Hacker Cinema
Justice League
2017 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Zack Snyder
ActionAdventureScience Fiction
Fuelled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman's selfless act, Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince assemble a team of metahumans consisting of Barry Allen, Arthur Curry and Victor Stone to face the catastrophic threat of Steppenwolf and the Parademons who are on the hunt for three Mother Boxes on Earth.
1 positive11 negative2 mixed11 neutralfrom 25 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
30 comments on Hacker News
> Don't you think the outrage would be real?
It would be real but only because people’s priorities tend to be incredibly silly. Like, giving children free school lunch is an original sin to probably a lot of the subset that gave a care about the Cracker Barrel logo… and for some reason there was a whole internet movement to remake a movie because a group didn’t like what was released (Justice League).
> Yes, the type of drama does include the range you're describing
When your "certain type of drama" covers every genre under the sun, and you pretend that Dexter and Justice League are somehow the dame type of genre, excuse me for bot taking your words seriously.
> I don't know what comedies you're watching, but it's not the case.
Whatever comes across my radar.
BTW it's also quite telling how in your classification there's "certain type of drama" (90% of genres apparently) that is susceptible to the sludge, and then comedies and reality shows (the only two you could come up with that are not. Even though comedies, especially movies, are often just as drab and gray as every other genre)
> The article you link even begins: "So many TV shows and movies now"
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
No, the whole reason "Director's Cuts" exists is that those represent the cut the director wanted, not the theatrical cut released by the studio (which is driven by the studio's or producer's wants).
See, for example, Alien 3, Blade Runner, and Justice League for the most notorious/well-known examples. Lesser known examples include Aliens, The Abyss, Kingdom of Heaven, Doctor Sleep, Lethal Weapon, Dark City.
Only a handful of directors at the big studios get the right to control the final cut. You'll notice the director responsible for 3 of the 4 highest-grossing movies of all time has 2 movies in that list; this is because James Cameron didn't earn the right to control final cut until after his 3rd blockbuster success.
A few studios, like Netflix and A24, adhere to the "auteur's theory" of filmmaking, and let the director have full control over the creative process of the film, including the final cut, even without an established record of hits, but this is the exception, not the norm.
I want to make this random off-topic comment: For years I've been collecting various audio clips, where "environmental" sound (voice, noise, etc.) transitions into music, or vise versa, in songs, movies and TV shows. I've searched the web and the closest term I can find is "diegetic switch", but not quite. Here's the (short) list:
- https://youtu.be/9j9bVl3rfNk?t=29 In The Defenders, repeated piano note transitions into background music.
- https://youtu.be/isZyX1xd1VQ?t=159 (The Great American Nightmare - Rob Zombie)
- https://youtu.be/pU_mZ1X69Ho?t=364 (Out of Control - Miraculix)
- Justice League the movie where the song "Everybody Knows" transitions into the ambulance siren. Sorry I can't find this footage.
> The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series.
It’s funny how something is so bad people won’t even watch it for free.
I don’t think this is a completely correct assumption, but since Amazon doesn’t give viewership numbers (or Netflix or Hulu or hbo) it’s hard to know if a show is successful or popular or profitable.
I’d like to see old fashioned Nielsen rating numbers so you can tell if 1M households watched something and could compare shows.
I’m sure some people watch an episode because the marginal cost is $0 so it’s probably equivalent to an old prime time show on ABC/CBS/NBC that would have high ratings in the beginning and then low ratings in the end. Broadcast tv was free too.
It reminds me of how friends wouldn’t even watch a movie or show on torrents and that would help me understand if a movie is good or bad (with a torrenting crowd) because people won’t even download Justice League and watch it for free.
Anyway, I’ve been surprised at how bad Amazon’s shows are considering their spend. They seem like the anti-AppleTV. AppleTV seems to spend a lot as well, but make much higher quality stuff.
I suspect it’s because AppleTV has a direct cost and budget and want to attract people to watch. And prime video is lumped into Prime membership that is probably pure profit to Amazon and just customers on auto charge year after year, so most don’t even watch video yet they have revenue from 152M US prime members [0] so Amazon is getting $21B/year and may not care about viewership, they just need to spend money.
