Anyway, one glad outcome was that I visited E-Square after what seemed like decades (that I realized later, was just the feeling created by an abysmally long movie). But yeah, about a year since I visited it, now that Cinepolis is in Aundh. So finally I got to see a movie in comfortable seats. Cinepolis seats suck.
The movie starts with a wonderful opening music track (Everybody Knows).
Then it becomes saadalele chips. Just plain bad. It has more exposition and
demonstrative sentences than a Wren and Martin textbook.
"This is the Lasso of Hestia, it compels you to tell the truth."
"The spaceship has an amniotic chamber. We can use it..."
"I go into another dimension while running so I expend so many
calories."
The dialogue writers seem to be a mutant of the Architect from Matrix and
Shashi Tharoor. You could almost hear Alfred saying "Mark the subject and
predicate and identify the verb in the sentence."
The story follows the predictable trope (I am sure it has fancy word) of gathering a team, then one member says no, disaster strikes, he joins in, then there is conflict in the team, emotional pain, team comes together, defeats evil. What is bad that this movie just seems soooo FORCED. Everything is forced. You can see the conscious efforts the actors, the director, the cinematographer, the editor, the scriptwriter, the gaffer, the make-up artist, the catering company, the vanity van driver are putting in to make it a successful. And there is where it fails. Nothing seems natural. For the entire Gladiator inspired sequence of Superman in the field, I had removed both my glasses. The graph of action and emotion was all over the place. The minor jokes and laugh are hollow and mandatory 'comic relief'. There was no consistency, climax or catharsis.
Also a nice little joke thrown in by either Floyd or SPDP (Suraj Prabhudesai, who also clarified several superhero story doubts I had) was that they expended so much budget on the villain (I forgot his name, he was that forgettable) stealing the first Mother Stone that the second just had a minor fight and the third 'to asach yeun gheun gela'.
Apparently Gal Gadot was given a lot of substance in the Wonder Woman movie (I have not had the privilege to watch it). Here she is back to her smiles, smirks (which Natalie Dormer does better) and being the Natasha Romanoff of the movie. You can actually count them! The extent of her abilities vis-a-vis Flash w.r.t. speed are inexplicable. And that brings us to the other issue: the superheroes. Why Aquaman? He was a mashup of Hulk and Thor. I think that was his only job as he cannot use the power of paani in the final battle. Flash tries too hard and when you already have one character with super-speed (Superman), how does he bring anything new? His only use is that of sentient capacitor. Cyborg is a new thing, and how far can one character take the movie all by himself? And then there is Deux ex Kal-el. The entire first half of the movie was pointless if there was need to resurrect Superman.
3D was inconsequential.
"DCU needs to get its act together to catch up to MCU" has been
repeated since before the Infinite Stones were crafted. But therein lies the
catch. Because it is lagging, it will ALWAYS be compared to MCU, which is going
from strength to strength. It needs to stop running the race, think outside the
tesseract and redefine superhero movies. Get in someone with vision, or a new style,
or willing to experiment. There can exist as many multiple ways of making
superhero movies as there are universes.
At the end, Justice League leaves you with more exasperated 'Whyyyys?' than a Power Rangers episode. Hence you are better off watching exploding grass than a failed Marvel xerox through a jammed, ink-less machine. Even La La Land was better, and that's saying something.
1 Beard/5
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