“Unhappy is the country that needs heroes,” exclaimed the hero of The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht at the end of the play. And if the whole planet is in need? Here, one hero, be it “your friendly neighbor Spider-Man” or the Dark Knight of Gotham, will not get you off. In the DC Universe, the Justice League comes to the rescue in such cases. Collecting it is not easy: it includes both humans (Batman, Flash) and gods and demigods (Superman and Wonder Woman)like Northern Rescue Season 2, but everyone values the membership. On the screen, Zack Snyder managed to do this, the director was on a scale to match. But first things first.
How Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne Met
There is such a truism: comics are myths of the modern world. And although Superman defended Metropolis (and periodically the whole world), and Batman owned an estate in Gotham, by the 1940s, DC had guessed to tell that they share a common mythological space. The first face-to-face meeting of the titans took place in 1952 on neutral territory, or rather even in neutral waters: the guys turn out to be cruise passengers (don’t ask) and, moreover, cabin neighbors (it must have been a very popular tourist route). At the same time, Clark Kent is unaware of Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, and vice versa. When a crime occurs on deck at night, both in the dark rush to change into leotards … and emerge into the light, discover the truth about each other. (Artists of that time generally liked to put superheroes in awkward situations – the same authors drew a famous picture,Batman gives Robin a hard slap .)
In fact, they have seen each other before, on the covers and as members of … Justice Society of America. Yes, yes, in 1940, long before the League, DC launched a series of comics that collected all the stars of the publisher (they were called All Star Comics). DC’s goal was to highlight the less popular heroes, so Superman and Batman mostly posed for the covers, and then were even declared “honorary members.”
In 1960, the society was reorganized into the League, and the word “league” was chosen by analogy with the national championship in baseball. The idea of a superhero team found readership: sales excited competitors from Marvel so much that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby first wrote Fantastic Four (1961), followed by the Avengers, who repeated the League trick, bringing together the leading characters under the cover publishing houses. Only if the League initially held meetings in a cave, the Avengers preferred their own mansion (in recent films, it is played by the tower owned by Tony Stark).
It’s not hard to guess why these early 1960s comics came in time. Humanity had just entered space, the planet was already surrounded by satellites, and the cold war continued in heaven – in the form of a space race between two superpowers. So the superheroes and their opponents have reached the planetary level of confrontation. Such series promised readers of all the stars under one cover and a lot of large-scale action (League meetings were often held according to the formula “no time to explain”like in Vagabond Season 2) – in a word, there was no time for street crimes, and the escapism handle was twisted to the maximum possible mark “11”… And this is also a characteristic feature of the Cold War of the early 1960s: the fear of a nuclear and then a hydrogen bomb as a weapon of instant destruction capable of changing the landscape of the entire planet Earth found various symbolic incarnations and attempts to cope with it. Just look at this love of round tables and secret meetings that decide the fate of humanity:
The idea of a team of heroes in the 1980s gets the author’s reading. Alan Moore creates Guardians: a critical commentary on the political situation of the eighties, when the two superpowers kept rattling their weapons. Find out where the quote comes from? From the “Keepers” all the same Zach Snyder. This man put together a superhero ensemble even before The Avengers and The League went to the movies! It should be said separately about the figure of a man who for almost ten years was the captain, or even the barge haule of the ship on board which the letters DCEU – “DC Extended Universe” are displayed.
Zack Snyder’s Road to Comic Comics
Snyder is Hollywood’s premier monumentalist, and if he had worked in the 1950s, he probably would have filmed ashes [1] and antique fantasy with time-lapse special effects by Ray Harrihausen [2] . In fact, his striving for scale was first manifested in ancient material. The Snyder we know today began with the movie “300 Spartans”, in which the brutal Gerard Butler in the role of Tsar Leonidas shouted “This is Sparta!”. That Sparta also came from comics, not the texts of Nikolai Kun. Next, Snyder translated Alan Moore’s Watchmen, one of the most complex texts by a British comic book writer, into movie language. The book (and the film) reminded of that very Brechtian thought: originally called upon to do good, the Guardians eventually got involved in such matters that the planet’s population by the end of history had noticeably thinned out. In the words of the Roman poet Juvenal, “How can you keep the watchmen safe?” (hence the name of the Murov book)
And this man, who took apart the genre of film comics, DC called to become the central author of their “Black Bullet Season 2“: isn’t it strange? He will direct “Man of Steel” , “Batman v Superman”and, of course, Liga. The rationale behind this assignment is pretty important to understand when comparing the path in DC and Marvel cinema. Despite the heroes who, no matter how high they flew, remained quite familiar guys, the Marvel cinematic universe was invented by serious people in offices and, one can assume, at about the same tables at which the heroes of the Justice League decided their questions. The set of “The Avengers” resembled a secret training ground, where everything is hidden from prying eyes, and even the most eminent actors received information on the military principle of “minimum need”: here is a line for today, you need to look at this point.
Compared to this efficient, streamlined system, DC followed an unpredictable path: she called authors, not functions, and then tried to make them fit into the guaranteed formulas. Let’s say today Nolan is canonized as the director of the best Batman . But no matter how good Heath Ledger’s Joker is, it’s hard to imagine a separate film about him. As good as Joaquin Phoenix is in this role , he will hardly be able to keep him in the publisher’s stall for a long time – he has never starred in a sequel before. For 11 years, DC offered us three different Jokers (Jared Leto was another) – in the same time period, Robert Downey Jr. played Marvel’s Iron Man as cute and without any substitutions . And played it ten times.
#ReleaseTheSnyderCut
The Justice League was worth $ 275 million and turned into Snyder’s separation from the studio. He filmed everything he wanted, but not the way he wanted: while the work was going on, negative reviews of Batman v Superman started pouring in, and the studio decided to make edits on the fly, annoying the director in every possible way. One of the “doctors” was Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but most importantly, a man from the Marvel camp who wrote and directed the first Avengers. Immediately after the filming was completed, Snyder dropped out of the post-production process: the last straw was the tragedy in the family. Whedon was promoted to director and requested two more months of additional filming at a cost of $ 25 million. The budget has grown to the round mark of 300 million.
“Justice League”, which was released in the movies, went on for exactly two hours, and Whedon balanced the grandeur of Snyder’s filming (his name remained in the credits) with humor, quick editing and other attempts to add lightness to what was happening – quite in the spirit of Marvel. The film did not pay off at the box office, and fans launched a multi-year campaign with the hashtag #QB1 Season 4 . And Warner Bros. conceded – and these concessions cost them money: obviously, the next additional filming, editing, dubbing and special effects cost the studio $ 75 million. Even Ben Affleck on occasion returned to the role of Batman.
The case with the Snyder version is interesting not only because it has changed in comparison with the rental version. Yes, it has changed enough: the film rang out until four o’clock, the last of which changed so much, the Joker got here, Superman changed and changed – in fact, you can list for a long time. This is an incredibly expensive author’s statement – with an academic (square in the language of the layman) aspect ratio, songs by Nick Cave and a division into six chapters with a separate epilogue. Even Nolan wasn’t allowed that — well, or he didn’t ask.
