Paul Clarke

It’s hard to express just how much better this film is than the original cut. It’s a long slog but ultimately the characters, their relationships, their motivations and their sorrows are so much more precisely defined. In the original cut I found it hard to muster any empathy at all for any of the characters and put plainly, I didn’t care if they lived or died. ZSJL works hard to correct that; the DCEU always came across as a ham-fisted attempt to compete with Marvel Studios and the fingerprints of studio executives was clearly visible of everything beyond Man of Steel as they tried to force through in three movies a narrative comparable to what Marvel had done in seven or eight. To correct those poor production choices this new cut had to be long. It had to do all the heavy lifting and make up for a plethora of missed opportunities. I wouldn’t even have tried. I had long since consigned the DCEU to the “oh well, that’s over”, pile. Amazingly though Snyder has managed to turn what was, and let’s be fair here, a steaming turd of a movie into something that is not only passable but is actually enjoyable and engaging. It bears only a passing resemblance to its previous iteration and is all the better for it even managing to set up some intriguing possibilities for the future. It is what it always should have been - a serious and darker alternative to Marvel rather than trying to replicate the MCU. Will it be enough to save the lumbering franchise that has seemingly stumbled to its knees? Who knows? It certainly looks like it’s getting its footing again though.