Review by Aster Gilbert
One of the most superb sequences in Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a terrorist attack modeled after a Christopher Nolan bank heist. Like clockwork, the black-hatted terrorists execute their nefarious plan – marching through the front door, taking out guards, occupying the classical architecture, and corralling hostages. The fluid choreography of the sequence rapidly establishes the scale of the location, the time required to traverse it, and the imbalance of power between the men with guns and a group of unarmed children. Enter: Wonder Woman, living god. The camera introduces her with a vertical decent from the sky. Her movement through the same corridors immediately distinguishes her from the humans: two brisk shots establish her inhuman strength as she dangles a man over a ledge with one hand. We quickly learn that the plot is to demolish several city blocks in a suicide attack in order to turn back the clock to the dark ages. “You’re too late” the terrorist tells her. Defying time itself, Wonder Woman smashes through a door, zips over to the bomb, flies it into the sky, and returns to block machine gun spray with her wrist gauntlets, all within a few seconds. The sped-up movement is uncanny: photorealistic, yet weird. Her power is perceived by both terrorists and hostages as miraculous, leaving both parties in awe – awesome in its classical sense of inspiring both reverence and fear. Her actions, depicted in both slow and fast motion, not only illustrate the superhero’s different perception of time, but expressionistically disarticulates the hero from a human reality.
Justice League is about the merciless passage of time and how that passage can only be overcome through miracles. This relatively minor act by Wonder Woman is shrouded in a sense of wonder that scaffolds the larger miraculous events of the film, like Superman’s resurrection and the Flash traveling through time to rebuild the world. It’s a film about the intermingling of fear and reverence that emerges in response to these abilities, which can only be perceived as divine by normal people. Snyder weaves these thematic concerns into his preoccupation with the effects of powerlessness on the human psyche, which he established in Man of Steel and expanded in Batman vs. Superman. In a film defined by digital special effects and unreal, cartoonish figures, Snyder conveys the miraculous through one of the oldest cinematic tricks: slow and fast motion. Snyder’s is perhaps the most philosophical use of slow motion in Hollywood since Peckinpaw. It’s essential for the aesthetic expression of Snyder’s miracle time: a state that is defined throughout the picture by grief and sorrow. Slow motion is not a means to accentuate super powers or protract melodrama, but rather a technique to render in cinematic terms the constant state of in-betweeness that defines the heroic figures of the film.
That is, all except for Batman. The aforementioned space of the in-between – a liminal space connecting different perceptions of reality – is one that humans cannot access, although Lois Lane comes close. Batman, despite being the lynchpin of the film, is all too human. But like all the heroes of Justice League, Batman is defined by his dualities. The “metahumans” are not simply the stuff of myth or science fiction, but are situated as occupying dual spatial-temporal locations: one that’s bounded by human Earth physics, and one that isn’t. Batman is the only figure who cannot access extra-sensory perceptions of reality, like Wonder Woman, Superman, and Aquaman, or Cyborg’s expressionistic connection to information technologies, or the Flash experiencing lifetimes within nanoseconds. But even Batman is a bridge of sorts, connecting the world of heroes and the world of humans, albeit a bridge artificially constructed with money, but bound by grief. In this way, Batman stands out as an image of human frailty in the shadow of the divine. His expensive equipment is destroyed almost immediately – his knock-off Wonder Woman gauntlets are a great visual representation of this – and he is nearly always getting his ass kicked, even by his fellow teammates. Batman’s human role is defined by his movement from fear to reverence. From his introduction in Batman v. Superman, he begins as analogous to Lex Luthor, driven mad by his sense of powerlessness in the wake of Superman’s arrival. But through his redemption, Batman moves along the scale from Lex to Lois Lane, in awe of the Superman. Justice League is driven by this redemption as Batman seeks to undo his betrayal of Superman, by returning him to life and quite literally establishing an Arthurian round table. Batman is both the Lancelot and the Merlin in Snyder’s reimagining of John Boorman’s Excalibur, which can be seen unfurling over the course of his DC Trilogy. Batmerlin’s role is to organize all of the players for a single defining moment of salvation: Superman’s miraculous deliverance of the planet from Darkseid’s clutches.
Both Batman’s role and Snyder’s philosophy of mythic time can be traced to this influence of Excalibur. This can be seen in the overall metabolism of the three films, which doesn’t tell a story of Superman, but the story of Superman. The three-film arc synthesizes over 80 years of pop culture iconography into a triptych Stations of the Cross. The passage of time is merciless in its leaps from station to station, perhaps the most significant cinematic homage to Excalibur, which renders the Malory-inflected myth through isolating key moments scattered across oceans of time. Prior to Man of Steel, Snyder’s films examined heroics as the attitudes of people facing down annihilation: zombie plagues, imperial conquest, booze-soaked cold war nihilism, and lobotomies. But in the DC trilogy, this becomes the rippling effects of powerlessness in the face of loss. Justice League stands out as the most personal of the lot – maybe even the entire genre. It’s hard not to see the personal tragedies of the filmmaker seeping into a film that is less about good versus evil and more about a yearning for a divine intervention to prevent tragedies or to reverse them entirely. Justice League is somewhere in the stages of grief. It’s both denial and bargaining made manifest. The sorrow of the members of the Justice League illustrate how time does not, in fact, heal all wounds. Death is permanent in our world, but in the fantasy world of miraculous beings what greater superpower could we imagine than bringing our loved ones back from the dead? While not every tragedy-defined hero gets to do this within Justice League – some losses are permanent – the overall relationship to time is for Snyder one of a desperate yearning where time can not only be stopped, but run backwards.