[0] https://www.searchlogistics.com/learn/statistics/amazon-prime-statistics/
Maybe you're just totally misguided on what a producer does, which may be the joke you're trying to make that nobody knows what a producer does. The producer would be closer to the president of the board while the director would be the CEO.
This is false. It seems you don't know what you're talking about. OTOH, I have worked with multiple studios including Fox (now 20th Century), Searchlight, Vendome, Canal+, and Lightstorm.
The executive producer is similar to the CEO or other executive; hence the "executive" in their title. They are in charge of the overall production, but not the creative aspects of the film or episode, and usually are not involved in the day-to-day operations. A regular "producer" can be anyone involved with the day-to-day operations of this production, and this title was once given out like candy. (Look at the credits for Top Gun: Maverick, for example: David Ellison is credited with a "producer" title despite having no actual involvement with the movie beyond being the CEO of one of the studios funding the production.)
The director is not involved with hiring crew, unless they also act as a producer (aka, the "auteur" school). These days, many directors also executive produce their own films (e.g., Nolan, Cameron, etc.), but many don't (e.g., almost all Disney movies). The director gets to provide input as to who gets hired, but quite frequently the main crew and cast will already be attached to the film. Notably, directors can and do leave films all the time (e.g., Rogue One, Justice League).
Who the creator/founder equivalent is really differs between projects. Sometimes, the producer has the idea and staffs around it. Sometimes, the director has the idea and also acts as a producer or just staffs the producer out to someone. Sometimes, it's the studio's idea and staffs everything out.
This is true for a few films, but the vast majority of films start with a screenplay that has come across the producer's desk. Auteur directors might produce their own ideas (e.g., Lucas, Shamalayan, Nolan, Cameron), but even they will usually start with an idea they acquired from someone else (Shamalayan: Old and Cabin at the End of the World, Gunn: Guardians of the Galaxy, Nolan: Insomnia, The Prestige, Batman Begins, Spielberg: almost all of his films, etc. Look at IMDB to see the production credits they have far exceed the films they actually direct).
These are still not fair comparisons.
Legend and Justice League are both mediocre movies, but Legend won a ton of technical awards, including being nominated for Oscars for Makeup, BAFTAs for visual effects, and won an award for cinematography [0]. Justice League's list of awards is much more meager, and nothing for technical achievements. [1]
The Dune and Lawrence of Arabia comparison is also flawed. Sure they're both "acclaimed", But Dune is acclaimed as "One of the best films of the year", and Lawrence of Arabia is acclaimed as "One of the best films OF ALL TIME."
Also, Lawrence of Arabia is a real story of a real person set in the real world. So realism is bound to be important. Dune is a fictional story set thousands of years in the future in a different part of the universe. And specifically deals with a bit of mysticism and fantastical elements closer to fantasy than science fiction. Comparing the "reality" of their effects is apples and oranges.
I'll give you Star Wars for sure. Star Wars most assuredly did NOT benefit from "improved" technology.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089469/awards/?ref_=tt_awd [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0974015/awards/
I haven’t seen 2017 justice league, but I have seen enough modern day superhero films to be sceptical that’s why his strength is unthreatening.
Of course he’s going to be defeated, he’s the villain. Heroes don’t get injured. Every strength based character is infinite strong.
Superman could leap tall buildings in a single bound, then fly, then fly in space, then lift a continent made of kryptonite which is “Superman’s Kryptonite”, if you will.
Tobey MacGuire Spider-Man hurt his knee trying to slow down a train, Tom Holland held a flying aircraft carrier together with his hands. Yesterday’s Doctor Octopus would be no match for today’s Spider-Man and his small scale plots no interest. Even so, Alfred Molina’s Doc Oc was a good and threatening character despite having CGI assisted arms.
Hulk used to throw tanks about, now he punches alien spaceships into the ground.
Iron man was a guy in a cyborg suite, with hulk buster he’s hulk strong.
Magneto was a strategist who could push away wolverine, now he can lift sunken battleships and stadiums.
