Current Events > Why are DC/Snyderverse movies so long for what they are?

(+) Yeah! (+)

"what they are" being fairly stilted, self-serious cliche-fests with awkward CGI, lots of bland surface-level imagery and action that isn't up to par.

This is mostly a Snyderverse complaint, but it crops up elsewhere too. This is probably going to cover a lot of my dislike for Snyder and his movies that you may have seen before.

Man of Steel: two hours. Filled to the brim with Shirtless Hobo Drifter Superman going into messianic pose and archetype after messianic pose and archetype. I'm not even pinning this on the regular points of derision like Jon Kent - the actionized opening on Krypton felt bland, in color palette and execution, the movie takes a glacial pace to get going without a whole lot of substance between the silence and the messiah contrast shit they loaded the movie with, and when the movie gets going it's a slugfest that has the grand, important message of "if superheroes were real, they could and would easily commit 9/11-level atrocities against us". Obviously reconstructing the golden, idyllic Superman in 2005 didn't work, so let's go in the grittier post-9/11 direction and have Superman wipe out 25 skyscrapers at once. It was slow and plodding, it had no heart, it wasn't the Superman I wanted.

BvS: two and a half hours. Again, breezing past the Martha stuff, though I will say that Lex Luthor was both fucking terrible and the most imaginative idea they had in that movie, turning him into some gibbering tech genius ala Zuckerberg on crack. The movie was written by fucking Alex Kurtzmann - why does anyone defend this shit. Again, the slow non-action scenes don't feel like character-building or like it advances anything - it's just slow, plodding empty air briefly punctuated by some hack dialogue that fails to stand out except when it's terrible. Even scenes where Superman is saving screaming families from raging floods, there's less of an emotional connection to it all and it's always caught up in this debate on whether Superman is an abomination or not. The titular battle is stilted and sluggish and miserable, like the rest of the movie. The movie exists to tease the Justice League, with an unrestrained 5 minute scene dedicated to showing TEASER TRAILERS for upcoming superheroes.

But then they release a new cut that's three hours long, and people go "no this one is so much better, they made the movie good", and pretty much all they did is add CGI blood and reinsert a sideplot that ultimately goes nowhere. The fact that Alex Kurtzmann was involved should be enough to sink this movie, but despite the absolute thrashing it got everywhere for being a waste of time with hack dialogue and a story that goes nowhere and wastes Superman as a character, this is still hotly debated as like the zenith of superhero movies. They could have pulled this in at two hours or less. This is not an epic cinematic experience, it's a waste of time that sorely needed to be tightened up to be captivating in any capacity.

I'm going to skip ahead here because BvS is where I checked out and Whedon's Justice League is a piece of shit for a ton of other reasons - which even Zack Snyder, with all of my ill will towards his movies, managed to make evident with his own cut, as egregiously long as it was.

Suicide Squad was full of padding. I remember it being less long than BvS, but not by much, and it was just as miserable as BvS. It felt longer than it was, like every DC movie since Man of Steel, because it had nothing to offer but a handful of bland platitudes and the most stilted, scripted character writing yet.

I'm going to jump ahead to a movie I honestly didn't mind, because I never watched Aquaman or any of the movies going forward. My next movie was Joker.

I honest-to-god liked Joker.

But it had one problem, and that's that the movie was padded out with scenes of Arthur's eccentricities. They're there for a reason, but they end up using too many of them and it pads out the movie - again, the issue is padding. There were scenes like the fridge scene where you could cut them out and replace them with a similar oddball character vignette from earlier in the movie, and not a whole lot would change. They're filmed, edited and slotted in besides each other without a whole lot connecting them, and by the end of the movie when it's actually spicing up and being particularly good, it's eaten up so much time that I don't care any more.

I would give Joker more leeway here because I respected what it was trying to do. It was emulating prestige film-making. It was going for a long, emotionally draining character drama. I loved it for that - it was something interesting, something new in the superhero movie space. When news broke of that black Superman movie, I fucking WISHED it went the way Joker did and became a prestige movie that sought to craft a "platonic ideal" of what Superman is. I honestly think that's what Joker tried, and that's what I like about it the most - how it creates a platonic ideal of the Joker, and not whatever Jared Leto was fucking doing in Suicide Squad.

But again, by the end, I had seen like twelve scenes of Arthur being cringe - in the sense that I cringed at what he was doing, but also felt immensely bad for him - that just came one after the other, piecemeal, until the next plot-relevant scene happened. By the time he was dancing down the stairs, I was giving up on the movie. When he shot Murray, I barely felt anything because I wanted to go home.

Literally the only criticism I have of Joker is that it meanders too much. It stops being engaging. I don't care that he's climbing into a fridge, I've seen this miserable loser suffer for two hours straight and I'm starting to lose sight of the point.

