Firstly, in no way is this better than Dawn of Justice (DOJ) (a film which I will defend), as the rating on some sites would suggest at the time of writing this. This follows on from that and spends the majority of the first half of the film reintroducing us to Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman's death/Louis Lane and introducing the new heroes: Aquaman, Cyborg and Flash. My thoughts with these kind of ensemble superhero films is that less is more. I'm not a fan of origin stories for well-established characters, but when you have three extra main characters brought in it takes time to familiarise them to the audience, and you also can't do it, well, justice. I guess they will be covered in more depth in their standalone feature films but it's kind of doing things back to front.
The story is uninspiring but decent enough and the actors were well chosen for each hero. My favourite scene, I guess similar to Superman III, is when Superman kind of becomes the villain after he is resurrected and forgets who he is. The representation of the raw power he provides is missing from the other heroes and a welcome addition once he arrives. Why there aren't any members of the public around to witness this event is questionable though.
What doesn't work here is the CGI that never seems to stop. If you had a problem with it in DOJ, then stay away from this one. I didn't see this in cinemas but it didn't look great at times. Furthermore, the villain, Steppenwolf, is too similar to what we got in DOJ and even Wonder Woman in a way. Like Doomsday, he isn't incredibly interesting. Did these writers see The Joker, or Bane, or even to a lesser extent, Lex, from recent DC films??? The reason the Batman films worked so well was that they were dark and 'realistic' but this film definitely loses those aspects of film, particularly the realism aspect. There is a feeling of déjà vu I had with this. It's as if Nolan's Batmans and DOJ are Burton's take on Batman, and this is almost Schumacher's. It feels very different.
As referred to earlier, while Superman plays a bit part, in my opinion, he still adds a lot to the film. While (silly) people complained about the convoluted plot of DOJ, there aren't many secondary events or themes here, with little else going on with the characters aside from accomplishing their objective to defeat the supervillain.
The action is interesting enough with enough variety throughout the scenes and the heroes strengths are all utilised (Aquaman is probably the most useless here) appropriately. I'm looking forward to the standalone Batman and Superman films in the future but Hollywood can keep their films with 101 heroes in the one movie in my opinion. 3-2.5.
