What I Loved About the Snyder Cut - Spoiler Review!

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to my spoiler review of zack snyder's justice league aka the snyder cut i did my non-spoiled review a couple days ago on wednesday right before the movie came out so if you haven't seen the movie and you're looking for just a regular review that doesn't really give much away you can check that review out now go watch the movie it'll take you about half a day but you can go watch the movie come back and we'll talk about the movie here because this is going into all of the nitty-gritty all the spoilers all the big reveals that the movie had in store it was a movie that i liked very much i enjoyed going back to it as i was prepping for this review and reliving the things that i liked there are a couple of flaws with the movie and we'll talk about it a little bit but this is largely going to be about what i really really loved about this cut of the movie because there was a lot that i liked especially when you compare it but not only when you compare it to the version that we got in 2017 that was the hybrid version between the stuff that jax zack snyder did and the stuff that joss whedon did let's jump right into it we're going to be going into it part by part and i'm just going to point out some things some changes that i liked and some other things that i thought were really cool but one thing i want to talk about real quick was the aspect ratio the framing of the film because it's something that has caused a lot of discussion there was already some discussion with the trailers and stuff it wasn't something that i really got the the first time when we saw the first trailer cut of this trailer back at the dc fandom event last year it is an odd choice it's an interesting choice but i think there's some things that people don't exactly get yes there are black bars to the sides of the screen because it was shot at 1.33 to 1 which is called academy ratio it's not imax ratio which is a mistake i made when i was trying to explain this on twitter imax ratio is slightly different imax ratio is 1.43 to 1. the basic difference in the reasoning behind this and if you know this already i'm sorry i know this has been explained ad nauseam in different places but i also wanted to mention in my review was i'm not saying that it's for everybody and and honestly this this it also doesn't mean that this is exactly what you would have seen let's say we live in a universe where zack snyder stayed in control of this movie from beginning to end and and shot the whole movie in this aspect ratio that also doesn't mean that you would have gone to a theater and seen it the way that it's shown on hbo max what probably would have happened is imax theaters would have shown it in the 1.4 three to one ratio so you would have had it on a big screen uh you know you would have had stuff off to the side it'd be less noticeable because you're at an imac screen and it's huge and not your television screen but then probably for normal theaters for standard theaters you would have had something closer to what joss whedon and the creative team did with the actual justice league theatrical version which was they took zack snyder's frames and then the stuff that he shot what you're seeing in the existing 2017 version of justice league is the frame that he shot but zoomed in so you can see that you lose the some of the information at the top of the frame you lose some of the information at the bottom of the frame and that's probably what you would have seen in a standard theater that's what happened with justice league in 2017 for the whole movie i suspect if zack snyder had stayed at the helm when it was released back in 2017 you also would have had for standard theaters that same adjustment and then probably it would have been released on blu-ray 4k etc the way that it is now on hbo max they're doing this with batman v superman as well the reason i'm pointing this out and running you through it is that it's not that i'm saying you have to agree with it aesthetically but i think there is a there's a there's a conception out there that you're seeing less of the frame because zack snyder made some kind of crazy decision to shoot it like an old tv show which is not exactly what it did it it is in the same ratio technically this four by three square frame but he actually shot that intentionally to get more of the height to be able to to show these opposing figures on a big imac screen the intention was never for it to premiere on hbo max and zack snyder has said before that he looks forward to the days when you can have a big wide release of this movie and imax maybe that'll be down the road a few months from now i'm not defending his decision necessarily because i can honestly see it both ways i think a lot of these images are stunning the way that snyder has composed them in this 4-3 i think some of them have a little too much head space because you have to plan for it potentially to be adjusted if you're going onto a smaller screen so i could see it both ways but but really i just wanted to talk about the intentionality of it the reasoning behind it and the fact that uh you know for everyone that's saying like well i want the version where you see more of the picture well when you zoom in uh to be a full widescreen picture you're actually seeing less of the picture you see the most picture in this 4-3 you can like it you cannot like it but i just wanted to kind of get the the factual reasoning behind all of that out so without further ado let's go into what i really liked about this cut and you know there are some things that overlap with the version that we got in 2017 there's some new stuff and i found that i generally liked almost everything better at least in some form uh in this cut than i did in the 2017 cut or maybe it was about equivalent there were a lot of trade-offs and i'll talk about them where i'll say like well you know what i liked this better from the 2017 version but i liked this more so it's worth the trade-off but the thing that we really open on is this direct tie-in to batman v superman we see superman screaming the scream echoing around the world this may this sequence may have gone on a tad too long but what i do like number one is that you have this direct connection you're basically picking up this movie from where batman v superman left off and it ties even more closely the consequences of superman's death because you see this this sonic event this world event and i like that you're going around the world and you see people noticing that it's happening you go to atlantis you go to the maschira the first act i would have to say or i should say the first part most of it or a lot of it is repeat stuff from from the the version the 2017 version uh but with different stuff added you have the recruitment scene with batman and aquaman the one thing i will say about this scene is the singing was a little much um i get the intention behind it and i think if it's been half the length uh but but especially for so early in the cut the fact that you have so much of that singing and the you know looking out and sweater