Wolverine was an eternal soldier now he can survive a hit from a nuclear bomb(!)
Batman was a strategist who worked out, now he’s strong enough to fight superman hand to hand.
Nobody gets injured unless they can walk it off, nobody dies unless they’re about to come back to life[mostly]. Nothing is damaged unless it’s background scenery buildings and cars.
Of course people aren’t thinking it’s hush stakes, it isn’t. That’s not CGI fault, it’s poor story telling papered over with CGI, bad character writing with CGI energy beam weapons instead of personality.
I think so much of what made The Thing great is what they couldn't show because of their limitations, not because of their great special effects. It's a thing that the great digital effect artists have realized and integrated into their movies.
When you look at movies like The Arrival, which is not considered a great special effects film because they're understated and get out of the way of the story, the effects artists plop a digital ship into the middle of a field and leave it there. Understated digital effects, in conjunction with practical effects, are often the most effective and least appreciated.
Villeneuve has a tendency to direct movies that do this well (and I apologize for being a bit of a fan boy), and I hope that more movies take this direction.
I enjoyed the Marvel films, but at times they looked a bit like digital vomit on screen and became hard to follow. I couldn't even finish Aquaman, TBH, as it was just over the top with the amount of digital noise. Though, Justice League attempted to do better than this, the Darkside fight was a bit nauseating =(
Again, though, I think the Villeneuve films will stand the test of time, where as the blockbuster comic films will go the way of films like Predator. I enjoyed it at the time, but it doesn't really hold up.
Darker scenes can save on CG budget and time as well as set design. It can also be a stylistic choice.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. The last season of GoT was particularly agregious as was The Justice League movie.
Couple of thoughts:
1. I'm not really sure what making this so interactive accomplishes. The result seems akin to a listicle: "X Great Movies to Watch When You're Feeling Y", except with a lot more clicks required and, importantly, no curation. I think I would prefer to see a static list of recommendations with a "random" button and a cool blog post linked about how the recommendations were generated. Furthermore, it seems fairly safe to say (?) that the site isn't dynamically generating recommendations because the list exhausts rather quickly, after 10 or so. Just make a list!
2. The lack of curation leads to a lot of strangeness in the recommendations. For example, my first choice was feeling "weird". I got a bunch of blockbuster action films: Justice League, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, Interstellar, Black Panther, Captain Marvel.
Batman vs. Superman and Justice League were both very much unjustly maligned superhero movies. They suffered from the same "big cgi fx" problem all modern superhero movies do, but the stories themselves were far better than the one-dimensional, flat dreck Marvel has been putting out the last decade. I mean, they're superhero movies, so they're about characters that are mostly one-dimensional anyway, but at least these two tried to push the boundaries a bit.
Big budget superhero movies are perfectly capable of failing because of bad writing and directing regardless of the CGI, and many of them have, particularly many DC movies. By your theory, Justice League should have made a fortune.
I think most adults you talk to that don't like it, don't realize it was a children's movie. Compare WW's intro in Justice League where she's breaking skulls against walls against the intro in 1984 where her violence is Disneyified.
Completely agree. It's just a natural transition to where the best place to tell a story is at the moment. It was in movies, since that was the best way to tell an entire story and have someone watch the whole thing and get the character developments and story. But now, TV captures people much more deeply, especially with binging. On top of that, you have much more time to put in a more interesting story and fully developed characters, instead of rushing to fill everything into 2.5 hours (Justice League, anyone?). It's a trend we're going to keep seeing, and I for one love it!
Well, from all appearances Warner Brothers saw the wild success of Avengers and decided they needed a big superhero mashup, thus the disastrous rush to create a Justice League movie without the gradual build-up of story lines and characters that the Marvel films produced.
Apple takes the Marvel approach to their technologies: releases features (of varying initial quality, admittedly) that gradually improve and are incorporated into bigger and better products.
Siri has never been best-in-class for anything, but has been a big part of making Apple Watch and AirPods so successful.
Apple invested in their own CPU designs for more than a decade before finally unveiling the M1 lineup.
