It is in the face of the rise to the niche of an army of fans on social networks, assisted by some of its star actors, that Warner finally agreed to disclose online the original cut, signed Zack Snyder, of the blockbuster Justice league (2017), superhero film stamped “DC Comics” relying on the enticing combination of several house characters. Result: a monster film of more than four hours, deluge of adventures, confrontations and special effects, which will have as never made the viewer feel that superheroic fiction was potentially infinitely expandable.
To better understand this expectation, we must take a detour through the stormy process from which the first one emerged. Justice League. At the end of 2016, Snyder, leader of Hollywood pompierism, was excluded from the post-production of the film following a family drama (the suicide of his daughter), but also by a studio frightened by the dark and Dantesque vision that he instilled in the franchise. Joss Whedon, master builder of the saga Avengers, is called to the rescue to revise his copy and smooth things over: he undertakes to turn over a significant part of the film and recast it in a standard duration of two hours.
When it arrived in the room in 2017, the object, wobbly, badly assumed, disappointed and ended in a half-failure remained through the throats of the fans. The return to the Snyder version four years later, therefore, marks a revenge on the will to water down the studio experienced as a work of undermining: a decidedly astonishing era where market research no longer meets the wishes of a hyperspecialized public. , become an expert, and in this almost a sponsor, of the universes offered to him.
Oedipal liabilities of the characters
This new version therefore picks up where Snyder left them after Man of steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016): On the death of Superman (Henry Cavill) at the height of a fight, casting a veil of mourning on the whole world. Spurred on by Batman (Ben Affleck), a coalition of vigilantes – Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) – come together to resuscitate him, with a view to ‘face a new villain from space: Steppenwolf, a sort of metal-caparisoned minotaur who takes up residence in Chernobyl and who, like most of his counterparts, aspires to conquer Earth.
Its messianic twist is obviously not the most captivating part of a storyline that, moreover, doesn’t just stack Herculean clashes. On the contrary, he takes all the time to delve into the heavy, tortured, Oedipal liabilities of each of his characters. Thus the advantage of this version compared to the shorter version is above all due to the disproportionate scale of its implementation (more than half of the allotted time), where heroism is often revealed to be the stigma of an intimate injury (Cyborg and her damaged body, due to her father’s failings).
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