After years of hashtags, online petitions, rumors, speculations, and down right begging HBO Max has released the infamous “Snyder Cut”. Justice League’s horrible theatrical version has been blamed on the edits and reshoots made by Joss Whedon after Zack Snyder’s tragic family loss forced him to abandon the project. Many saw this as an excuse for what has long been a pattern of disappointment, while others held on to their faith that Justice League was better suited with Zack Snyder’s true vision. This group of Snyder faithful started a movement which lead to the studio funding another 70 million dollars in edits and reshoots to bring this vision to HBO Max. While this version is better, the bar was set rather low and with years of fan criticism it would be hard to not improve upon the original trash heap.

Reshooting this film should have been the easiest “lob ball” Zack Snyder has ever seen. It should be easy to hit it out of the park with the amount of time and knowledge he had to finalize this film. He has gone on record as saying that he has not watched the theatrical release of Justice League and we will have to take him at his word for that. One thing is for sure is that he has heard the years of criticism regarding the film. The “Snyder Cut” checks too many of the boxes in the “they should of” section. For the original to have a minimal fan fare “Easter eggs” and this version be full of them would leave you to believe he was paying attention. The other advantage Snyder was given is that you don’t really know what was a shot that hit the edit room floor and which was part of the budget that could fund many entire films. If you want to give the benefit of the doubt you may side with it was always intended to be in the film. If you side with common deductive reasoning you may see that this film may as well have Twitter given a writers credit.

There are a few things that also work in the Snyder Cuts favor. First thing is the length. There is no way any studio lets a movie exceed four hours for a theatrical release. At minimum the film would need to be trimmed down at least an hour if it were ever to see the light of day. Fans of Icelandic folk singing would surely be disappointed. Secondly much of the film has no context if not for a film released after the original version released. Without seeing the Aquaman film you have no clue who Willem Dafoe is or many of the references made by Atlanteans. Lastly, Snyder benefits from modern and reconsidered CGI. CGI has been the weak point in many films in the DCEU and you can tell there was a huge increase in the CGI budget. It was surely money well spent.

DCEU fans I hope your happy. You fought hard for what you wanted and you succeeded. Your forced a studio to retcon a trash movie and bring it into the heights of mediocrity. There is no doubt a large population will be pleased with what was given to them and that is understandable. For those that have higher expectations for the DC properties given the long history of quality story telling in literary form, the Snyder Cut will be an underwhelming film falling just short of disappointment. Like a chocolate covered candy corn you will be pleased at moments with bits of pleasure but periodically be reminded of its truly horrible core. No doubt curiosity will compel any fan of the superhero genre to the marathon length film. Many will feel vindicated, unsurprisingly most will just feel 4 hours older.