Justice League vs. The Snyder Cut - Filmmaking Comparison

[Music] [Applause] the most obvious difference between the two versions of the film is the tone there's so many examples i could use to illustrate this but even the opening seconds of the film clue us into how wildly different each of these films are going to be in terms of how they frame their stories tone is constructed through a lot of different elements of the filmmaking how you light a scene makes a difference weed and re-shot scenes like this one in the airplane the lighting of the original snyder version is just way more moody and whedon's shooting stuff a lot more like a comedy and we see more of the image more clearly that has an effect on tone it's already here for the same shots how they're color graded affects tone the choice of music is a big element [Music] even the choice of a prop like a shovel can affect the tone of the film in this video i'm going to go into all those little differences in the filmmaking of the two versions of justice league how they differ and how those differences affect tone pacing and ultimately the overall experience of watching the film thanks to mubi for sponsoring this video [Music] well i think the snyder cut is a far from perfect film i found it way more compelling entertaining and interesting than the original which honestly kind of bored me out of my mind but i wanted to know why what exactly were the differences and why did i enjoy the snyder cut so much more i watched the two films back to back and then loaded them into my editor to see exactly how much overlap and how many differences there were snyder was already a significant way into the production of justice league when joss whedon was brought on by the studio to try to make some changes that they wanted snyder had to step away and whedon ended up finishing the film what we're getting to see now is the snyder cut which is what snyder originally intended for the film to be plus about 70 million dollars of additional shooting whedon's version has about 16 scenes that are re-shot he also added about seven new scenes that aren't in the snyder cut at all there are about 22 scenes that are in both films but are just edited differently and about 24 scenes that are in the snyder cut that aren't in the weeding cut at all but it's not about tallying up all the little differences in terms of plot or content what i want to focus on are the smaller changes that affect the film's pace tone and story this is not a discussion of how each of these films treat the superhero lore or toxic fandoms or the drama behind the scenes i want to play film detective to find out exactly why i liked one of these so much more and bring you along for the ride to see what we can learn along the way let's break down a scene and see how several different elements can work together to affect the tone in both versions of this scene aquaman has rescued a guy from a shipwreck he drops him off at a pub asks for a whiskey grabs the whole bottle and walks away diving into the sea but the tone and therefore what each scene represents for the character and the story is radically different in the original justice league this moment is kind of like [Music] and in this version it's struggling fighting his inner demons and you know pushing through it or something like that you could argue about which of these is better which sets up the character better i think the tone of the song that snyder chooses fits sort of the aesthetic of what's on screen a lot better but if we look back earlier in the scene we can see that the way the scene is cut also affects the tone in the snyder cut the representation of aquaman as brooding and melancholic is bolstered by the bartender's reaction to him and his awkward walk to the door the weeding cut avoids this using either a different take or recut to portray aquaman as more confident and also gives the scene more energy by adding a smash cut to bring in the music i think it's pretty clear that a lot of the motivation behind the changes that were made for the weed inversion were made to try to change the film's tone they went to great lengths to try to do this some of the more ridiculous examples include changing the design of the drawing of the parademons or replacing the skull on the screen and flash's lair with a k-pop music video i guess besides these aesthetic elements obviously a big part of establishing a tone also comes down to the writing of scenes and dialogue you had enough to deal with don't need to add mother-in-law to the list but i found a little place that suits me just fine right by the diner i'm not here for help whedon is reshooting scenes or adding in lines that are more jokey and uh you're gorgeous and fierce and strong i don't think really a lot of these land okay but so far i've only shown that the tone is different in the snyder cut none of this explains why it's better snyder's darker brooding moody tone has often been criticized in the past and warner brothers dc as a studio have kind of wanted to potentially lean away from this like overly brooding like dark tone that snyder has brought to a lot of these films part of what the studio on seems like whedon was trying to do was to sort of change the tone honestly into something a little more marvelous the way i see it there's not an objectively best tone like light and fun isn't somehow objectively better than like moody and dark as an individual you might prefer a lighter or darker tone personally but what i think is the most important in telling an effective story is having a tone that is consistent and one that matches with the story you're trying to tell in the original version the tone just feels forced because well it is it really clashes with the existing material that's there and what you end up with is a movie that has scenes like this kalel no right along scenes like this this janitor's wife had some strong words for the aliens she says stole her man if whedon had maybe been trying to make his version of this movie from the start maybe a lighter more fun tone would have worked but this attempt to sort of force a lot of what snyder had already done into the box of being a fun film it wasn't working that's not to say snyder's tone is perfect there are still places where the tone feels a