Apple chose to shrink the Mac operating system to fit the iPhone, instead of porting the iPod OS, which gave them a unified set of APIs, and has made it practical to have Catalyst as a (still somewhat raw as I understand it) toolkit for writing software across iPhone, iPad, and macOS, plus of course iPhone and iPad apps can run natively on M1.
Most of Apple's competitors lack the freedom or the desire to bet the company on a specific direction; Microsoft of course has released Windows for ARM but has not, and cannot, tell their partners they have two years to switch or get left behind, for example.
Apple can set long-term strategic goals and follow through on them.
Snyder left during post production, to deal with death in his family. The resultant film wasn’t what he envisioned, as Whedon took over. He’s back and wants to finish making his film the way he wanted it.
GoT is exactly what D&D envisioned. The fans didn’t like it, but it’s their vision, and they DGAF what anyone else thinks. We might not like that outcome as viewers, but should respect the artistry all the same.
PS: the cast of justice league didn’t dedicate 8 years of their life to making that film like the cast of GoT did. They’re understandably done and moving forward, not looking back.
Commenters here gave great recommendations. I'll try mentioning the unmentioned.
- Gifted (2017):
Drama about a single man raising a genius girl. Some small bits of the film explore about the responsibility of extraordinary people vs their right to feel like normal human, but most of the film is about the human aspect of it.
- The Wind Rises (2013):
The Ghibli Studio film dramatizing the story of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer of Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and its successor, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. This is one of Ghibli film that is more grounded to reality than the others.
- Sorry to Bother You (2018):
Black Comedy Drama about a young black telemarketer who are really good at his jobs, gets involved in a huge corporate conspiracy where he must choose between profit and joining his activist friend.
- Don't fuck with cats (2019):
Documentary about people over the internet brings down the infamous murderer Luka Magnotta.
- The Great Hack (2019):
A great documentary for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- Justice League (2017):
Please don't flag, I'm not joking! The film itself didn't change anything. It was a little under my expectation. What happens following the release of the film, though, is the gem. The snydercut movement is a very rare phenomenon where a significant amount of people actually take action against disappointment from a change in a film's direction. Long story short, fans investigate how it could be and uncovered a great deal of what they think a miss-handling of a film production. It opened a window where we can see how moviemakers and everyone involved has their own political agenda and some actually falls for what they do. The movement is actually successful considering it has the power for the film industry to react and the fans seems to get what they wanted.
So it's not necessarily that there were 20+ MCU movies in the span of 10 years (and from what I understand the majority were at least good and some great), it's that during that time period the MCU movies became a dominant slice of the overall movie pie instead of the entire pie growing bigger. That, overall, seems to be Scorsese's gripe, because Avengers Endgame and DC's Justice League and Joker, etc... suck up so much oxygen Scorsese couldn't find a studio to back The Irishman so now he had go with Netflix. Now I'm starting to diverge a lot from where Scorsese and Moore intersect and it becomes more about Scorsese and a matter of sour grapes.
Ken Loach said this of superhero films: "They're made as commodities like hamburgers, and it's not about communicating, and it's not about sharing our imagination."
Superhero films are just a genre, like any other. It's a constraint that lets you better express other themes or ideas.
Think about the best superhero films vs the worst ones. The good ones were all about something, not just people running around in costumes. And all the bad ones were just people running around in costumes.
Nolan Batman: does power make right? (all) who has the right the enforce justice? (bb and dkr) does peace by force breed a worse evil? (dk) how far can you push people before they embrace their darker haves? (dk and dkr)
Captain America: what is patriotism? (all) can you trust authority? (WS) the risks of concentrating power (WS) is rehabilitation viable (WS and CW) is safety more important than liberty? (CW)
Wonder Woman: is it better to be a part of society or apart from it? is the world worth saving? do woman have the power to shape the world?
Captain Marvel: can a woman succeed in a hero role without a male romantic/sexual interest to feminize her? also, the power of propaganda to literally shape how we view others (and especially, "The Other")
Black Panther: can black culture be identified with modernity and success? what is the role of tradition and culture in modern society? does our true power come from external sources or from within?