It had every business being long, but it ran out its welcome by the end, like every other DC movie that had lost me before. And I still like it more than any other DC movie post-2013, but that loss of engagement still sticks with me. It didn't deserve the Oscar over Parasite, that was a movie that honestly engaged me up until the closing shot - the part at the party where the dude smashes the protagonist's head in with a rock was where the movie began to get dicey, but the way that movie ended was such a great payoff to everything that had come before. As much as I genuinely liked Joker? It made the same mistake as these other movies, and it fucking meandered.

I can respect Snyder re-cutting Justice League for the sake of his vision, but I'm never going to watch a four hour superhero movie, let alone a four hour Zack Snyder movie. I'd rather get brain damage.

And you could say it's the length of the movie, but I've seen Avatar and Endgame before and they were fine movies that I enjoyed. Felt a little bit of fatigue by the end of Endgame, but that movie absolutely sold the rock'em sock'em robot aspect of superhero movies and was somehow coherent and engaging for a sheer majority of its runtime. I think the MCU is getting a well-deserved backlash nowadays, but Endgame was a tight fucking movie. Those three hours always had something engaging and relevant going on. Even when Avatar was focusing on alien CGI scenery, it was a gorgeous spectacle. I'm down to spend three hours watching a movie if I think that movie is worth my time and attention. DC movies have either lost me by the end, or they have done nothing but waste my time and money.

And I just don't understand why they wouldn't cut back on the long, pretentious scenes of Superman in a crucifixion pose, or on the bland dialogue or the extraneous scenes of characters being miserable. DC movies, imo, tend to look terrible and lose the point by the end. There's an art in tidying up your shit and being coherent, ZS doesn't need to pretend BvS is the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Something artistic blah blah

This is a part of my art installation, Posts As Long As Zack Snyder's Terrible Movies. Consider leaving a donation at the entrance of the museum, or enjoy other fine exhibits such as One, Two, Avian Flu or How The Silicon West Became The Silicon Best

Edit: man I didn't even mention The Batman. It seems like that movie is where people are drawing the line.

I have no idea, BvS, and his justice league movies had no businesses being as long as they were for such simple storys and concepts.

That was all on him, not WB. Hell the dude was so out of touch with the casual audiances he didn't realize that all most fans care about BvS........was batman vs superman. Rather then the philosophical BS he kept bringing up. And Idk if any else noticed but the marketing took a huge shift in that regard near the end when they realized. Lol.

maybe the movies will be 15-30 minutes shorter if he cut the slo-mo and zoom ups.

MabusIncarnate posted...

Something artistic blah blah

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/5/6/3/AAe7Y8AAD3NT.jpg

I don't care I loved those movies. I wish they were longer. I could have watched a 6 hour cut of Justice League and I would have been happy.

It seems like he tries to push the tone for too long, his thing is dark and dreary, and its gotta be so obvious throughout movies that are too long as a result.

I remember in Batman, commissioner Gordon was having a conversation with Bruce and he just answered every question with another question and by the end of it, I was thinking really? Can we progress a bit now?

It drags unnecessarily a lot.

SomeLikeItHoth posted...

I don't care I loved those movies. I wish they were longer. I could have watched a 6 hour cut of Justice League and I would have been happy.

They so much screen time to all justice league it could've have been its own movie. They should've gone the marvel route of establising all the four core members of justice league like they did in Avengers. Make a cyborg solo movie would've made so much sense before making justice league movie.

Why are you talking about films Snyder had nothing to do with (like Joker or the Batman?)

Zack Snyder is under the impression that his movies are much deeper and more complex than they actually are, and the runtime reflects that. He's like the director, less incel-y version of Jordan Peterson.

BvS is partly responsible for bringing about this age we live in in which dumb people think theyre smarter than everyone else.

Im sorry but if you think BvS was a good movie, your brain is broken.

lolife67 posted...

Why are you talking about films Snyder had nothing to do with (like Joker or the Batman?)

DC/Snyderverse is in the topic title.

My main gripe is absolutely with Snyder movies, but other DC movies went a bit too far with it as well. Some people liked The Batman just fine, some people thought it dragged - I can't judge because I haven't seen it, but there's a topic on CE right now that kind of inspired this whole topic. Like I said, I liked Joker a lot, but it overstayed its welcome with these repetitious scenes of Arthur Fleck's misery that they could have roped in just a little bit.

I have a lot of bad blood towards Snyder's movies, but it seems like the tendency of these movies to drag and go on for longer than maybe necessary is enough of an institutional fault at Warner Bros. that the blame doesn't fall squarely on Snyder's shoulders.

WB definitely knows that the movies dragged on too long, that's why they cut some of the movies on the theatrical release.