Justice for All

After a couple of disappointments and a rousing success from DC, we went into Justice League (2017) with high hopes. Not so high that the movie couldn't match them, at least for me.

After the events of Batman v. Superman, Superman is dead. The world is going to heck, because he's not around to protect it. Batman (Ben Affleck) has noticed weird creatures - he uses a street crook as bait to get one to come out. He needs to find more heroes, and we know he has a database - we saw it in BvS. First he want's Wonder Woman. He meets up with her being a hero, in a scene where she gets to play Bullets and Bracelets, my favorite WW game. But she isn't interested in teaming up, until ...

Back on the island, the Amazons have been protecting this artifact, a cube called the Mother Box. It bursts out of it's container, and a horde of evil demons snatch it. It turns out that they are lead by Steppenwolf, a follower of Darkseid. Now, I was not following DC when Kirby's New Gods introduced Darkseid and the Mother Boxes, but I know enough to be thrilled. If Kirby came up with it, I am behind it.

Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne has recruited Barry Allen, the Flash (Ezra Miller), who is a goofy kid like Tom Holland's Spider-Man - a bit too much like him. He doesn't get Adam Curry, Aquaman (Jason Momoa), who is hanging out in bleak Icelandic bars, wearing cool jeans and cable knits, with lots of hair and tats. He looks cool, but (as expected) doesn't do as much as you might hope. He joins he gang when the Atlantean Mother Cube gets lifted.

Rounding out the hoped-for team is Cyborg (Ray Fisher). His body was almost destroyed in an accident, and his father (Joe Morton) has rebuilt him. But he used Chitauri Kryptonian parts from the crash from BvS, and it maybe has a mind of it's own.

Note on that cross-out above - there are a lot of places where this seems like a Marvel ripoff. Batman is Tony Stark, The Flash is Spider-Man, Steppenwolf is Thanos, etc. I don't exactly mind this - it's no skin off my nose who they steal from. But it's too bad they couldn't be a little more original.

But what about Superman? He's dead, right? Of course, the last act is to bring him back to life, using Cyborg tech and Mother Box energy. Of course, he comes back to life as a mindless zombie, but it all works out in the end.

I guess I'm making this sound pretty lame, but I actually liked it a lot. Especially in the first act, everything is very epic and comicbooky. For instance, every scene seems to end with someone intoning some comic book line, like "I don't understand this world, I just know that I have to save it!" Stuff that only works in a comic book. And it's the kind of stuff I want in a comic book movie.