sniffing etc again it's not i'm not gonna i'm not gonna get hung up on it although i did think it was kind of funny as they were showing these long this long approach sequences bruce wayne is riding up to the cliff overlooking where he's going to find aquaman and it's it's a bit extra it protracted and i thought it would be kind of funny if the snyder cut was this for two hours just like bruce wayne traveling in real time to meet aquaman for two hours and then the rest of the movie is just the the cut that came out in 2017. uh that would be a very that would be very cruel prank but also i have to admit a pretty funny one too following this we get the first restored scene that i actually liked and and got me of the first of many times saying like why did you cut this out which is the alfred and bruce scene where bruce is coming back from failing to recruit aquaman and alfred has that great line maybe a guy who broods in the cave alone isn't cut out to be a recruiter which is a great kind of pithy line from alfred and jeremy irons in general um we'll get to who i think suffered the most from the omissions that were made in this movie but i think that the character of alfred and his interactions with the other characters in this movie suffered amongst the most of all the cuts because i love the interplay between ben affleck and jeremy irons how they have this bruce wayne and alfred relationship it was almost all of it excised from this movie and i i think that it's so great to have this restored and back intact because they have this it's not so much a subservient relationship it's collegial i mean they're they're almost peers they're almost equals and i love how they interact with each other and it was great to see that restored and back in this version because every time that that jeremy irons had a scene with somebody i came out of that scene saying like oh wow i really like that scene i wish they'd kept that in the movie we also see a little bit of lois elaine and the fact that she has established this routine of pretty much every day since superman died slash clark kent for her of going to the remnants of the statues memorializing him she buys coffee for the cop who stands guard this is going to play into the movie later but what i like here is that they're already putting the seeds in your head for later on down the movie that lois number one has her own independent storyline and number two it establishes why she's there later on in the movie which if you don't have this scene the fact that she's there later on uh really doesn't make a lot of sense or it seems like a huge coincidence so i think it's smart early in the movie to establish this thing that lois lane has a daily routine where she's in this specific spot because that's going to be important later on in the movie we have the wonder woman terrorist scene which is pretty much the same in tone or at least the same in consequence to what we saw in the theatrical version as i'm going to say this a lot i thought the scene was a lot cooler in this version first of all you have the part that did not make the 2017 version where she kind of in real time is deflecting the bullets with her bracelets which i thought was a really cool shot to see not in slow motion they do make her a killer and and this is a thing with zack snyder's he has no compunction about making his superheroes killers and she's throwing people into the walls i mean they're dead they're obviously their heads are crushed against the wall it's one of those things that i i just have to you know i've said my piece about it many many many times it's something that i just have to make peace with so it's something that i'm not the biggest fan of but it's something that i will sort of allow in favor of the other stuff in this cut because there are actually two things that i really love that followed right after that the first is uh when she's throwing the case up in the air with the bomb in the 2017 version she just throws it through the roof i love the shot of her jumping up and then you have the case up here you have diana here in the air and this is another good example of snyder wanting to use that one point three three to one four by three frame and i think that's just a really striking image and a better image than we got in the theatrical version and then there was something that it was again the second thing that i'm looking at i'm like why would you cut this is she she saves the day she apparently vaporizes roose bolton then she talks to one of the little girls and she she calls her princess she says are you okay princess and the little girl says okay can i be like you when i grow up and she says you can be anything you want to be and it's such a great interaction and it so shows such a humanity i don't know why you cut this and it's part of a trend and we'll get into it later in the movie as we're collecting more and more evidence but this is another one of these head scratching things of just like it's such a sweet little moment and why would you cut that out of the movie and then we have the first appearance of steppenwolf i think that the steppenwolf character design is better in this than it was in uh the 2017 version i think you can tell when you look at the steppenwolf character from 2017 that once they had jettisoned darkseid as the villain it seems to me like there was a note from somewhere that said you got to make him look more human you got to make him look more like a person even if you don't change the look of him i think this is a better look for either version from there we go to part two which is the age of heroes there was some character set up right at the top here between victor and silas stone it's a small scene but it establishes this antipathy between them this idea when cyborg says you know a lot about monsters especially how to make them and this is going to be important because with all the enhanced character development that you have for cyborg in this movie you have to establish this very uneasy relationship that he has with his father right off the bat we also have right after this a really good character scene and this was an appearance from a character who was not in the 2017 theatrical version which is willem dafoe's volco you can tell they hadn't quite gotten the wardrobe and the the looks for everyone uh quite yet before the aquaman movie was was to come out but i think this was great setup for the aquaman movie volkow telling arthur that you can't turn your back on the world forever at telling him to take up the trident to to live up to his responsibility these are good character beats and you had an opportunity to establish these beats on film prior to the aquaman solo movie and these are like character defining traits for aquaman at the beginning of that film so it's a little puzzling to me again why you would take not take the opportunity to set this up but they ultimately didn't because these things were cut you also have the first scene with da'sod who was sort of the secretary if you will for dark side or at least you know he's the guy that screens his calls and this is the thing also where where i talk about steppenwolf and i