By Jake Wilson
★★★
(M) 120 minutes
Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is given sadly little to do in Zack Snyder's Justice League, but she does get to deliver a compelling justification for the superhero genre as a whole.
After the death of her boyfriend Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) – also known as Superman – she's lost her mojo as a reporter but still yearns for the days when she was able to break news stories that revealed "the engine of the world".
That's roughly what the erratic but underrated Snyder is attempting: storytelling on a planetary scale, with larger-than-life characters who stand in for the social forces that affect us all.
The Flash (Ezra Miller) Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) in Justice League.Credit: Warner Bros
Without abandoning the shadowy expressionism that defines the DC Extended Universe, he underlines from the outset that Justice League takes place in a recognisable version of 2017: global warming, reactionaries urging a return to the dark ages, a pervasive sense of impending doom.
As the first full-scale team-up of the major DC heroes – Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and company – Justice League offers itself as a major pop-cultural event. It's no secret the film had a difficult genesis: a personal tragedy forced Snyder to withdraw midway through the shoot, leaving the loose ends to be tied up by veteran superhero wrangler Joss Whedon (The Avengers), credited as a co-writer.
But while you can see the joins, the blend of talents works surprisingly well, Snyder's visual bombast complemented rather than sabotaged by Whedon's bent for irony.
Snyder's politics have always been strategically ambiguous, but here it's the more progressive Whedon who appears to have seized control of the machine.
Ezra Miller, left, and Ben Affleck drop their superhero personas in a scene from Justice League.Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Traumatised in his own way by Superman's death, the Batman we meet here has shed some of his usual quasi-fascist tendencies: his billionaire alter ego Bruce Wayne has morphed into a jaded do-gooder all too aware of his status as an emblem of white male power.
Whatever you think of Affleck, he's perfect for this conception of the role, though the film can be read as an allegory of his well-publicised doubts about playing it for much longer.
Lois Lane (Amy Adams) is mourning the loss of her love, Clark Kent (Superman). Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
The DC Universe, in other words, is changing almost as rapidly as our own. Batman is the past, and Wonder Woman is the future, descending from on high with her magic lasso so that Bruce, good liberal that he has become, can coax her into taking over his leadership position.
The physically ageless Diana is now much older and wiser than the ingenue we met in Wonder Woman earlier this year, but in the Hollywood context, the Israeli-born Gadot retains the quizzical foreignness that boosts her authority by implying that many of her thoughts are kept to herself.
Aquaman (Jason Momoa) provides back-up muscle.Credit:
Also part of this brave new world is Ezra Miller's millennial version of the Flash, a sardonic outsider faster than regular folk in mind as well as body, making him a natural mouthpiece for Whedon's fourth wall-breaking quips.
This blatant bid for the approval of the Tumblr generation could have led to embarrassment, but the levity makes a welcome break from the dullness of the main plot, which sees the extra-terrestrial demon Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciaran Hinds) racing to turn the world into a "primordial hellscape".
Like many modern superhero films, Justice League is at its most stimulating in its expository first half, built on TV-style cutting between disparate locales and characters (including a humble Russian family whose decrepit apartment, complete with views of a nuclear cooling tower, suggests the transition to hell has already occurred).
The eventual showdowns are business as usual, and the supplementary Justice League members Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) are sulky tough guys who don't have much to offer beyond back-up muscle.
But it's teamwork that saves the day, with DC's trademark darkness giving way to a brand of sentimental uplift that Snyder, Whedon and company apparently see as necessary in our own dark times.
The final paean to hope again comes close to breaking the fourth wall, and manages to be touching in its very lack of conviction: you half expect the newly unified League members to link arms and sing Kumbaya.