Franken-Justice

After rewatching "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015) and this, "Justice League," it seems that Joss Whedon, who co-wrote and reassembled this, along with being one of the main creative forces behind the former MCU installment, managed to rework Mary Shelley's book "Frankenstein" into the two biggest comic-book superhero movie franchises. Unfortunately, they're both among the most flawed entries in those respective shared cinematic universes, but it's an interesting similarity nonetheless. It’s as though he wasn't content with his stitching together of the horror genre and superhero fare for the MCU sequel, or thought that Lex Luthor raising a Kryptonian blood-brother of himself from the grave in the form of Doomsday in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" (2016) wasn't enough of an homage to the 1931 film version of "Frankenstein," that he had to try again. Too bad this is the worst monstrosity of Franken-supes yet.

The production mess has been well reported, but the overriding aim was clearly to imitate the success of the lighter tone of the Marvel movies after the mixed record of Zack Snyder’s grim visions in “Man of Steel” (2013) and, more so, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Personally, despite the faults of Snyder’s prior two DCEU pictures, I’ll take them any day over “Justice League;” at least, then, we have two distinguishable behemoth comic-book franchises instead of an amorphous glut of repetition at the box office. Sure, when the imitation works, an “Aquaman” (2018) or “Shazam!” (2019) is largely indiscernible from an “Ant-Man and the Wasp” (2018) or “Captain Marvel” (2019), but what’s interesting about that. On the flip side, when the temperament is off and the jokes are flat, you get a bomb such as this, and all that’s left of any compelling nature, for me at least, is what sort of Frankenstein monster lurks within all that wreckage.

Sadly, even the Frankenstein stuff here is less intriguing and integrated than in Whedon’s prior “Age of Ultron,” where the entirety of the superhero team and their antagonist were part of the creation process and the monstrosities within the story. There were mad doctors (Tony Stark, Bruce Bannon, Ultron’s manipulated scientist), monsters (Hulk, a Jekyll/Hyde type character, most obviously, as well as a (scarlet) witch and the AI robots) and even a god (Thor) to provide the spark of life. The mixture of magic and science fiction and, to a lesser extent, that of the horror and superhero genres worked. DC has its alien god, too, which was part of the appeal of Snyder’s pictures, although Superman as a Christ figure had been a theme mined since Christopher Reeve put on the cape and tights. That’s absent here, as Supes doesn’t interact with regular people at all outside of an opening smart-phone interview by off-screen kids and his carrying an apartment building that presumably contains humans. Nope, here, he’s merely an overpowered deus ex machina who’s a bit confused at first, but then is just happy to be alive and save the day almost effortlessly. Batman and Alfred have the computers and tech savvy, but not along the lines of their MCU counterparts, and Cyborg seems to be content merely to hack into such gizmos and search the web. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman each have their own personal backstories that the narrative gets into and which have nothing to do with the Frankenstein theme or with anything particularly interesting.

What “Justice League” does have is magic. The infinity stones… I mean, mother boxes are employed for both of the movie’s two Frankenstein-esque creation/resurrection episodes. Cyborg’s dad, perhaps the only true mad scientist here, used one to save his son’s life, who was otherwise legally proclaimed dead, and merge him with robotics and computer stuff in the process. The two of them will later discuss which of them is a monster. The same box, then, is made to bring the corpse of Superman back to life. Cyborg and Flash get tasked with digging the body up, too. The resurrection of Jesus Superman is somewhat intriguing--more so than the creation of Abomination Doomsday in the prior picture. Having the body in fluid is somewhat reminiscent of the Hammer Frankenstein films more so than any of the Boris Karloff versions. Moreover, Flash explicitly references “Pet Sematary,” for which Stephen King’s novel surely owes much to Shelley’s work.

Curiouser yet, I don’t recall the insides of the Kryptonian ship in the previous movies looking so vaginal. Just look at those corridors to the embryonic chamber. In this sense, Superman’s corpse is the egg, of course, along with the “box,” which is already slang for vagina. The spark of life--the penis and sperm, if you will, is provided by Flash. He backs up to the end of one of these vaginal canals, then races through it, past the cervix and uterus, to fertilize the magical super egg in the Fallopian tubes with his surging electrical charge. It’s one of the more sexually-suggestive Frankenstein-esque creation scenes I’ve seen since Kenneth Branagh essentially alluded to masturbation in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (1994). And, in the Frankenstein tradition, Flash and Superman play out the myth of homunculi--fully formed humans from which fetuses were formerly misbelieved to develop.

It’s all downhill from there. The fight between Superman and the rest of the League isn’t bad, though, and the speed of Flash allows for the exploration of Superman’s quickness, too. Everything else is bad. The CGI vomit that is the bland supervillain (Steppenwolf) and his army of insect clones is excruciatingly generic--proving the usual bloodless warfare for some PG-13 violence. The climactic battle is unexciting, and there’s a peculiar focus on a sole family fleeing the carnage. Compare this to the better-integrated fates of civilians in the climax of “Age of Ultron.” The humor is uniformly flat, including Flash’s “racially-charged” fist-bump fail with Cyborg, and the running gag about brunch only rings true for middle-to-upper-class filmmakers--an unemployed young university student of poverty like Barry Allen would not be concerned about brunch. His pops is in prison, and he admits to having no friends, so who would he be going to brunch with anyways. At some point, it seems they just ran out of things for characters to say and so resorted to such uncompelling interjections between fight scenes as, “alright” and “booyah.” Sometimes, the superheroes merely line up and pose for a few moments. Even worse are the several gratuitous shots focusing on Gal Gadot’s posterior and the low-angle up-skirt shots while she’s wearing her revealing Wonder Woman costume. It reminds me of how the MCU introduced Scarlet Johansson as Black Widow back in “Iron Man 2” (2010), including a prolonged look at her backside as she walked into a restaurant in one scene. Better MCU installments don’t do that. Heck, DCEU’s “Wonder Woman” (2017) didn’t do that. But, hey, this was the DCEU’s first attempt at being derivative. There are even scenes during and after the credits that aren’t worth watching--one of which sets up another movie that may never happen because this one was so bad.

(Included on my list of 50--and counting--Frankenstein films.)