think there were a lot of improvements made with steppenwolf this establishes who steppenwolf is and why he's doing what he's doing and i love the fact that i think one of the reasons that he didn't work in the theatrical cut of this movie was that he just seemed like a nothing he seemed like a just just a guy just some dude you know why is he worthy of the entire justice league taking him on and here that turns out like that's kind of his character trait he is just a guy he's just a dude he's he's on the outs with dark side he's been going around the galaxies turning over planets tens of thousands of planets paying off this debt but he really just wants darkseid to notice him he wants to get back into his good graces he's desperate he's a very sad thing and that's what i like is as you finally give me some insight into who is this guy and why is he doing what he's doing so then we have this flashback and this was present in the theatrical cut where diane is telling the story about the age of heroes and the first battle between in the theatrical cut it is steppenwolf and this cut it is dark side it makes way more sense in this cut for it to be dark side because dark side is like the ultimate big bad in the universe i know he's not quite the dark side that we will come to know at this time he's kind of proto-dark side you see more of it in this version of the movie and and this was another thing where the the taste that we got and the theatrical version was nice uh but this actually felt like the epic battle scene that decided the fate of the world you also had this idea of ares uh you know this this this antagonist from wonder woman actually saved the world he jumps in he chops dark side in the neck with the with the axe you know he's the guy that turns the course of the battle you get more with the lantern that shows up and uh you know it's not just a fleeting thing with the ring flying away it's a bit more of a featured moment you get a little bit more of every single army that's involved in the battle when you give it some room to breathe i liked it in the theatrical version i loved it in this version then we move on to part three which is called beloved mother beloved son of all of the different parts of this movie this one and part six i think are my favorites but this one has my favorite additions to it first of all the big edition of the scene with barry allen where he meets iris west when he decides to save her when he when he first moves into super speed you see him run out of his shoes i thought that that's that's a little fun thing that just is is a small indicator of just how powerful he is i got a big laugh out of him grabbing the hot dog i thought it was funny i i've seen online some people thought it was weird or some people thought it didn't fit the tone of the scene i thought it was really good i thought he was grabbing it because the flash is always hungry you know he the the super speed the metabolism is going so fast he's gonna want to snack later turns out he wanted to feed it to the dog and i like the fake out where the shopkeeper's like where did he go and he's over there with the dogs he has to do the kind of clark thing like oh what happened where did i go is everybody okay it sounds like kirsty clements is gonna be back for the flash movie so i'm curious like what do you do do you write a new introduction to them do you just use this footage i don't really know the legality of using footage from a different director's movie i liked the sequence i thought it was visualized really well i got a good laugh out of it uh and then we have um what i think is one of the biggest highlights of the whole movie and and this in general was the stuff that i did not understand the most as far as what was cut out of the film cyborg he's the best thing in the movie for me by far basically the whole setup to his his past his character arc he was an all-star athlete his mom his mom is his biggest champion we see that he has this huge football game the you know he wins he scores the winning touchdown it cuts to the stands his dad's not there and they have this discussion about the fact that his dad is never there so this antipathy between victor and silas is established to have happened before this accident even occurred then there's the car accident that kills his mom it cuts to him in the hospital he's hooked up to machines in the hospital this is a great acting moment from joe morton joe morton was great as silas stone who again was a pretty nothing character in every other version of this movie i loved this moment from him where he's looking at his son and he decides to uh you know revive him this is the other thing that i love because you're establishing the weight both the weight of victor's powers and who he is inside and it tells you all you need to know about the character of cyborg and i don't mean like the characters in the movie character i mean like his character his morality if it involves technology you can do whatever you want you could launch every icbm in the world at the snap of a finger and the quote that he says roughly says the challenge will be not doing it it is the burden of this responsibility that will define who you are and who you choose to be and it's the idea that victor's essentially a god he can destroy the earth if he wants to or he can choose to use his power for good and you have this great scene where he's monitoring this this waitress who's struggling she's working she's she's getting evicted she doesn't have any money and he uses his power to help her and and that scene where she's at the atm and she sees that she's gotten this hundred thousand dollars that she's won in a contest and she's so excited you cut to the shot of cyborg smiling just in that two or three minutes there i immediately knew who this guy was i knew who this character was i liked this character i was rooting for this character but i could also understand why he was so conflicted why he was in such turmoil they did in one i think 10 minute sequence uh more than the entirety of the movie the previous justice league movie had done for cyborg and this more than anything this is when i really started to to realize how much in this movie i was going to look at and be like how do you look at this and decide that you're gonna cut this like let's because this isn't necessarily story stuff like when you remove uh darkseid and you put steppenwolf in as the main villain yes there's gonna be some stuff that you have to get rid of because it doesn't fit anymore how does establishing how and why the one of the protagonists of your movie is a likable person something that should be cut nominally i thought that they were still wanting to make cyborg movies or at least a cyborg movie down the road or more justice league movies featuring cyborg down the road so it seems like you would want to like this character you'd want to exit the movie liking the character in much the way that that audiences left batman v superman liking wonder woman she wasn't the star of that film but you at least gave her enough to do in that movie that after the movie was over people said i really liked wonder woman and