little weird or over the top to me but it actually feels like a movie that knows what it wants to feel like and come across as rather than the original which just felt like an attempt to copy paste an avengers color grade over top of an existing moody film i also think it just speaks to this weird debate about tone that i think completely misses the point of dc versus marvel films i think a lot of fans and the studio themselves misidentified the difference between these films as primarily a tonal one i mean the tones are definitely different but the reason the marvel films are more successful is because they've generally been better made more entertaining better written films they just also happen to have a lighter tone but because that's an easy to spot difference between the two it's something fans complain about when the dc films aren't as good and then the studio thinks hey if we just make it have a lighter tone it'll do better the dark knight has one of the darkest tones of any superhero film and it's one of the most popular you don't achieve marvel's success by just mimicking their tone you do it by telling stories that are as engaging and entertaining to your audience take a look at both versions of the scene that introduces wonder woman and pay attention to the differences in pacing the first thing you'll notice comparing the two is just how much longer the lead up to the action is in the snyder cut by the time the van has pulled up to the building in the snyder cut in the original the baddie is already out of the van and has shot through several victims the basic structure of the scene is the same in both versions the terrorists come in takes some hostages wonder woman is introduced and then she saves the day but the original cuts four minutes out of the scene over half its original length and it does so without sacrificing any plot information which works if your goal is simply to cut down the running time so while what's cut doesn't affect the clarity of what's going on it does dramatically affect how the scene feels this time spent on the long walk up to where the hostages are in the snyder cut that is mostly trimmed out of the original it might feel unnecessary but that extra minute of building tension and danger before wonder woman is introduced creates suspense and makes it more impactful when she is revealed and in the snyder cut after we see wonder woman we go back inside the building spending some time with the bad guys and in the perspective of the hostages again it further builds suspense because now we're waiting to see when and where wonder woman will step in in the original wonder woman is revealed and then she just immediately gets to work and saves the day and all the tension is lost the scene is reduced to its most fundamental action and plot points the snyder cut also contains this moment which helps humanize and develop wonder woman as a character a bit something she's really lacking in the original this pattern kind of replicates itself throughout a lot of the scenes that are in both films and in some scenes it's not even a an instance of taking out big chunks of the scene it's just trimming every shot like a little bit so that it flows faster [Music] it's clear from both behind the scenes reports and just seeing the two versions side by side that a big priority for the studio was reducing the running time instead of aiming for the running time that was necessary to convey the story they were trying to tell the studio had a goal of achieving a specific running time and in the process of cutting all that material down to the running time they wanted they ended up pacing the film too quickly and removing a lot of the stuff that makes it an enjoyable engaging film it's about finding the pace that's right for the story you're trying to tell for justice league there's a lot going on the script is written as a sort of epic there are a lot of characters that need to be introduced a lot of moving pieces in the plot and slowing down the pace helps us understand all of these things and feel their significance here's an example would you like to have some uh no thank you if you put the water in first of course so we don't a little scene between wonder woman and alfred about having tea might feel inconsequential and unimportant but it has an impact on how we perceive the story first it develops their characters a little bit seeing them do something mundane and relatable makes them feel more human second it indicates the passage of time seeing the characters killing time and doing something that isn't directly related to advancing the plot makes it feel like there's story happening while we're not around watching this adds to the film's sense of scale and actually makes it feel like it's taking a while for this team to assemble it's not just something that happens overnight the biggest issue with the original is the fact that they just tried to force a running time onto a story that was meant to be much longer they did attempt to rewrite and cut some things out so that the story fit into the shorter running time but i don't think they did enough most of the time when it's a scene that shows up in both versions i like the version that's in the snyder cut a lot more in the original justice league it just feels like a montage where we're jumping from one thing to the next as quickly as possible now i can't talk about pacing and give the snyder cut a free pass the snyder cut has pacing issues in a different way the original tries to do too much in too little time and the snyder cut tries to do too much in too much time i personally like the snyder cut better because i think it contains the elements that are necessary for the story to feel significant emotional and for there to actually be some suspense and tension but it also contains a lot of additional clutter that does distract from the best elements of the film in terms of both pacing and running time i think the best version of this film overall would land somewhere in between the two all of this pacing is coming from basically differences in the editing and the editing in the two films is not that dramatically different outside of the pacing most of the places you're pulling from the same footage to edit the scene so it's not like in the original