| HBO Max | Release Date (Streaming): March 18, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
16
Mixed:
23
Negative:
7
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Critic Reviews
The TelegraphMar 15, 2021
It shares a vague shape and a handful of specific, linchpin scenes with its predecessor, but everything about it lands differently: characters that were previously empty or ludicrous now have real grit and depth, while action sequences that were once incoherent, lightweight and garish now number among the most thunderously spectacular in the genre.
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Mar 17, 2021
This film is gorgeous, massive in scope, well-written, and superbly acted. It goes beyond being a Michael Bay-explosion fest and definitively transcends action and destruction porn. This is a real movie. Every single issue I had with the original release is fixed—everything from pacing, cinematography, acting, characterization, and even the film’s score.
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Mar 15, 2021
The new movie — and make no mistake, it really is a new movie — is more than a vindication of Snyder’s original vision. It’s a grand, nimble, and immersive entertainment, a team-of-heroes origin story that, at heart, is classically conventional, yet it’s now told with such an intoxicating childlike sincerity and ominous fairy-tale wonder that it takes you back to what comic books, at their best, have always sought to do: make you feel like you’re seeing gods at play on Earth.
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Mar 15, 2021
Mar 15, 2021
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a surprise vindication for the director and the fans that believed in his vision. With a mature approach to its superhero drama, better-realized antagonists, and improved action, Snyder’s version of Justice League saves the movie from the dustbin of history.
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The Film StageMar 15, 2021
As a gift to those who’ve stuck with him through changing trends in the genre, the director’s vision gets its freest reign in this four-hour director’s cut, boldly titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League and thus asserting authorship under what’s become not so much a genre of cinema as it as an entire mode of production, corporately controlled and split over hundreds of FX artisans in post. And while still bearing a few unfortunate marks of industrial cinema (like almost all of The Flash’s painfully lame jokes from the studio-bungled theatrical cut being kept intact), this title is earned.
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Mar 15, 2021
The film isn’t without its pleasures; it’s fun to see Aquaman and Wonder Woman beat people up and smirk afterward. I didn’t realize that watching Superman blow on stuff and freeze it with this super breath was something that would bring me immense happiness. And I’ve sunk an afternoon or more into video games in the past. But it would’ve been nice to see Snyder knock this out of the park and supplement his eye for visuals and his unique style with a story that had a bit more soul, especially with his very rare $70 million second chance.
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Mar 15, 2021
For long stretches, Zack Snyder’s Justice League feels more like a rough assembly than a director’s cut. It appears to include every single shred of footage Snyder shot, no matter how superfluous to the story. It will absolutely delight the hardest of hardcore Snyder heads. I’m not sure how more casual viewers will react to a longer and bleaker version of the same movie they already saw and dislike.
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Mar 15, 2021
Watching Snyder’s intermittently rewarding epic—if nothing else a spectacle of completed vision—stirred up surprising emotions. Not about what happens to the people (and aliens) in the film, but about what happened to its maker, and to the course of human events while Justice League 2.0 wrestled its way into being.
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Mar 15, 2021
Zack Snyder superhero movies are the black licorice of cinema: Those who like the taste can’t understand why everyone doesn’t, and those who don’t like the taste grimace at the thought. And now the streaming wars and online clamor have brought us Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It’s four hours of black licorice.
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Mar 23, 2021
Mar 15, 2021
If you’re looking for a brisk, compelling story, maybe not. It’s as if there is a third version of this film, something in between the two in terms of tone and fan service, that would be the best way to tell this story. That’s unlikely to happen, of course. How many “Justice League” movies do we really need, anyway?
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The PlaylistMar 15, 2021
ZSJL is a fan cut as much as it is a director’s cut, with all the indulgence that the notion applies. As for any continuation of the story, as the fans hope, that seems gravely unlikely considering the direction Warner Bros is headed. But for a director who had to abandon his grand superhero project because of a family tragedy and because a big movie studio tried to wrestle control of the film, which was too much to bear at the time, one supposes, this postmortem collectible for die-hard, is about as good as an outcome as one could get.
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IndieWireMar 15, 2021
The overall arc of this “Justice League” coheres throughout, providing occasional dashes of intrigue and inspired visual conceits, and sometimes it’s even fun. Re-centering the drama around ostracized actor Ray Fisher as Cyborg, and drawing out some of the ostentatious fight sequences to their breaking point, Zack Snyder’s Justice League displays genuine effort to make this impossible gamble click.
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Mar 15, 2021
It’s just a really long, more coherent version of that story. I certainly didn’t hate it like I hate the prior version – and, admittedly, I do like it more than Batman v Superman – but all the character motivation in the world still doesn’t help the foundation the whole thing is built on.
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Mar 15, 2021
Yet even compared to the glacial Marvel-Netflix Dramas, Zack Snyder's Justice League is a chore. At the end of the rainbow, viewers are left with the promise that the actual cool things will happen next time. This cut is no worse than the theatrical edition, but it sure is longer. "So begins the end," Steppenwolf declares. When he says that, there is one hour left.
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PolygonMar 15, 2021
Mar 15, 2021
What Snyder has contrived here feels less like a vital re-energization of the form than a ponderous guided tour through a museum’s worth of familiar superhero-movie tropes and conventions: Look at this, look at that, try not to look at your watch. Like the Flash himself, Snyder wants to slow time to a crawl, to deconstruct every gesture, to make his obsessions your own. He wants the movie to go on forever. Mission accomplished.
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Mar 15, 2021
Zack Snyder’s Justice League may feature altered scenes from its chopped-up counterpart, but it’s unlikely to play any differently to general audiences — apart from feeling like more of a slog. Its mere existence guarantees that someone, somewhere will be satisfied, but the film’s improvements are hardly enough to fix what was, now quite apparently, a flawed endeavor from the start.
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Mar 15, 2021
The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.
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Mar 18, 2021
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