then they showed up in droves to her solo film why would you pass up the opportunity with cyborg to do the same thing this was so crazy to me and and we'll go back and and like i said i've got some theories that i'll share later uh but this was the first major sequence where i just couldn't understand because this was so head and shoulders above almost anything that actually existed in the 2017 version new or original uh this was just a really standout sequence and it it's made me sad that we may not see any more of ray fisher as cyborg because just this one part of the movie made me really like him as a character we also have a repeat of a scene that's in the 2017 version but it works better here because it's established more and there are a couple of extra beats which is when steppenwolf shows up and takes the mother box that's being guarded by atlantis first of all i love the addition of the scene which shows that steppenwolf and the parademons are literally going down into the ocean and dragging atlanteans out of the water and throwing them onto the land and then i also like the idea that the interrogation is this machine that like invades your mind and does a hollow projection and this is how steppenwolf found the motherbox that was in atlantis you see this process you see him actually doing the work and doing the job of finding all of these different things so i thought that was a great addition and then you have this scene and it's a repeat but where mira is down there with some atlantean guards she's helping to guard the mother box steppenwolf shows up and takes it steppenwolf has mira you know against this wall and she uses her abilities to draw water out of steppenwolf's body but then starts to draw the blood out i just you know some people might say this is grim dark or gritty i just thought it was cool and then when aquaman does show up he's got a much cooler entrance where he comes and stops and he the blade you know it comes right up close on his face it's an extra added beat but it works better and in general this is something that that works with a lot of these repeat scenes even though this is essentially the same thing that happens in the 2017 version you've expanded it you've added a little more information you've added a couple of extra beats and the scene works better two things i am glad they did get rid of though number one was mira's british accent which did not work for me in any way shape or form in this movie and i'm very glad they got rid of it uh for aquaman the second thing being i'm glad that they got rid of this conceit that in order to speak underwater that you had to make an air bubble like physically make an air bubble uh for you to talk to each other if i'm willing to accept the fact that atlantis exists and it's underwater i will also accept the fact that they can speak to each other underwater so i'm glad they got rid of that idea as well part four is called change machine and it starts out with a lot of what we've seen in the 2017 cut with going to stryker's island and saving the hostages including cyborg's dad there were a couple of alternate things that were in there number one i liked the idea that we see them learning to work together as a unit and i think at one point flash even says like we're not working together this idea that they're they're still struggling and how to not just be fighting for each other you had a great beat i really liked where the debris is falling down and flash just kind of encircles them uh and stops them and vaporizes that debris and then you also have this little scene here this little interaction but it adds a lot where silas looks at victor and says you know i wasn't sure you'd come and he just says you're my father and they give a bit of a nod and he says you know go it shows that there is at least some sort of an understanding that is emerging between these two that they're not just gonna be butting heads uh for the rest of the movie it's a tiny little moment but i think it adds up in the end aquaman i liked his entrance more in this version when he's coming in to save them from the gotham harbor which is flooding in which as he comes into the crack and you see him through this wall of water you just sort of see his face in the theatrical version he just sort of jumps out of the water and stops it five to ten seconds it just added a cool little beat for me and then we get to the whole part about the anti-life equation and when there were leaks even before i think there was an actual snyder cut when there was talk about what what snyder's movies would have been if they'd continued and they brought in the anti-life equation i rolled my eyes a little bit because it just it sounds a little over the top you know the anti-life equation it's a mcguffin in a way it's the thing that will allow you to rule the world they don't get too far into the nitty-gritty or too far into the mythology of it it basically just needs to establish a reason even more so for darkseid to want to come to the earth it does bring up the plot hole of if he knew that the anti-life equation was on the world that fought back um you know how exactly did he forget what world that was because you'd think that somebody might have you know dropped a pen or something after they were like well we've conquered tens of thousands of worlds there's one that beat us but we you know what we're just gonna leave and we'll find it later it's kind of like trying to remember where you parked your car and then there's trillions of planets you're like well i don't know where i parked the world that has the anti-life equation you'd think that maybe somebody would have kept track of it it's one of those kind of annoying things i wish they could have written around it a little bit more but it's a conceit that i will grant although i do wish that they come up with a little bit of a cleaner solution but this is also the part when when steppenwolf realizes that the anti-life equation is on earth and he contacts darkseid for the first time again when you talk about making stefan wolfe a more appealing character the way that he cowers before him he is just you know this he's this imposing guy on earth but he really is just a minion of dark side and i liked how they played that scene and that interplay between these two characters even this scene where steppenwolf talks to darkseid even if you rewrite the rest of justice league why wouldn't you keep this scene in because you don't really see dark side he's part of this kind of metal thing where he's communicating etc wouldn't you want to establish his character and establish the fact that he's out there instead of just name-dropping him it makes me wonder like how committed were they to actually making more of these movies because this is another thing i think that you would have kept in in either case in order to continue advancing the storyline and it makes sense to bring dark's dark side not corporeally into this movie but just as a face uh basically on a monitor you know what do you have to lose especially when you already have this footage then we have an alternate version of the scene where the justice league decides to