“Justice League” was a big blockbuster film made to challenge the likes of Marvel’s “Avengers.” It was released in 2017 and ended up being a major flop compared to its competition. Fast forward to 2021, we have “Zack Snyder’s Justice League.” 

The film, called the “Snyder Cut,” is supposedly Director Zack Snyder’s original vision for the movie he was originally hired to make. He directed the films building up to this point with “Man of Steel” and “Batman vs Superman,” but due to the tragic loss of his daughter, he stepped away from filming and the studio needed a replacement.

Enter Joss Whedon, the director of one of the biggest box office draws and the competition “The Avengers.” Whedon was brought in to give this DC film more of a Marvel look. It was as if someone took a saturation knob and turned it up on the screen. There were reshoots and then the added humor that worked so well for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This tactic did not do so well with the DC Cinematic Universe as the movie failed to give the studio what it wanted, and that was to emulate what Marvel has done.

So, how did we get to another movie four years later? There was a huge outcry on social media from fans and even the cast to “release the Snyder Cut.” That’s how we get two versions of same movie but they are very different. The original run time for the first release was two hours; the “Snyder Cut” has a monstrous runtime of four hours and two minutes.

How can you ever expect to release this to the public in theaters to sit there for a chunk of their day? You don’t, in a world of COVID-19 and establishments still being shut down, you can turn to a streaming platform like HBO Max. To make that four-hour runtime less intimidating, you break the movie into six parts and an epilogue. This is a movie that doesn’t seem possible in a normal world unless we expect a straight to DVD director’s cut.

With the same star-studded cast with the likes of Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa, it turns out to be a much better film than the original release. Characters like Cyborg portrayed by Ray Fisher and The Flash played by Ezra Miller were saved in this film and given back scenes that were originally cut from the movie. Cyborg can even be seen as the heart of this cut, while he was the biggest casualty in the other version with a lack of motive or anything to do. 

Is this a good movie? Compared to the original release, it is a much better movie as plotlines make more sense and the story fits much better. There is a sense that these aren’t just characters thrown into a fight to do whatever they have to do to get the job done and save the world. The elephant in the room is the fact that it’s still a four-hour movie,  and it never feels like you owe it four hours of your life when you get down to it. The “Snyder Cut” gets four out of five stars, while its predecessor only gets two stars. It was a much-needed improvement and the closure a lot of fans needed.