Spiderman (HC, FFH, IS): how much would the events of the Avengers films actually affect daily life? (HC, FFH) what are the consequences of casual implementation of government policy? (HC) what does it mean to be a superhero? (IS) what is identity (IS) how much of life is driven by deception (FFH)?
X-Men: what does it mean to be an outsider/The Other? (1, 2) can The Other become part of society (2, FC, DOFP)? Contrast with the universally derided 3, Apocalypse, and DP, which don't appear to have any driving themes.
Aquaman: can man and nature exist together in a non-destructive state? can mankind save itself?
Joker: what is sanity? how thin is the line between thought and action? does inequality justify class-based warfare? does abuse justify retribution?
Contrast with the DC Justice League ensemble films, which don't have any themes. They just have people in costumes stand around a fight CGI villains. Snyder's Superman films have a concept (what if Superman killed?) but no themes (since they backed away from actually exploring any of the religious themes likening Superman to Jesus).
For those of you who haven't had to suffer through Ken Loach's works: they're all pretentious, insufferable dramas that claim to be about something. But they're trying so hard that they have to hit you over the head over and over and over again so that you know that they're supposed to be about something. Because if his works didn't explicitly tell you they were about something you wouldn't know from the play/show/movie that it was anything deeper than the poorly directed, poorly acted crap in front of you.
Monopolies on content don't really matter because media properties aren't fungible. It's not like you can shop around for the best Avengers movie or that Justice League is a substitute.
I agree with you about distribution but it's hard to argue that there aren't lots of competing distribution channels for content.
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site or Remote
Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Prefer developers for our Boston office, but would be open to candidates in other locations with a history of working with a remote team.
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
SyncOnSet Technologies | Full-stack Web Developer | $80k - $120k + equity + benefits | Boston, MA | On-site
Our customers: TV shows such as Game Of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Westworld, feature films such as Wonder Woman and Justice League, and pretty much every major studio including Netflix, HBO, Fox and Warner Bros. What do we do? SyncOnSet Technologies has revolutionized TV and Film production management. No, seriously, we have a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award to prove it. Our product, SyncOnSet, is an industry leading platform for creative professionals to manage script breakdowns, fitting notes, continuity photos, inventory, and much more. If you are interested in the entertainment industry and building great products, please get in touch!
Tech stack: Node.js / Angular / React / TypeScript / Postgres / MySQL / PHP
Website: https://www.synconset.com/ More about this job and others: https://angel.co/wymsee/jobs
Contact: rob@synconset.com
It's of course technically possible but it's also much more difficult. You basically have to photoshop a long series of frames and make sure that it looks natural and consistent in sequence. You have to take into account changes in lighting, focus, motion blur, things passing in front and behind the object etc...
In your example they modified a very clean source video, image is perfectly stable, very little motion and they edited a very small portion of it for a very short duration. TFA is about replacing one person by an other while they're talking and moving on a potentially lengthy video clip. Doing this convincingly by hand would be hard work.
I think a good example of the difficulty is with the infamous "moustache removal" for reshoots of Superman in the Justice League. It cost a fortune and the results were not exactly seamless. Also the re-created Princess Leia in that Star Wars movie, not bad but definitely still in the uncanny valley.
If there's more than 20 points between critic score and viewer score (in the viewers favor) on Rotten tomatoes, then the movie is usually good. There are exceptions to the rule, and recent inclusions in the culture wars (Justice League, Ghostbusters) can break this, but generally it's a good rule of thumb to follow. Reviewer scores come from people forced to watch hundreds of films, and as a consequence they reward poor quality idosyncrocy over good quality but predictable tropes. People crave variety, and when you review movies for a living, you lose touch of what variety is for normal people.
I dont think its that straight forward, but there have been instances lately where they behaved rather calculated
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-rotten-tomatoes-justice-league-review-20171117-story.html
That's correct.
You can compare Snyder's work in Batman v Superman to Joss Whedon's last-minute changes in Justice League and how the CGI is actually worse off in a film that has a higher budget and lower runtime than the former.
Watch Justice League Movie Online Free https://www.facebook.com/events/304007890105860/