242 min | R | March 18, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A dead Superman leaves Earth defenseless, so Batman assembles a league of gods to hold the line against an alien invasion. Zack Snyder finally gets his full vision restored, and it is enormous. The vision is the problem.
A god dies and the world goes dark. Batman gathers a team of metahumans to stop Steppenwolf from terraforming Earth into a wasteland. Bruce Wayne builds the Justice League out of guilt over Superman’s death. That is the engine. The restored cut is really about Zack Snyder treating comic-book spectacle as scripture. He films his heroes as deities and asks the audience to kneel.
Ray Fisher plays Victor Stone as a young man mourning the body he lost and the father who saved him. His Cyborg arc is the emotional spine, and Fisher gives it real grief. Ben Affleck plays Bruce Wayne with a fatigue that reads as penance, and Gal Gadot plays Diana Prince with a conviction the script keeps interrupting for exposition. Jason Momoa swaggers through Arthur Curry with little to do, and Ezra Miller plays Barry Allen as comic relief that lands once and then repeats. Ciarán Hinds voices Steppenwolf under armor and pixels, and the villain stays a blank no matter how the camera worships him. Henry Cavill returns as a Superman the film orbits rather than a character it writes.
Zack Snyder directs in his signature register of slow motion and desaturated color, and he presents the whole film in a boxy 4:3 frame that stacks each hero against the full height of the screen. Chris Terrio structures the script as six titled chapters and an epilogue. The division lets every character breathe before the team forms, and it also exposes the bloat, because long stretches exist only to seed sequels that never arrive. Snyder stages action as a chain of frozen poster compositions, and the relentless slow motion drains the fights of momentum. The gray and gold palette stops reading as a mood and starts reading as a filter.
The restored version proves the disowned theatrical cut was a butchering. It also proves the material never justified this much reverence. Snyder gives Cyborg the arc he deserves and hands everything else more weight than it can carry. The film is a monument to one director’s conviction, and conviction is not the same as discipline. It treats every beat as epic, so nothing in it feels earned.