Justice For All

Last Monday evening, my friend Jewel Shepard and I went to the premiere of Justice League up at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, aka "The place where they do the Academy Awards." I had a great time but a lot of that was being at the pre-screening cocktail reception that DC Comics threw, and later at the after-party that Warner Brothers threw, and some of it was the carnival atmosphere of the whole event. I saw lots of friends and there was great food and Jewel got selfies with several stars of the film. That's Jewel above with Henry Cavill. For some reason, she'd rather have a photo with the guy who plays Superman than the guy who writes this blog.

It was fun to see the crowds and on the way in, there were two reporters (I'm using that noun in its loosest sense) doing red carpet interviews of the arriving celebs. I was in awe of their ability to be thrilled to the point of beatitude over every single thing about the movie. They loved the people in it, every single thing they did in it, every single thing they were wearing, very single thing they said, etc. If and when Jesus Christ returns to Earth, he will not get such an enthusiastic reception.

Before I talk about the film itself, I should confess that I haven't seen a lot of these. I think the last DC super-hero movie I saw had Christopher Reeve in the title role. The last Marvel one was the first X-Men movie and I would have walked out of that around the mid-point except that (a) I was sitting next to Stan Lee and (b) I wanted to see if they'd really put Jack Kirby's name in the end-credits and, if so, if it would be in type any larger than the bottom line on an eye chart. Yes, they did and no, it wasn't.

Also, I have a problem with CGI special effects in a live-action movie. Once I'm too aware that that's what I'm watching, I'm watching a cartoon. Everyone in it might just as well have been created on a Wacom tablet.

What the live actors say and do becomes remarkably trivial to me and I'm no longer watching human beings doing those incredible feats or facing possible deaths. We know that in any kind of movie, when a building is going to collapse on the hero in ten seconds, he's not going to perish. He is, after all, the hero. But I can play along with the movie and self-generate a little tension and fear for his demise if it feels like there's a flesh 'n' blood person up there racing to get away. I can even pretend if it's an obvious stunt person. I just can't pretend if it's a cartoon character.

Justice League is full of incredible action scenes, done about as well as effects animators can do them these days. But only once in a while did I feel it had any actual people in it.

And yet, I probably liked it more than most of the reviewers who've weighed in so far. Some of them are furious that it's not the Justice League movie they wanted to see or perhaps make.

My reaction was tepid at first, except for the rescue scene with Wonder Woman. That was pretty good for two reasons, one being the stunning screen presence of Gal Gadot. It wasn't angled oddly and dimly-lit and cut at such a frantic pace that you couldn't get a handle on what was happening or where anyone was in relation to anyone else. And it featured a super-hero doing something super-heroic and not looking ferocious and maniacal.

Then came a lot of scenes that I found hard to follow and noisy and contrary to a lot of how I think those characters should be depicted. Since Jewel was next to me instead of Stan Lee, I pondered leaving…but I knew Jack Kirby's name was in the end crawl and in a legible font so I stayed. Also, we still had two hours 'til the after-party and you know what an After-Party Animal I am.

I was glad I stuck it out because about the time You-Know-Who was resurrected from the dead in the least-surprising surprise in the history of film — my mind changed about what I was watching. I made the shift to: "You know, I don't care a lot for this kind of movie but if I did, this would be a pretty good 'this kind of movie.'" I decided to just sit back, enjoy whatever I could find to enjoy and ignore the rest as I waited for Jack's credit and the after-party.

And why not? Jewel and I got in free and they paid for all the guests' parking at the Highland and Hollywood entertainment center which, knowing that place, probably doubled the budget of the movie. We had good seats and I had my free box of freshly-popped-last-month popcorn and my free bottle of Dasani water. I decided to turn off the writer part of my brain for the rest of the evening and stop thinking they'd buried the plot and "Why the hell didn't they explain where that came from?" and all other mental sniping.

Yeah, so it stretched reality that Batman was holding his own and surviving for two seconds against a villain who could annihilate mortals with the flick of his pinkie. The following mindset clicked in: This is a movie about a guy from the planet Krypton, a man who breathes underwater and talks to fish, an Amazon princess…

Where is any reality to stretch?

And besides, Batman was never any closer to death than Wile E. Coyote plunging into a canyon because yet another Acme product had failed him. Why didn't that punch he took, the one that sent him flying across the room, kill him immediately? Because he's Batman and he's CGI, that's why. When you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense.

Some reviewers don't seem to like what they've done to some of the characters we've lived with most of our lives. Some time ago, I decided the best way to deal with that was not to curse the new versions but just to say, "Okay, these are new guys with the same names." The Flash was once Jay Garrick. Later, he was Barry Allen. He was someone else for a while and now he's a different fellow named Barry Allen. Someday, completing the Circle of Life, he will probably be Jay Garrick again.

I actually thought the current Flash was the most interesting character in the film even though I have no clue how he got those powers or all that equipment or what he does with all of it. Is the idea here that I have to go see another movie year after next to learn all that and find out how he gets his dad out of prison? Okay, fine. Maybe DC will invite me to that one too. They'll probably still have some of the same popcorn lying around. But I'll go because I liked Ezra Miller in the role. He had about 85% of all the humanity there was in that script.

Who did I like least? Batman. And yes, I know: Everyone's got their own idea of who Batman should be. In Justice League and I guess in films before it, he's become a pretty ugly and way over-equipped character. A few weeks ago, Jewel and I were at a screening of the new Batman direct-to-video animated movie, the one with Adam West's final performance. It's now an ongoing joke in Batman's sillier depictions that he somehow has all these amazing gizmos with no known science or logic attached. If aliens from the planet Beta-23 were to land in Gotham City and begin changing everyone into talking, nine-legged scallops, Batman would save the day by hauling out the Bat-Nine-Legged-Scallop-Reversal-Ray that he always carries for just such an emergency. It also saves the day for the writers who can imagine up the most heinous, incredible menaces and awesome pending doomsdays free of any requirement that they come up with a genuine, satisfying solution to them.

That joke turns out to be how he functions in the Justice League movie, too. It's what gives him some parity with Superman and other characters who can fly and deflect bullets and who won't die even if someone drops a three-story condominium on them. "My Batman" uses his brains and his physical agility to triumph instead of billion-dollar hardware and he also isn't a brooding, obsessive maniac. He's also drawn by Dick Sprang.

But they didn't make a movie about My Batman. Someone will some day but for now…well, I started feeling too much like a guy I know who hates all the new James Bond movies because 007 isn't played by Sean Connery. I decided to stop fighting the movie I was watching for what it wasn't and looking for what I could enjoy for what it is. From that point on, I had a pretty good time. If you're of my age and/or you have grand affection for earlier versions of these heroes, you might try what I did. You don't have to renounce that affection but maybe you can put it aside for the duration of the movie and also stop looking for realism in a movie where even the heroes' muscles are CGI-enhanced. If you can't, don't go…no matter how awesome the after-party promises to be.