whedon cut the scenes are you know using dramatically different angles or anything like that mostly it's the same camera angles being used it's just tighter pacing cutting through things cutting out anything that's unnecessary to the plot there are definitely some instances where different shots are used however here editing is being used to manage the tone the snyder cut is darker we see the violence in a little bit more of a visceral way and the weeding cut kind of tries to avoid that we stay on the villain's face and we don't see who he's shooting and so here editing is being used to kind of manage the tone as well and try to keep the film a little bit lighter in the original cut the resurrection of superman shows how even small changes can have a big impact on how significant the scene feels here's how they raise the idea in the original if you were in a conductive field boost from the mother box could bring him back to life it's just kind of tossed out as an idea here's snyder's cut i know we're all thinking the same thing right now who's gonna say it i'm not gonna say it maybe a little bit overly dramatic but you get the idea it feels more important more epic more significant one of the things that bothered me about the original is that this moment felt a little anticlimactic and [Music] insignificant and in the snyder cut i think it hits much harder there's also a big difference in how they set up the stakes at the moment of revival as a viewer you kind of know that it's already going to work so you have to infuse this scene with some kind of drama in the original there's just a general sense that things might go wrong aquaman literally says this is crazy and this is a bad idea but we don't really have an idea of why the only real conflict here is the setup that you have to charge it the moment it touches the fluid which is just kind of lame and a little trite and weakens the scene compare that to the snyder cut where the heroes need to resurrect superman but they know using the cube risks action is summoning steppenwolf who's afraid you're no stupid wolf will come forward you know that already continued it creates a possible cost to their actions and they're willing to pay that on top of that the conflict with flash shifts from he needs to time things just right too he's pushing his abilities to their utter limit i don't like to break this rule but when i approach the speed of light i look crazy things happen to time but if i do it i create massive electrical power which feels more significant and also plays into a payoff that comes at the end of the film as superman is being revived it's intercut with these scenes of lois lane kind of going about her life and then we get this moment where she sees him and this creates an emotional arc for this section these moments are all cut out of the original and you can cut those out because like technically they're they're not really important to the plot lois lane like doing stuff going about her day leading up to this moment it doesn't affect the plot but there's more that's important to a interesting entertaining film than just like the step-by-step beats of the plot we need emotion one of the ways to generate emotion is reaction and so if you have this character there we see how they're reacting and responding feels more emotional one of the things that i really didn't like about the original cut was just i never felt connected to any of the characters they didn't seem very human i didn't have time to really connect with their emotions there wasn't much backstory involved here and you can launch some of those complaints still about the snyder cut but you definitely get way more of this kind of thing in the snyder cut and i think a lot of that just has to do with the fact that there is more room to breathe you're actually spending some time with the characters a great example of this is cyborg and his relationship with his father we get all this detail about his backstory then there's a subplot with his father who ends up sacrificing himself and it gives the character a little bit of an emotional arc there's actually some emotion some personal human backstory happening here and this just all gets cut out in the original i think it's also worth saying that the snyder cut does push this stuff like too far in some cases like when we're setting up the backstory for cyborg we probably don't need the hugely dramatic scene of bulls fighting to represent the stock market the world's monetary systems and its complex interactions will seem as easy to manipulate for you and the scene where he's like hacking an atm to give money to a poor family those both kind of establish the same thing and it's a little redundant and the movie's four hours long so overall i'd rather have a little bit too much development so that i actually become invested in the characters than none at all like we see in the original let me show you a cool example that shows just how significantly context and setup can impact our perception of a moment by looking at the scene where the heroes fight together for the first time so going into a scene like this you have the conflict of the heroes are teaming up for the first time and they're trying to go in and take out this target but what makes a scene like this even more interesting is if you give it additional layers of conflict and both films do this but differently in the snyder cut we have cyborg cyborg's dad is in with the hostages and so there's this emotional conflict within cyborg they are trying to not attack individually they want to work all together but cyborg ends up breaking that rule because he wants to save his dad help his dad in the whedon version since the story line between cyborg and his dead has kind of been cut out i'm assuming they kind of reshoot or add in this element of the flash being nervous about whether or not he's going to be useful full transparency i've never done battle i've just pushed some people and run away save one what this affects the way we see the two scenes when i watch the original version this moment felt very significant it felt like sort of the culmination of his arc for the scene because he was in conflict am i going to be able to be helpful and then super stylized fashion he's shown being helpful and it sort of