[5.5/10] It’s impossible to process *Justice League* without considering *Batman v. Superman*, the film’s literal predecessor, and *The Avengers*, its spiritual one. *Justice League* is so much in conversation with these films, so much reacting to them and responding to them and in the twin shadows of them, that the movie almost doesn’t make sense without them.

It was *The Avengers*, the 2012 superhero team-up film, and its billion dollar box office take, that sparked Hollywood’s current fascination with cinematic universes and builds to franchise-wide crossovers. It is the seismic event in superhero cinema that moved D.C. from making siloed, solo flicks for its best-known characters, to packing as many recognizable faces and logos into each movie as possible, and promising more interconnected adventures to come.

On the surface, *Justice League* borrows plenty from *The Avengers*. Both films feature an alien invasion led by a helmet-horned antagonist who promises to pave the way for a bigger bad to come. Both feature the occasional extraterrestrial cube which some want to use as a power source and others want to use as a weapon. And both feature a collection of heroes who are not on the same page, and bicker and take sides with regularity, and need a grand event to reunite them. Having *Avengers* writer/director Joss Whedon on board to help pinch hit for Zack Snyder (the director of *Man of Steel*, *Batman v. Superman*, and this film) as needed just reaffirms the inevitable parallels between the first big superhero team up film and *Justice League*.

But just as *Dawn of Justice* felt like a reaction to *Man of Steel*, *Justice League* feels like an attempt at course correction from *Batman v. Superman*. Critics complained that *BvS* was too self-serious, so *Justice League* has plenty of jokes, light-hearted moments, and the sort of meta winks that have Whedon’s fingerprints all over them. Fans groused about *Batman v. Superman*’s runtime, so *Justice League* comes in at a crisp two hours.

And yet, this attempt to imitate the movie that started it all, and course correct from the predecessor that disappointed audience, just leads *Justice League* to make its own, brand new mistakes, which will no doubt be fodder for some third new direction in the next DCEU team-up film.

The most tangible of these issues is the awful CGI. Steppenwolf, the film’s computer-generated antagonist occupies an entirely different world than the flesh and blood characters in *Justice League*, and anytime his pre-rendered domain intersects with the nominally real world, there is a sharp dissonance that takes the viewer out of the picture. Everything from the villain’s uncanny valley visage to the fact that the climax of *Justice League* takes place an off-the-shelf Playstation 2 environment signals phoniness to the audience and makes all the action feel miscalibrated and inconsequential.

But the deeper problem is how underdeveloped most of the characters here feel. One of the advantages of the first *Avengers* film is that four of its six heroes had already had their own introductory films to establish who they were and what they were about, and the other two had played significant roles in those films. That meant that a handful of scenes to reestablish everyone was all you really needed.

*Justice League*, on the other hand, has only really introduced three of its characters in prior cinematic outings, and one of them spends most of this movie in a box (the film opens with the equivalent of a Superman flashback). That means *Justice League*’s hurried attempt to reintroduce its crew in the first act has more work to do, on top of introducing the major conflict, themes, and villain. Only Wonder Woman’s intro can coast on having a full film’s worth of exploration and coast on a thrilling action set piece. That leaves Aquaman to make abbreviated sarcastic comments to Bruce Wayne; Flash to have his entire situation explained in exposition by either Batman or his dad; Cyborg to banally brood in shadows and middling graphics, and for Batman himself to skulk around a cutscene from *Arkham City*. The result is that only Diana feels fully realized by the time they’re all ready for a team-up.

It also means that everyone comes off caricatured rather than developed. There’s not time in *Justice League* to really tell Cyborg’s story, so the film ups the brood factor to try to compensate. Flash goes from being the compelling, untested kid finding his way through all of this to being just a superpowered Sheldon from *Big Bang Theory*. And everyone, but especially Aquaman, starts spouting catchphrases and rejoinders so cheesy, I half-expected the King of the Atlanteans to blurt out “Cowabunga!” There’s interesting threads of stories for each of them, but it’s all either rushed or discarded as the film plows forward.

Despite those mistakes, *Justice League* finds its own unique, laudable moments, which are entirely separate from its predecessors. The peak of these is the “save one” sequence, where young Flash starts to get cold feet when things start to heat up in terms of the big fight. Batman tells him to simply save one person, and let it all unfold from there. It’s a simple idea, but one that blooms nicely as the sequence goes on, and provides the optimistic bent that had been so demanded in an organic way.

And as much as it follows the *Avengers* blueprint, *Justice League* also finds ways to distinguish itself. If there’s a single self-contained arc in *Justice League*, it’s the same one the Marvel equivalent had -- that these superheroes could be a powerful force for good when working together, but that they needed something important, something that was missing, to unite them. For The Avengers, that was a major death, but for the Justice League, it’s a resurrection. needed a death to reunite them. For the Justice League, it takes a resurrection.

To that end, the film manages to make good on some of the promise of *Batman v. Superman* that was lost in execution. In many ways, *Justice League* is the other half of *BvS*, the answer to the questions that the prior film was asking, and both films come out looking better for it.

It’s a creditable twist that when Batman seeks to revive Superman, and cautions Alfred to have the “big guns” ready, that saving grace turns out not to be a superweapon or a dose of kryptonite, but simply Lois Lane, there to remind Clark Kent who he is. It’s a clever moment, and an echo of that much-maligned “Martha” scene, which reveals how Batman now understands that the way to get to Kal-El is not through weapons of technology, but through their shared humanity.

By the same token, *BvS* wondered aloud and often if the world really needed Superman. and the closest thing to an overall theme *Justice League* has is that the world is broken without him. There’s a conviction in the film that Superman brought the world hope, and without him there’s only fear. He is a unifying, reassuring force, for his mother and the woman he loves, for the team that needs him, and the world at large. There’s new threads to pick up, and future teases galore, but the best thing to say in favor of *Justice League* is that it takes care to resolve much of what its predecessor set up in a satisfying enough fashion.

The only issue is that in trying to split the difference between its lead-in and its competition, *Justice League* turns out to be a fine but unavailing outing for what is supposed to be the climax of D.C.’s Cinematic Universe. It is not nearly as fun, enjoyable or clever as *The Avengers*. It is not nearly as contemplative or thoughtful as *Batman v. Superman*. Instead it’s stuck in a strange middle ground, taking a team-up that fans have been salivating for for decades and making it into a reasonably enjoyable, roundly generic superhero action flick, rather than the world-beating crossover the movie-going public has been waiting for. In trying to find a middle ground between those two approaches, and those two aesthetics, *Justice League* comes up with a film that’s lesser than either.