revive superman using the mother box it had to be re-shot because surprise surprise they ditched again cyborg's role in this whole process which was to tell the story of the mother box that it was recovered by nazis that the allies brought it back that it was this artifact and then that his father was studying it as he was studying the the crashed uh kryptonian ship and then when victor was essentially killed he uses it to revive him and this was a very like robocop type body horror as cyborg is going back into his own past and he sees himself just basically half a torso just hung up uh and this this mother box reconstructing what's left of him and is he machine or is he human you know this is a this is a question that haunts him and you see why with this process because it doesn't look to be much human left in him victor's experience with the mother box is also what inspires them to decide to do the same thing with superman because he basically says look i was i was essentially dead and this thing restructured matter this it built a body for me it revived me wouldn't it be the thing to have the kind of energy to bring back superman and this is so much more organic than the way they get to it in the movie so by restructuring it this way you number one kind of have to take a longer way around to figuring out how you're gonna go to superman and number two again you cut a key component of cyborg's backstory and you cut even more of him out of the movie part of the reason why i think this was and there were reports that came out back in 2017 i think in the kind of aftermath autopsy of what happened with justice justice league which is that there was apparently a mandate or an edict that was sent down from the then ceo of warner kevin tsujihara who had since resigned for various reasons that the movie come in at two hours and that you know reportedly it said like the studio felt that the one of the reasons that batman superman did do so well is that it had it was too long and people thought it was too bloated the problem with batman v superman for myself and for a lot of people especially when you go back to 2017 when this was all happening wasn't that it was too long it's that i didn't think that the story was necessarily very well told you can't just say like well we're gonna justice league will be a great movie if we just cut it down to two hours because what they did with this is they cut good story out of a movie and by having this mandate to keep it down at two hours they cut out all of this great stuff that i think audiences would have loved and i can almost promise you even if you you keep us in a universe where joss whedon takes over if you put 20 25 minutes of some of this stuff particularly the cyborg stuff into the joss whedon version of this movie i think people like that movie better or at least they come out of it feeling better about a lot of the characters it's the most base level of thinking and yet you see this with executives so many times that just think that they can boil down what the success of a movie is to something as simple as it was too long the length of the movie doesn't matter it's what's in the movie and they cut great stuff out of a movie to try to get it down to an arbitrary running time it's it's maddening it's infuriating that billion dollar decisions are made based on these these pointless metrics and it just goes to show you that studio executives don't necessarily know what makes a good movie they're trying to make guesses about what makes the most money that's why a creative executive is the ideal format not a guy who came from the theme parks division that was a money guy a financial guy who's up at the ceo now a producer who knows how to write story who knows what story is who can back a two-hour movie who can back a four-hour movie who backs the right version of the movie okay dan stance over uh let's move on to another well i guess not because i'm gonna go on about this scene as well uh this was the scene between uh martha and lois and it was replaced in the 2017 version uh by the thirsty reporter scene oh he said you were the thirstiest reporter you've ever seen a what a story mark this version of the scene so much better first of all you get the basic information out anyway the idea that martha lost the farm she and lois are still basically mother and daughter-in-law even though clark is gone and they're gonna remain that way but then you have this beautiful speech from martha saying that the world is mourning a symbol i see all around the world people are talking about my son like they knew him you know they don't know him they don't know the person that he was i know the person that he was but you know what i can't tell anybody that it's a secret that the world can never know and you lois are the only other person in the world that can share this pain and that knows this secret it's such a great human conversation between these two characters let's ignore the the the tag to the scene for right now we'll talk about that in a second even if you don't do that why do you ditch this version of the scene because it doesn't change anything story-wise in any way other than the fact that the the scene in the in the 17 version was at the daily planet this scene is at lois's apartment but it's so much better written and it's so much deeper and it feels so much real and more human you don't have that stupid thirsty reporter joke in it but okay let's talk about the tag to the scene which is martha leaves and then she reveals that it is not martha that it is in fact john john's martian manhunter also known as general swanwick the first time i was watching the movie i just because i was the last thing i was expecting my mind was blown my jaw dropped i couldn't really believe that as i'm revisiting it i do have to say if i'm gonna make the mural cut of the snyder cut i would not reveal that martha is martian manhunter i think it does undercut the impact of that scene because i just love the fact that that these two characters would have this talk so i understand why you would cut martian manhunter out at least at this point you don't want to reveal them you're not sure about the casting whatever for whatever reason i can understand that the thing that confuses me again is why you have such a deep conversation between these two characters that you essentially decide to keep at least in context but then decide to write a much more surface level and stupider version of doesn't make any sense to me but whatever let's move on moving on to part five it's called all the king's horses it starts at the first version of the graveyard scene where flash and cyborg are digging up superman's grave again this is the same thing that we saw in the 2017 version only they shot a worse version of it in this version the snyder version we have the two of them talking uh flash basically saying superman was my hero i like the fact that they both acknowledge the fact that they could just do this in a couple seconds but that he is worth doing this essentially the long way around to do it using their powers would almost seem cheap uh that they need to show that they have the respect for him