[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Justice League]
The fact that Superman has to come back from the dead in order to be humanized in dire superhero blockbuster Justice League says a lot about the film’s misconceived combination of Frank Miller Lite-style gloominess, and co-screenwriter (and fill-in director) Joss Whedon’s signature quippy humor.
This film, like so many other stories involving Superman, only details its creators’ myopic inability to effectively convey the optimism that Superman personifies.Justice League is, at heart, toxically cynical, even if it does ultimately conclude — not counting its second post-credits sequence — on a shaky note of optimism. In the film, paranoid millionaire turned nocturnal vigilante Bruce “Batman” Wayne (Ben Affleck) assembles a team of similarly powerful outcasts to defeat a doomsday scenario that, while inherently generic, is a survivalist’s wet dream. Demigod-like villain Steppenwolf (a personality-less computer-generated monstrosity voiced by Ciaran Hinds) has invaded Earth, and plans to transform it into his home planet of Apokolips (though his native world isn’t named in the film). Unfortunately for Batman, Clark “Superman” Kent (Henry Cavill) died fighting Doomsday at the end of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Diana “Wonder Woman” Prince (Gal Gadot), the closest thing that the film has to a Superman-like leader, unfortunately takes a backseat while insecure teammates Arthur “Aquaman” Curry (Jason Momoa), Barry “The Flash” Allen (Ezra Miller), and Victor “Cyborg” Stone (Ray Fisher), muscle her out of the spotlight.
Wonder Woman’s diminished role says a lot about Justice League. Wonder Woman’s role was supposedly beefed up during reshoots after her solo film’s unprecedented, and understandable success. But you can’t really tell based on the negligible support role she performs (more on this shortly).
Justice League‘s weak role for Wonder Woman is also not surprising given a pattern established by decades of DC Comics films and TV shows: nobody knows what to do with Superman, arguably the most iconic superhero to be defined by his idealism. This imaginative handicap isn’t one that exclusively defined trainwreck cash-in sequels Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) had: even Superman Returns (2006), the closest thing to a decent Superman movie we’ve seen in a while, was an uneasy mix of pseudo-contemplative bathos, and kitschy retro humanism.
Fan-favorite creator Bruce Timm, one of the key showrunners on the otherwise top-notch ’90s cartoon Superman: The Animated Series, also candidly admitted in an interview with Modern Masters that he’s disappointed that his version of the character ultimately reflected an unproductive desire to turn sunny Superman into Byronic Batman. That self-lacerating criticism is more applicable to Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), two films that try to make Superman approachable by giving him a canned tragedy — his father got sucked up by a tornado because…he told Superman to stay on the down-low? Huh? — and then ultimately murdering him in a weird homage to “The Death of Superman,” one of the most highly publicized, but retrospectively unpopular comics events of the ’90s (if you want a laugh: got to your local comics shop, and ask the proprietor how many copies of the “Funeral for a Friend” sequel tie-ins he’s still got in stock). Whatever happened to the “Man of Tomorrow,” an iconic character that the Comics Journal’s Tom Crippen once devastatingly put down as “a childish hood ornament atop a faux-serious industry,” and “the appendix of the superhero genre, a super-appendix that’s as big as a spine and completely inoperable?”
If anything, Justice League reflects the long-established Batman-ification of the superhero world. Like the Caped Crusader, several members of the title group are defined by pseudo-tragic backstories that are related through leaden expository dialogue peppered with eye-roll-inducing Whedon-style one-liners. Aquaman’s cursing, drinking, and generally surly behavior — which are undercut in a scene where Wonder…
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