I watched its four hours in maybe two. At some point in the last couple years I scrubbed through the theatrical cut. Of course I'm no student of the theatrical cut, but I didn't notice much difference, for my purposes. Personal and artistic takeaways were roughly equivalent -- just cheap thrill for a lifelong movielover. I guess I could tell which was which if I blind-tested them back to back? Probably just by Snyder's general grunge. But in the scope of my life it'd be splitting hairs -- both are so insignificant the differences hardly matter. It's still all interesting to me -- I can't help it -- but I can't call either movie very good.
I'm consistently disappointed by superhero movies (as mentioned recently). I'm not sure I've ever seen a superhero movie I'd call really good. The Dark Knight was supposed to be the one, but my last viewing was quite underwhelming. I think part of the trouble is we're trying to make immature material mature. The comic books were written for a different audience than these movies, and the translation doesn't work. I'm not trying to say comic books are intrinsically, universally immature -- but there's something about them that doesn't translate to blockbuster Hollywood. Example: I was watching an ostensibly dark, mature moment in The Dark Knight, and I noticed the ears on his suit, and it looked stupid, and I felt stupid and confused for watching this, which tore me out of the immersion. Some of this is just ridiculous. The comic books were probably never intended to be translated like this.
It's like Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, where they tried to make a mature blockbuster epic out of a children's fairy tale. Everything is supposed to be epic these days. Not everything can be epic. Some things will die before they're epic. Tolkien's Hobbit wasn't designed for epic. Maybe these comic books weren't either. It's just silly to treat them so -- and as far as I'm aware, not a single great movie has come of all these colossally-expensive attempts.
But will I keep trying? It's hard to resist. I'm so interested.
Note: Wikipedia's take on the differences between the two cuts sounded as biased as anything I've ever read on Wikipedia. I guess I'll trust Snyder's cut should be considered more authentic, but boy was Whedon vilified for (again, for my purposes) vaguely equivalent cheap entertainment.
Did you notice the different aspect ratios? The Snyder cut is in 4:3. I'm still sort of interested in this--mostly due to its runtime. There is a cult around Snyder on Letterboxd; all of these people say there's a night and day difference between the cuts.
ReplyDeleteI didn't notice the aspect ratio, even after the title card explicitly called it out. But I've never been as sensitive to aspect ratio as you, at least not consciously.
DeleteI'm sure if I watched them back-to-back I'd notice differences -- or if I liked the movies more. For me they're basically the same genre, and neither is a great movie. No, I didn't watch the entirety of either, but I feel like I can extrapolate the materials of each and say there's no way I would find either to be all that great. I'm still interested in all this DC stuff, and interested in the idea of the Snyder cut (I almost spent as much time reading about it as watching it). But I can't say it saves Justice League. So how much should I respect the changes, if the movie is still not very good?
Maybe this isn't surprising, since I'm not in this "Snyder cult". 300, Watchmen, Man of Steel,... are any of his movies actually that great? I've been generally interested in them, but with more instinctive than reasonable justification.