uh you replaced that in the 2017 version with them still digging up the corpse but then you have the weird fist bump joke and then he's like oh racially charged and what stupid dumb dumb joke and you're replacing a better version of the same thing that still existed so add that to my what the hell list because i don't get it then we have another bruce alfred scene it's sort of a mirror scene to what was happening in batman v superman he has the power to wipe out the entire human race and if we believe there's even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty alfred is sort of talking bruce out of or trying to talk bruce out of hunting down superman he is not our enemy here he's saying why he shouldn't bring him back and you've almost reversed the character roles here bruce essentially tells him you know what i'm working on faith for once in my life i'm working on faith i'm not working on reason it was a great scene between these two characters so of course they cut it and it didn't make the 2017 cut it's back here i like this scene better uh then we have the scene where they um revive superman first of all and tell me if this sounds familiar they cut a huge portion of backstory slash character development out from cyborg from the sequence so we have silas stone mixed up here after cyborg fakes a biohazard to evacuate the lab silas sees what they're doing he kind of gives them a nod gives him the okay there's a mutual feeling of respect he trusts his son here um so it goes to show again that these two are having grudging respect for each other or at least that victor is starting to have a grudging respect toward his father and then we have lois in the 2017 version lois was the big guns lois was bruce's plan backup plan if all the superheroes didn't work then bring in the big guns and lois will defuse superman she uses a means to an end here we've established why she's in that vicinity she's going back to work she's decided she is going to move on with her life we get that little pregnancy test thing which as a not so subtle hint to where they would have been going in future films but lois is not used as a pawn in this game or is not recruited as you know this this thing to be used as a way to manipulate superman she's just there and it makes sense why she's there because we've got the setup for it superman is revived we have a beat that i like where lois is leaving she turns around to look and she sees clark floating above the site um from a distance and i thought that that was really well shot the battle that follows is mostly what we got in the 2017 version the stuff that i liked the best was in this version so i'm assuming this was snyder stuff there's a laugh moment and i think it works where he side eyes flash and flash has this look like oh my god how can this guy see me i thought that that was a great moment in both versions i'm glad that it was there the military attacks here uh this was the the end of this really is what is reshot so in the 2017 version he's about to kill batman he says you know do you bleed you could tell that it was reshot because he had the weird cartoon mouth kind of thing it was a little bit better than it was at the beginning but you still have the cartoon mouth thing here you have uh superman uh ripping through the justice league he's blasting batman with heat vision superman's about to incinerate batman and lois runs in on her own lois makes the decision to run in and interrupt and again when you look at the rewrites she's rewritten to be more of a pawn or more of a tool of batman whereas in this movie she is she's her own person and i don't understand how the rewrite makes things simpler by making things more complicated we'll put a pin in that we'll go back to that later it ends on a laugh line and a laugh line that makes sense which is aquaman kind of pointing to the flash and flash saying like i am so sorry and i think that could be referencing to a couple things number one the fact that superman threw flash into him and knocked him into the stairs the other one being that it was sort of flash's idea to revive superman in the first place and aquaman's just like what the hell did you do man that laugh works it works uh in the context of the movie i like it way better than the joke that was in the 17 cut with the something's definitely broken which is so out of context for batman just didn't make sense with his character again you cut uh you cut a good joke and a good scene for a worse joke uh and a worse scene then you have the thing i was referring to was cyborg where in the theatrical cut the the mother box gets blown out of the building and lands in the parking lot and then they just look over and they're like oh oh man he got the thing well now what are we gonna do and they look a little incompetent here uh the mother box lanes in the parking lot silas stone grabs it he takes it back inside into star labs of course steppenwolf shows up to come claim it silas climbs into this chamber victor shows up so he's able to watch and then silas shoots this particle beam or whatever at the box he sacrifices himself he gives his life in order to help the heroes save the world and first of all this is a great beat for silas this is a great character beat for silas number two it's a great character beat for victor because he lost his mother he thought that he'd already lost his father but he was finally getting to a point where they were sort of able to have this respect for each other and then he loses his father it adds to the tragic backstory gives him motivation to go and win this fight it's it's a story beat that makes sense as to why they're able to find this box so quickly that they have to rewrite around in the 2017 version and invent a new reason for how they could get to where they're going and when you add all this stuff up the fact that you know the lowest lane storyline of being rewritten all of the excision of cyborg stuff um when you look at what was changed and what was cut from this movie there's a bit of a trend that starts popping up you you have character moments um and development from wonder woman you have agency and story lines from lois lane you have the entire backstory for victor stone and cyborg you have other characters that were excised completely and in almost every case these people these characters happen to be women and people of color and look i don't jump to these conversations lightly because i know this is a very charged topic these are very charged issues and i know sometimes these things are simplified when they're much more complex and vice versa but what i will say is that to me it shows one of two things is happening here number one is that those characters were chosen specifically to have their stuff cut out of the movie which is very um problematic idea the fact that these characters were kind of targeted um individually to have their stuff cut out but the other thing and i think in my mind perhaps the more likely thing and and this is kind of a broader view thing it seems like perhaps it was an unconscious choice in the sense that these characters were deemed by somebody and i don't know who as more worthy of