I wasn’t really convinced this was for me but I drank a lot of rum and survived to tell the tale.

In principle this is, I guess essentially the same film as the other Justice League but they don’t get my hopes up for a hippo fight in this one.  Again, it’s all very Transformers.  Mega-Goat-tron is still questing for the Allsparks.  The Allsparks are still called motherboxes and there is just as much hilarious innuendo about them.  Batman is still trying to make friends.  Superman is still dead and then a zombie.

The first two hours are pretty good and there is a lot of slow-motion.  And I do enjoy slow motion.  I often say I’d tolerate longer movies if there was a higher quotient of slow-mo.  So the excessive slow mo is nice.  But if it was all done at normal speed, probably this film would be cut down instantly from 4 hours to maybe 2.5.  They also tell this film very visually at the start, so there’s not too much talking.  I like that.

I thought the team came together quicker this time.  There is this great moment where they introduce Aquaman and then he bails to go back to the sea.  And all the women of this village are lined up singing their sad “goodbye Aquaman” song and sniffing his jumper.  And it was a big mood.  Aquaman and Wonderwoman are still the best parts.  

I did enjoy this Batman though, because he was a lot more self-deprecating about being the rich dude.  He also models some effective use of richness as a super power.  It’s also implied in this one that the reason Batman has to go find all the other supers isn’t just because he’s lonely, but because he knows he can’t fight these bad guys because he has no actual superpowers.

I didn’t mind the old-school screen ratio, partly because it just felt like watching an old square telly and I feel that’s the screen-shape I’ve watched for most of my life.  I’d say generally I did feel like it was a different movie, but that could entirely be because the first one really didn’t really impress me much.

The second two hours are really quite dull.  There’s a lot of super-power fight scenes going on and they’re all the kind where you can’t really get oriented in time or space.  They’re just like watching a whole lot of those “thwap!” “bam!” “pow!” “Kerunch!” type comic book fight punch word bubbles.  But not actually doing that, like in Spiderverse.  

I never did come to understand exactly how many levels of bad-guys there were, or if some of them were actually the same one just in a slightly different suit.  I did like MegaGoattron’s sparkly silver metal suit – I think it was way better than whatever suit he had in the other version of this movie.

Towards the end end it gets really stupid and weird and then Batman wakes up and the whole thing was just his dream.

That is legit my least favourite ending for anything ever.

J* probably still gives it 3 stars, but required a lot of rum to make it through.

PS.  No, you really don’t need to watch it.  It’s not anything clever or interesting or different it’s just a ridiculously long superhero film.  Just find an Aquaman gif and a Wonderwoman montage and enjoy those instead.

PPS. I actually scrawled notes (so many notes!) while watching this to try and keep myself focussed and you should see thing things I don’t get or don’t care to understand about this film, not to mention that I am now obsessed with The Flash and Quicksilver sharing one long slow-mo movie.