We watched “The Justice League” on HBO Max last night. It wasn’t a bad movie. It certainly had an exhausting amount of CGI in it and there was no dearth of superheroes. It suffered from two issues.

The first is that they don’t tell you what’s going on until the middle of the movie. This has become a trendy way to make movies as well as a fair number of TV shows. Call me old-fashioned, but I like knowing what’s going on before halfway through the film. I was more or less of the impression that if you are a dedicated DC-world movie watcher, you could probably deduce what was going on because you’d already seen other movies which link to this. I stopped the movie at one point and explained “Aquaman” to Garry because I had watched it, but he hadn’t. Yet.

I could also be that the director doesn’t know what’s going on either and needs to wait until the middle to make sense of the so-called script.

There were a bunch of others we’d both missed. I’m sure we could make up for lost time by watching the entire DC section of Max, but there is a limit on the volume of superhero mystique I can absorb before all I hear is noise.

I try to pick and choose which movies I watch and those I do my best to avoid. I’m avoiding “The Joker.” I hated the Joker when he was a comic book character at a time when comic books cost a dime, were made of paper and not part of a gazillion dollar movie franchise. I also didn’t like him on any number of Batman movies and television shows — or, for that matter, on TV’s “Metropolis,” Too creepy.

Somewhere around what I thought was the middle of the movie, they began telling us what was going on. By then we had figured out who the bad guys were. That’s was easier than I initially thought since the bad guys are covered in something metallic, wear devil-like horns, have electronically altered voices and are planning to blow up the world. We had missed whatever movie had the Supe go missing in the first place but we didn’t expect anyone to tell us. Some stuff, you just have to let roll.

That was a moment when I pointed out to Garry I knew there was a plot and all I needed was a little help in figuring it out. From there, the movie proceeded to a dramatic climax and the destruction of Darkside (was that its name?) and some strange murmurings about Lois Lane being a darker character than portrayed. What? Lois Lane? Really? Is no one safe?

Then they went into a long — very long — epilogue which was not an epilogue but a promo for the next batch of upcoming DC movies or TV shows. The epilogue went on for maybe fifteen minutes. It was the equivalent of an extended “next show” highlight for a weekly TV show.

Garry objected. He felt once they’d killed off the awfulest bad guy, that WAS the end. The rest was advertising. It could have gone out as a trailer. We’d probably have watched it regardless, but this was not an epilogue. It dragged the movie on too long, purely intending to generate interest in future DC products.

I prefer being told at the beginning what’s going on. Even though it’s a franchise, the assumption that everyone has seen all the other movies in the series and can remember what happened is a pretty big assumption. More like a presumption. I also suspect an awful lot of stoned out people watch these movies and can’t remember anything. Finally, there are people like us who may have seen some of the other movies, but not all of them and quite possibly forgot what we saw. Entirely. We may have forgotten we’d seen the other movies at all. I actually can’t remember which superhero movies I’ve seen or anything that happened in any of them.

Just saying. If you have Max, it’s entertaining when there’s nothing else to watch. I don’t think it’s any kind of memorable cinema but it’s lively.

I really liked it when Wonder Woman warned everyone it was “time to get dressed” and one guy (sorry, name has been forgotten) said that he “was always dressed.” It gave me a chuckle. It’s the light-hearted moments that makes these movies watchable. If they got serious, we might fall asleep before they tell us what’s happening.

Categories: Film Review, Movies

Tags: CGI, DC Comics, Marilyn Armstrong, movie review, The Justice League