorn-helmet didn't make much of an impression.

Then there's the lack of a sense of finality.  When I said that this movie just as much of a sequel to the Avengers movies, it's more than that, because it's also a giant buildup to Avengers: Infinity War.  It not only feels like it picked up from where other films left off, but it also has no sense of finality, because it's clearly leading into future films.  So it neither caps off a trilogy, nor is it a standalone film.  I wish that it had, at least, felt like a definitive ending to Thor's story, but it didn't feel quite that way.

The humor was good, but I found that I actually didn't laugh too much at it.  There were times when it actually ruined moments that could have been legitimately epic, too, so it actually frustrated me.  There were moments that were simply designed to be epic, but they either didn't get enough time dedicated to them before cutting away, or the humor took away the awesomeness.  For example, the climax.  That could have been pretty amazing, but I actually didn't feel too invested, and though the visuals were pretty good, the subversive humor kept on reminding me that there was nothing really at stake, and I couldn't quite get invested in the action scenes as action scenes.  Ironically, I found myself more invested in the final fight in Wonder Woman.  The best action scene in the film is probably the one in the trailers, where Thor fights with Hulk (and wins, easily), which had the least humor in the film and simultaneously the best humor because it's the type of humor that gets you invested in the conflict.

There was one joke, though.  On one hand, it was a callback to everyone's favorite joke from The Avengers, but on the other hand, I also happen to think that it's one of the funniest jokes in the entire MCU.  But it's still pretty good.  I anticipated it, actually, and I laughed for an uncomfortably long time in the middle of the theater because of it.

As it happens, although I didn't feel the stakes, the stakes actually were real.  I've said that there are things that I didn't like, but what I did like, which I think that this did better than most Marvel movies, was that it made some serious decisions that ended up having permanent repercussions.  There are changes to the mythology that will carry over in to future films that will have a lasting effect on the landscape of the MCU, I'd argue even more than Civil War did.

At the end of the day, I'd say that the film is pretty funny and captures almost exactly what everybody either seems to love or hate about the MCU.  I'd personally have put less emphasis on the humor and more on the balls-to-the-wall creativity of the settings, but that's just me.  In order to get the most entertainment out of this film, you should go in expecting something that will do a great job of setting the stage for Avengers: Infinity War.  I'd recommend that everyone go see it — once.  Because it's such a middle film, I actually don't think that it's worth worth watching a second time until it comes out on DVD and you want to go on an MCU marathon.