Critic Reviews

It shares a vague shape and a handful of specific, linchpin scenes with its predecessor, but everything about it lands differently: characters that were previously empty or ludicrous now have real grit and depth, while action sequences that were once incoherent, lightweight and garish now number among the most thunderously spectacular in the genre.

The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.

This film is gorgeous, massive in scope, well-written, and superbly acted. It goes beyond being a Michael Bay-explosion fest and definitively transcends action and destruction porn. This is a real movie. Every single issue I had with the original release is fixed—everything from pacing, cinematography, acting, characterization, and even the film’s score.

It's so bombastic that it makes "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" seem modest.

Snyder’s film may be exhausting but it is engaging. Justice is served.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a surprise vindication for the director and the fans that believed in his vision. With a mature approach to its superhero drama, better-realized antagonists, and improved action, Snyder’s version of Justice League saves the movie from the dustbin of history.

It's a fascinating exercise and superior to its predecessor, but clocking in at four hours, the operatic highs are somewhat offset by the lack of any pressure to say "cut."

Snyder’s Justice League is more, more, more in a way that most films wouldn’t dare, and, after a year of no theaters at all, a movie that makes me long to return to a multiplex—to see more movies that commit so completely to a vision that it’s impossible not to be swept away.

As a gift to those who’ve stuck with him through changing trends in the genre, the director’s vision gets its freest reign in this four-hour director’s cut, boldly titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League and thus asserting authorship under what’s become not so much a genre of cinema as it as an entire mode of production, corporately controlled and split over hundreds of FX artisans in post. And while still bearing a few unfortunate marks of industrial cinema (like almost all of The Flash’s painfully lame jokes from the studio-bungled theatrical cut being kept intact), this title is earned.

It is still by no means a great film, even compared against the standards of contemporary superhero cinema, which is bleeding any sense of individual artistry and purpose each passing year. But it is a wild, invigorating experiment to experience.