Pluck the plumage off the bird because I’m prepared to eat some crow. For years, I doubted the fact that the long-rumored Zack Snyder director’s cut of Justice League would ever exist in a format suitable to be watched outside of a producer’s screening room. It just didn’t make one iota of sense. With WB having moved on from Snyder’s vision after the director was forced to leave the film mid-production when his daughter tragically committed suicide, the “Snyder Cut” was incomplete, with tens of millions of dollars in VFX shots never even brought into post-production.

In his absence, the now-problematic Joss Whedon was brought on, did a Frankenstein hackjob to “salvage” what he could, filling in the gaps with the kind of smart-alecky quips that worked so well in The Avengers. The result was much more poorly received here. This “official”, canonical cut received generally poor reviews (it currently sits at 40% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a relatively paltry box office (especially for a Justice League movie the world had waited decades to see come to fruition). Years went by and fan outcry grew, with #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hitting the Twitter trending threshold numerous times. Put on your Flash shoes and fast forward to March 2021 and somehow, for some reason, Zack Snyder’s Justice League not only actually exists, it’s actually pretty good.

As far as plumage goes, the already-notorious Snyder cut, which weighs in at just a hair over four hours long, is as frilly and pompous as a bull peacock, if much much less colorful. With no qualms flaunting excesses and always drifting into extended version territory whenever the choice shall arise, the Snyder cut always maximize, never minimizes. It’s an filmic argument that more is indeed always more, less be damned. Even though much could arguably be cut, excesses could be excised, the oft-untrimmed Snyder doo actually rocks, particularly in contrast to Whedon’s doo-doo.

Self-indulgent to an extreme that few films can be while also managing to be strangely introspective, the four-hour runtime is almost necessary for this cut of film to work. I say that while also acknowledging that there is no argument that could convince me that a four-hour sit will ever be a good idea nor should ever be intentionally sought out. Skipping individual introduction films for Barry Allen a.k.a. “The Flash” and Victor Stone a.k.a. “Cyborg” (and jumping the gun on Aquaman’s solo outing) was a clear misstep, as egregious as passing up an actual Man of Steel sequel before just going ahead and killing off Superman in his second on-screen appearance in the SnyderVerse.

Those problematic decisions continue to haunt the SnyderCut just as they, in many senses, demand the film’s long-winded approach. It is a problem of Snyder’s own making and forces into existence a director’s cut that I can’t imagine would have ever actually made it to theaters. The basic economic calculus of being able to turn over half the amount of theaters per day simply makes it an untenable situation, one that perhaps only the perfect storm of a pandemic-sized content hole, a rabid, unrelenting fan-base, and an emergent streaming service like HBO Max, hungry to make a name for itself, could have mustered.

Insider baseball commentary aside though, the Snyder cut manages to exist as more than a fascinating artifactual piece of modern franchise filmmaking gone wrong. Remarkably, the four hours as presented by Snyder were not laborious for this viewer. Sure, the VFX can look plenty muddy and tailored exclusively for home theater viewing. And yes, the aesthetic pallet is such an undersaturated gray that one wonders why they didn’t just go with a straight-up stark black and white cut (a version that, no joke, is coming soon to HBO Max.) And of course, I chopped my watch up into two much more-reasonable two-hours sessions rather than doing the whole thing in one fat beefy crunch. But despite all these obvious glaring obstacles to my enjoyment, I still found myself rearing to re-enter this world, genuinely excited (and dare I say anxious) to finish the Snyder cut in a way that I did not think imaginable prior to firing up my Max and settling into Snyder’s world.

As has been pointed out so many times already, the improvements over the theatrical cut are vast. The hugely obvious inequities of Justice League having two daddies is resolved. Per my 2017 review of that theatrical cut of the film, “The experience is jarring. The love child of two vastly different filmmakers; superhero storytellers who for my money stand at two completely opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to their aesthetic style and storytelling cadence. It’s a ship divided. A movie at war with itself. You can never not tell when a particular filmmaker has the reins, Justice League waffling back and forth between stark tones and divorced sensibilities. Though this is decidedly not the grim, unrelentingly somber audience-pummelfest that Batman v. Superman most certainly was, Justice League is still beleaguered by its inability to get the key ingredients right.”

One such key ingredient: Bruce Wayne, who over the course of just one movie went from battle-worn crusader to burnt-out pedestrian. With the Snyder cut, Ben Affleck’s take on Batman has been restored. He vaulted from butt of the joke to inspiring group leader, all the more impressive considering he’s the only supergroup member without a superpower that isn’t wealth-based. So too does Steppenwolf transform from a bland, dime-a-dozen CG-baddy to a well-enough-defined character with decent motivations. His search for redemption, acting as middle management to boss level villain Darkseid, is a more grounded character want than world domination, even if his connection to our band of heroes remains loose and largely undefined.

So too does Cyborg emerge as the beating (artificial) heart of the film. Over the course of the past few years, Ray Fisher has had a very hostile and very public feud with Joss Whedon and some of the executives over at Warner Brothers and this cut, if not necessarily proving the racial inequities he’s foisted at them, underscores the source of his abundant frustrations. Under Whedon’s prevue, Cyborg was a nothing character with hardly an arc to sneeze at. Here, he may be the least physically human, but is the main thing grounding the ultra-nerdy comic book lore to the human world. His sidelining in the theatrical cut was so severe that it’s hard to not suspect some deeper, more systemic breakdown but that remains a conversation for another day and a more nuance publication, likely once all the Knightmare dust has finally settled.

The fact that something as fundamentally “in-camera” as the portrayal of a character can be changed so drastically years after the original version hit theaters speaks to the all-encompassing power of the edit. Naturally, since Zack Snyder is the guy wielding all the editorial power this go ‘round, there’s an unsettling amount of artsy piano covers of power ballads and all the slo-mo slaps you’ll need for the entirety of 2021 but at least this Justice League feels of a piece with itself. The “itself” being fundamentally Snyder and his very specific understanding of these characters. Having editorial stake is powerful and though giving the SnyderCut the light of day when there is no intention to continue this story’s cliffhanging trajectory makes little business sense, this is clearly a vision that, for better and worse, is an internally-consistent piece. This project clearly means something to Mr. Snyder, and in moments he foregoes his typical moody grit-doctor pastiche for something sincerely forlorn and arguably rather introspective. The notes of a man who’s suffered a great loss haunts the film but it isn’t until the final frame of film reads “For Autumn” where you feel yourself just a little bit shaken and perhaps even teary that you know, my god, he actually did it.

CONCLUSION: A breathless ode to the frighteningly almighty power of fandom, ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ has finally seen the light of day and, against all odds, it’s a fairly riveting four-hour super-packed, superhero affair. It’s en vogue to go with extremes on this one but the “best ever”/”worst garbage” dichotomy just doesn’t fit here: this is an undeniable labor of love that eclipses the theatrical cut in all sorts of ways while still suffering a litany of problems inherent with Snyder’s faulty architecting of the franchise.