being cut as if their stuff was more cuttable but at the same time we're gonna add all this stuff for these other characters flash drawing silly nose and mustache on the guy at the jail you have all that stuff with the russian family um at the power plant i mean that's several minutes worth of stuff we're talking about a a critical studio mandated two-hour deadline we are in an age where i think it's important to ask these questions i'm not saying anyone should be fired or or pilloried or anything like that um i'm not even saying this it was necessarily anything that was intentionally meant to slight anyone or to do harm but the questions should be asked and i think that's what the whole point of asking these questions is is trying to figure out um you know if you can't figure out what your reason is then ask yourself what that reason is and then maybe down the line we can work toward a more equitable solution for everybody so that's another dan's stance gone let's move on to part six which is something darker the big action finale of the film this also has the what i think maybe my favorite new line from the movie when batman says i don't care how many demons he's fought and how many hells he's never fought us not us united love it that's a good that's just that's just such a great mission statement ultimate faith in this team it is a transformational arc it strengthens batman's character arc from batman v superman to this movie so of course they cut it uh then we have uh superman he's gone back to the kryptonian ship we have i think some of this has to have been new voice over some of it is recycled lines we hear kevin costner's voice we hear russell crowe's voice but towards the end i don't remember these lines ever showing up before and it feels like they're they're speaking to him uh after he's gone through this ordeal jonathan kent saying you need to show them who you are which i thought was great because that was the opposite of what jonathan kent saw in life he told clark that maybe he had to hide who he is but now that he's made the sacrifice and and and clark is it has the second chance i love that he's got his earth father saying like no this is the time to show the world who you are then you have jorel saying love them cow as we did you uh and again this is jorel's whole message about humanity was that they need a guiding light i liked this new voice over from his two dads and basically the fact that this experience now has brought him full circle with them and he hears their voices now in unity not not conflicting uh but united saying be who you are be the hero you were meant to be show them who you are and that propels them to go and have this big showdown we have the big action finale a lot of the same beats although it doesn't have that pukey muddy looking red which is great you have a really cool justice league uh group shot kind of in a you know an avengers type shot if you will only because they you know they did it first and then superman's entrance into this scene i liked where his character was at the end of justice league but i'll sacrifice it for the cool superman stuff that we get here steppenwolf bringing down the axe and it just like stops on superman's shoulder and he says not impressed and then the the blowing of the the super breath that freezes it that's a great superman entrance i'll take it over what we got you know they're pretty close but i'll take it over what we got in the 2017 version uh but then we also have something that that that to me topped it which is um the the the unity happens and there's an explosion that that that basically kills everybody kills all of our heroes and the flash kind of puts his hands up and now we're delivering on this thing that he's been sort of inching toward the whole movie which is the ultimate use of his powers and this is my favorite part of this new cut this is one of my favorite superhero things ever in a movie this sequence where flash is tapping into the speed force he's gonna run faster than the speed of light he's going to break all of his rules he's going to save everybody he's going to save the world the music first of all junkie xl score was fantastic i love this piece of music i i don't know if they're selling the soundtrack yet but if anything i'm gonna buy that specific track i love how it's visualized i love that the the ground is materializing under his feet as he essentially rebuilds the world everything about this scene is great top 10 superhero moment ever in a movie for me how they cut this in favor of dostoyevsky i don't i don't understand again this is something that you could have kept everything else in the other version but you still could have kept this and you would have had a great flash scene a really awesome scene and yet they they cut it for like the lamest stuff anyway uh i love it so much flash turning back time and then you have another shocker cut cyborg scene that's great where he's stopping the unity and it and it sort of gives gives him another vision and it's him and his mom and his dad and basically saying like hey just let it happen we're going to be reunited you know you're going to be put back together he looks at his mom and his dad and his himself as he remembers it before he was cyborg when he says i'm not broken and i'm not alone if you're writing what a character arc is that is a tip from the beginning of this movie to the end of this movie for cyborg that is a perfect character arc they cut a absolutely textbook arc for cyborg not only textbook but great so they cut that moment i was very sad to see that go aquaman stab stuff and i've seen some people say like oh man they really destroy steppenwolf i mean how many people did steppenwolf kill aquaman gets steppenwolf from behind superman punches him through the boom tube into apocalypse uh i like that wonder woman is just like well you're not getting out of here unscathed she thinks at this point that that steppenwolf may have killed her mom because he says that he did so you know diane is up for vengeance she she cuts his head off dark side just puts his foot on top of steppenwolf this is where this character belonged he was always a minion his death is not a big deal darkseid doesn't even really care about it i think that that's the perfect way for him to end that's why you needed a bigger bad in this movie than what we got and i love this moment where they're basically staring each other down they're looking at the future dark side's looking at the justice league the justice league is looking at dark side and they're basically saying like bring it we're here we're waiting for you and then we have a couple great shots of the justice league uh united similar to what we got in the 2017 version but not exactly the same and then we have the epilogue a father twice over and and i'm you know i'm mixed on this because i love the part that actually kind of goes to the characters in this movie you have victor listening to silas saying you know i i brought you into this world and and and back to it you can't imagine how proud i am of you you see the fact that he is uh happy now finally with who he is and his identity as cyborg barry's