I’m way past the point of bashing Zack Synder. While I may be a cheeky lil’ bastard sometimes, I’m not cruel. Dude went through something I would never wish on anybody outside of our current governmental leadership. An unfortunate casualty of the terrible circumstances around his departure from Justice League though was a lot of the character development Synder and writer Chris Terrio had in the original script. Warner Brothers wanted a lean two hour film, and the final results left many people dissatisfied.
I’m not even talking about just DC fans looking for their triumphant team-up flick. Actor Ray Fisher, the first live-action Cyborg, recently voiced some displeasure with the final cut of the film at an appearance at Wizard Con, lamenting about his character’s backstory and how it was gutted. In particular, Fisher seems upset we don’t get to explore Cyborg’s immense sense of loss, and anger towards his father, Silas Stone.
“I think the other part, something that we didn’t get to see well represented in the film, was the loss of Victor’s mother, and how that sort of drives a wedge between them as well. Because not only has he lost his body, he has lost his mother, he has lost his ability to play football, he sees himself as a monster, and most of this is due to Silas.”
We even see snippets of Fisher running with a football in the first Justice League trailer. You know, the one with the trite White Stripes song? Aye aye aye, man. I don’t think anybody was happy with the Super Friends’ silver screen debut. I had an old friend actually walk out of the theater around the half hour mark to get a refund.
Will DC bounce back, though? Well, if Shazam‘s performance and Aquaman‘s non-tepid reception is anything to go by…maybe? I can’t tell at this point. I’m no expert; just a pundit. While I don’t consider myself a fan of the current slate of DC films, I dunno, maybe a Synder cut would be, at the very least, interesting to see. A dark Justice League works in the video games, so why not cinematically, too?