resolves the arc of that conflict in the snyder cut we don't have that setup and so when you get to this moment it's just a little bit of a cool thing the last thing i have to say about stakes is to address one of the few things that was actually added in the weeding cut which is this russian family that lives near where the baddies hive has been established normally i would applaud the motivation behind something like this one of my complaints about a lot of superhero films is that the stakes feel very distant from the reality of saving real people in the world in the snyder cut we don't get a visible sense that there are real people in danger there's mostly this abstract concept of evil looming threatening to destroy the planet so in theory having something like this family should help the stakes feel more human immediate and relatable except that it doesn't because it's so clearly just a patched in attempt to try to do just that since it was added in after the fact nothing that's going on with this family feels like it was connected to anything else and the payoff just ends up being a lame moment and a cheap joke this is a great example of the solution being worse than the problem i love the idea of trying to add a more human pedestrian element to make things more relatable and the stakes more immediate but how you do something often matters just as much or more than what you do in a film i think of my notes i have written down for this scene real cornfield like here the cornfield they're standing in to me actually feels like real in the snyder cut in the weed and cut the original it just just feels fake for whatever reason whether it's just bad taste on joss whedon's part or whether it's just that he had less money or was working quickly a lot of the reshoots that he's doing that are in the original justice league are just not well done the quality of the writing is low quality the quality of the cg is is lower this also applies to the bad guy like this version just looks like a bad video game character to me and this version looks more real a little more sinister even hey we need a scene with some exposition to patch in this scene that we cut out for time and so it's like oh instead of going to an inventive location or something interesting we'll just shoot gal gadot and ben affleck like walking beside a lake or something i understand why the snyder cut is four hours long don't get me wrong snyder had the opportunity to release his cut shoot some additional material and just put out whatever he wanted for the fans and he took it but i'm trying to evaluate this as just a film and take it out of the context as sort of a pop culture lore collectible item and i know a lot of people love the fact that a certain someone shows up but when i look at the film as a contained story i often wonder what on earth is this scene even doing here so that's my best shot at diagnosing the technical reasons why i think the snyder cut is so much better on a lot of levels if i had to actually give my review of the snyder cut i don't think i could say it better than rich from red letter media zack snyder's cut of the justice league is an unbutchered mess that's true while watching six hours of justice league material was a nice diversion for a week i think i've reached my quota of superhero stuff for at least two years now so it's back to talking about bergman and whatever else it is i do on a regular basis if you're like me you want to break and you want to explore some other kinds of film i recommend you pick out something to watch on mubi i recently watched dark star a documentary about the artist h.r geiger who designed the xenomorphs for the alien films you could check out that or you could check out the holy mountain which like the justice league is about a group of people who come together to honestly it's nothing like the justice league and it's probably nothing like anything else you will ever watch and that's what i love about mubi here you'll find fascinating interesting stuff that it's difficult or impossible sometimes to find anywhere else and that's because they have a team of people hand-picking interesting stuff for you to watch on their platform right now my list of stuff that i want to watch on there is getting so long it's kind of getting out of hand so if you want to expand your exposure to international art house and classic films with access to a library that's hand curated and is updated daily give mooby a try by going to mubi.com thomasflight click the link in the description or go to mubi.com thomasflight that'll give you an extended 30-day free trial when you sign up for free to try mubi thank you so much for watching and a huge thank you to my patrons who really help support my channel and what i'm doing when you become a patron you can get access to additional content i make i do a podcast every month where i talk about what i've been watching i make bonus review videos where i let my patrons choose a movie for me to watch every month and then i review it there's a discord where you can ask me questions hang out and discuss things learn how you can become a patron and join the community by going to patreon.com thomasflight

Channel: Thomas Flight

Views: 1,698,585

Rating: 4.8787246 out of 5

Keywords: Video Essay, Thomas Flight, Justice League, The Snyder Cut, Zach Snyder, Joss Whedon, Justice League vs. The Snyder Cut, Justice League 2017, Justice League 2021, Zach Snyder's Justice League, Justice League Comparison, Snyder Cut Comparison, Compared, Justice League Differences, Snyder Cut Differences, Snyder Cut better, DC vs Marvel, Snyder Cut Review, VFX, Editing, Snyder Cut Joker, Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Cyborg, Flash

Id: uemtKijCHyQ

Length: 26min 4sec (1564 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LukeStarKiller54321]

why does Ben look like a different person between the two and also at the very end of ZSJL. i get it’s been a few years but he looked really different

[u/TheJusticeDweeb]

He was fit and healthy during the original principal photography... not so much during the Joss reshoots. At the very end of ZSJL is something shit recently so he’s not as fit but still healthy

[u/FN-1701AgentGodzilla]

Whedon is so bad at making films look good by himself lol