Justice League takes place around two years after the events of Batman v Superman. After Steppenwolf, the movie’s main villain, finds out that a sentient container, called a Mother Box, awakens on Earth, he journeys there with his group of parademons in search of it. After the parademons start showing up, Batman and Wonder Woman decide to assemble a team in order to stop them.

Now, I can’t talk about the original theatrical cut of Justice League without talking about all of the behind-the-scenes garbage that went on. Zack Snyder initially was making a movie that was going to continue with the tone of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, but because of the critical reception and public divide of those two films, Warner Bros. didn’t want that. They eventually got their way because, after a tragedy occurred in his family, Zack Snyder decided to step away from the project. Warner Bros. used this to make the version that they wanted, hiring Joss Whedon to finish the film and make it fit the tone of the Avengers movies more. Now, based on just the stuff that went on with the making of the movie, I would give it a horrible review, but I’m here to criticise the movie and not necessarily the creators.

While I think that Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the proper and definitive version of this movie, is much better in every single way, I do think that the tone of this movie is more of what I want from DC, and it seems to be more of the tone that we are getting from James Gunn’s new DC Universe. Now, there are certainly tonal issues and really dumb jokes here and there that Whedon added in that are really cringe and are obviously clashing with everything that Zack Snyder shot, but not enough of them to really hurt the movie for me. This movie, or rather, this version of the movie, has plenty of problems and is one of the more flawed movies in the DCEU, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a lot of fun with it.

For one, the action is awesome throughout. All the best action turned out to be the stuff shot by Zack Snyder, and it shows. I think the use of slow motion is awesome, and seeing all of these characters together with their powers for the first time will never not be cool, and it was certainly awesome the first time I watched it. I think out of all the crew, Batman gets the best action, where we get to see him use a lot of his tools and such. However, once we get more into the third act, characters like Aquaman and Wonder Woman also get their fair share of sequences to show off their powers.

I know this gets criticised a lot, but I do really like the vibrant visuals as well. I definitely think Snyder’s cut is better looking and cinematic, but I do like this version nonetheless. All the colors pop, especially the warmer colors, which, while it was maybe a little overdone, was still good to look at. I will say, though, that it definitely gets maybe a bit over-color graded in the climax, and is a little too vibrant and definitely over-saturated quite a bit.

Like I said, though, this is one of the more flawed movies in the DCEU, even if I have a lot of fun with it. The first, and by far the biggest issue, is the pacing, which is pretty much the cause of all my other problems with the movie. This movie goes out a breakneck speed, and barely gives you any time to breathe or take things in at all. Along with all the tonal changes, the studio also wanted the movie to be no longer than two hours, and that is abundantly clear. You can even tell that the editing was doing its absolute best to make it that runtime, with it being two hours long almost to the exact second.

The first thing that this affects is the main villain, Steppenwolf. Yes, there is a reason he shows up on Earth to come and get all the Mother Boxes and such, but the way it is portrayed makes it seem like he shows up kind of out of nowhere. His motivations also aren’t clear at all until about halfway through the movie, and even then, the way his motivations are revealed is a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of moment. Even aside from the rushed stuff, his character design and CGI are frankly awful. I have no idea why they changed it, as it’s not even the way he was shown when Batman v Superman was setting this up (the look we got in Snyder’s version), but he’s straight-up ugly to look at.

The other issues all lie with literally every member of the team, with the exceptions of Batman and Wonder Woman. The first two characters I’ll talk about are Aquaman and Cyborg. They are as shallow as can be characters, with little to no depth, and if they weren’t based on beloved comic book characters, there would be nothing here for me to care about them. Their motives are also either unclear or, yet again, rushed, with them joining the team extremely abruptly and seemingly out of nowhere.

The Flash is the other main character affected by the two-hour runtime. While his motives are more clear, with him really just doing this because he has nothing else going for him in life, he is also extremely shallow, and one of the more obvious aspects, at least when it comes to the characters, that there were a significant number of scenes and character moments with him that were cut out. The most obvious thing is the stuff with his father, where they hint at some really interesting and compelling stuff, and stuff based on the comic books, but it never goes anywhere. Instead, we are given one scene at the beginning, and one scene at the end, and that’s pretty much it. The other thing I really don’t like about the Flash in this movie is how he is treated as kind of an over-the-top jokester, and speaking of jokes, he kind of is a joke in this movie. He barely does anything throughout, and the team honestly wouldn’t have accomplished any less without him.

Justice League, by all accounts, is messy and a piece of bad storytelling, but it’s still very entertaining. As I said at the beginning, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this version, even if the other version is very much superior in literally every way.