dad is super happy that he was able to get a job i love the shot of barry you know running down with his flash run but just that smile on his face he's now fully realized his potential so we've left cyborg and very in better places and then you have uh the the final reveal superman opening his shirt uh this was the blue and red and yellow uniform and the whedon cut it's the black uniform and the snyder cut but it's the same basic concept and then we have just some kind of chopped scene some scenes that don't really have a place first of all we've got the a revisit of the luther escaping from arkham he's on the yacht deathstroke shows up their meeting goes on basically the way that it was only this time luther reveals batman's secret identity and says like oh he's bruce wayne and then they have a little toast then we've got the nightmare sequence this was this was what zack snyder re-shot specifically for this cut you're on earth dark side is invaded uh superman is hunting everybody you have batman's hunting party cyborg mira flash deathstroke they're all together you know trying to trying to do what they can and then we've got the introduction of joker and he and batman have a conversation and i know that a lot of people love this scene um it's not my favorite if i'm being honest i i i didn't come out of it really liking jared leto's joker any more than i did before it's just not for me his take on the characters not for me and then we have one final scene which is bruce wakes up from his nightmare and martian manhunter shows up and basically says hey you know crazy stuff's about to go down uh there's a war coming i'm here to help and bruce says uh cool all right i'll see you around so now martian manhunter is part of the group he flies away and that's the end of the movie that's where i would have like i said i i i didn't mind the manhunter reveal really to catch me by surprise at the end of that martha louis scene but because he comes back in this part i would cut that reveal from earlier in the movie and just have this scene but you know that's my own fan edit this is the snyder cut and he can put in what he wants to so those are the things i loved about the movie it's been a long conversation but there's a lot that i liked and and my non-spoiler review was probably shorter than i wanted it to be just because i didn't want to go into all of this stuff but on whole and when i look at the snyder cut in general um yes there are some things that i have qualms about um when i read you know if these stories are true about what his sequels would have been they don't make me jump out of my seat but then again those aren't finished movies those are concepts who knows how many more iterations they would have gone through i would say on balance 90 of the stuff that was in this cut was stuff that i reacted positively to that i thought was either a great addition or a superior version of what we already had uh 10 of it was stuff that i was kind of like uh you know i'm not so sure about that you know there was very little that i didn't like but there are a few things that i just flat out didn't like but in general i'm i'm really happy with this cut of the movie and i said this in the non-spoiler review i think this is the definitively superior version of the film it's not like an alternate version of the film like the richard donner cut of superman 2 which i've always thought was kind of a companion piece to the richard lester cut but couldn't really replace it because it was stitched together from the best that they could do at the time i i think that richard donner's version of the movie if he had made it back in 1978 79 80 would have been superior to what we got here we essentially get the the leveled up version of that where the director zack snyder did have the capability to go back to reshoot what he wanted to retool what he wanted and deliver the version of the film that he would have delivered um x a number of years ago now it's not the version that probably would have hit screens because i doubt that wb uh would have put a four hour movie out but i think it's pretty close to that and it honestly may have even gotten a little bit better if you cut 15 20 minutes out of it i i don't know i don't know what that version of the movie looks like but this surprised the hell out of me when this was announced i wasn't sure what this was going to be i said that i would walk into it with a curious and open mind this exceeded all of my expectations and then some it really is uh i think one of the best you know dc movies that's ever been made and i don't say that lightly and it just goes to show and a lot of people say like when i'm talking about movies i say that i wish every movie was good i'm so happy that we live in a universe where i liked this movie because this would not have been nearly as fun if i didn't like the movie that's why i go into every single movie wanting to love it because it is many times nine times out of ten so much more fun to love a movie and talk about what you love i love the fact that i love this movie and whether you love the movie or didn't love the movie i love the fact that it is now uh not a theoretical that it actually exists what did you think about zack snyder's justice league did you enjoy this was a i was gonna say this was about as long as the movie itself but no you could run the raw footage for this like two and a half times and it still wouldn't be but thanks for bearing with me as i went over the stuff that was added that i really liked if you want to see even more about what i'm up to you can check me out on patreon at patreon.com dan merle i've also got stuff coming out uh this week upcoming i've got a review of the film nobody which hits theaters on friday i also have reviews coming up for godzilla vs kong another movie that i can't wait to see and there are movies that are getting added to the release schedule we're getting back into the groove of things movies are starting to come out again it's been a very long year and we're coming up on a year since i started this channel in about a month uh but also just been a very long year for everybody and it just feels refreshing um to get back into the swing of things and i love that one of the first really big projects that's come out to start having this conversation has been this movie a movie that i liked way more than i possibly could have expected to so thank you so much for watching i will see you next time stay safe and i will be back very soon [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Dan Murrell

Views: 173,223

Rating: 4.8969841 out of 5

Keywords: dan murrell, dan murrell movies, snyder cut review, snyder cut spoiler review, justice league review, justice league spoiler review, zack snyder justice league review, zack snyder justice league spoiler review, dan murrell snyder cut, dan murrell justice league, dan murrell snyder cut review, dan murrell justice league review, dan murrell spoiler review, dan murrell snyder cut spoiler review, dan murrell justice league spoiler review, dan murrell screen junkies, dan murrel

Id: PrmeTzMsHVA

Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021