Justice League: A Cinematic Injustice To Superheroes

Not all bands can fight and still be fabulous like The Beatles. 

It is a bit startling, for instance, to realise that beneath the dazzling and eclectic versatility of 'The White Album', the pitch-perfect melodic brilliance of 'Abbey Road' and the hard-slamming edge of 'Let it Be', there was not just a conflict of interest. Instead, the recording studio had assumed the air of a battlefield with almost all four of them (with the notable exception of Ringo) sparking off with their talents and egos. And yet, the result is some of the most daring and audaciously spectacular work that they pulled off together, sealed with a poignant climax in 'The End', in which all four created the most stunning rock and roll solo ever. 

That is what being a great team is all about, something that Zack Snyder does not understand. 

The idea of a superhero team is potentially fantastic, even as it has been done to death by none other than Marvel which continues to not only make similar movies about one ensemble or the other but also make new teams altogether out of the same old guys and girls and some new members in tow. Yet, while the formula does not always work successfully, at least even the weakest movies, say 'Avengers: Age Of Ultron' or the excessive 'Guardians Of The Galaxy: Vol 2', offer us heroes or costumed freaks worth rooting for and who share a fairly thrilling level of repartee that makes them preposterous fun while they last. 

'Justice League', Snyder's latest ham-fisted chunk of superhero bombast, has the diametrically opposite problem. 

It is a well-known fact among us comic book lovers that, with no offence to fans of Captain America or Tony Stark, the distinguished members of the Justice League are more intriguing because of the rich wealth of personal backstory and characteristically sparky interplay they share with each other. It has always been interesting to see how the slightly nihilistic and cynical Batman can end up working with the samaritan Superman or how the laconic Martian Manhunter can kick ass alongside the constantly wise-cracking Flash. The wonder, as with Marvel's Avengers, is always in the uncanny way in which these mismatched saviours get together and save the world in style. 

This film, to begin with, does not have heroes worth rooting for. 

Sure, they may have names penned by legends like Bob Kane and Jerry Siegel but the so-called 'heroes' of 'Justice League' are in no way worth being called heroes. Yes, that means you too, Diana Prince, no matter how conventionally solid a standalone movie you got yourself some months ago. 

Rather, this is a bunch of thick-headed and confused freaks who would do a lot better if they are left alone, without the need to fit into the plan of a man who was once a true delight on the silver screen but is now just a smug and self-obsessed snob. 

When asked by a speedy and snack-chomping Barry Allen (who also dubs himself, with true relish, a 'snack-hole') as to what exactly his superpowers are, the Bruce Wayne of this film replies, 'I am rich,' thus making a distasteful political allusion that would have won him the love of Donald Trump. Being the undeniable dark-edged hero of the comics, Batman could have said anything, even about having 'eight-pack abs' as in the lovely, lovely 'The Lego Batman Movie', but Snyder's version, played by a patently unlikable Ben Affleck, has to be so glib and selfish that even his reason for uniting a ragtag team of heroes is just to save his face over the fact that he came embarrassingly close to killing a fellow superhero for no real reason. 

And that is all to the threadbare script really, which makes me wonder just what did Joss Whedon, one of the brains behind 'Toy Story' and, to hit closer to the mark, the creator of the cinematic Avengers team itself, have to do with this piece of bilge, co-written most incoherently by Chris Terrio, who seems to have forgotten that he had written 'Argo' as well. The director himself feels awkward and hesitant this time around, which means that, in a flash of optimism, that 'Justice League' is at least less loud and hammy than all his previous films and it ends, at least, when it has to. That does not mean, though, that it is even remotely a good film. 

For one thing, it is a long excruciating wait for us all before we actually see all of them come together and start doing something. 'Justice League' starts typically with an all-too-literal eulogy for Superman, whom we saw buried beneath the ground at the end of 'Batman V Superman' and then, without the slightest hint of imagination or inspiration, starts tracking down each of the characters without ever bothering to flesh them with soul or even much of enthusiasm. 

That is not to say that the actors are any bad; it is just that they deserve a lot better than just being etched out as empty-headed idiots who simply choose a mission because they should choose a mission. 

Jason Momoa makes for a very fine Aquaman, if just for the overwhelming visual idea of strength and snobbish sarcasm that he embodies well; he is the only player in the team who has the gall to declare this Batman a nut. Ezra Miller is a lot of fun as Allen but the film carves his Flash to be only a goofball. Ray Fisher is agreeably a tormented Victor Stone but is not given much of an emotional resonance despite the intriguing developments in the beginning. 

When I watched 'Wonder Woman' some months ago, I felt that, despite the film's many narrative limitations, it worked because Gal Gadot played the titular character with the same winsome believability as with which Christopher Reeve played the Man Of Steel. This time around, I still believe in the lovely actress' increasing confidence as the iconic lasso-wielding lass of charm but could not help feeling that she is playing it a bit too safely, sticking to the uninteresting plot tropes that Snyder and his team hand out to her. She and the others are all performed earnestly but they are given precious little significant to do. There are bits and pieces when they get their share of the limelight, like Prince holding her own against in a team of men mostly leering at her legs or Aquaman delivering a fine little monologue announcing his intentions. But mostly, they are paper-thin cutouts who are there only to defeat a villain without even the slightest shred of menace. 

Maybe it is because 'Justice League' has such a frustratingly imbecile supervillain that the film feels so deprived of real stakes or even the merest hint of danger. Ciaran Hinds' Steppenwolf is a wasted caricature armed with the most ridiculous lines like 'Mother is calling' or 'You will love me,' directed at people trying to stop him. The rest of the fine actors are marginally lucky, with JK Simmons playing a not-so-bad Jim Gordon and the always reliable Jeremy Irons as Alfred Pennyworth, the real unsung hero among a crowd of people who think they are heroes. 'I cannot recognise this world,' he laments brilliantly in the film's most resonant line. 

He is not wrong, of course. It is increasingly difficult to relate the bleak, grimy world of Snyder's films to whatever the brilliant comics and the films by Richard Donner, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan had offered to us in the past. Batman's gadgets look like grey, ugly toys and yes, they can be destroyed pretty easily too. The man himself looks more of a fat-necked and furiously inflexible idiot in a suit with Affleck's mediocre performance bordering on being unforgivably vicious and sexist at the same time. Beyond that, the film's desperate attempts to link all that stupid, blatant subtext about people fearing aliens of all types with a half-baked commentary on the necessity of heroes are just laughably bad. I found myself laughing unexpectedly on a throwaway scene in which a foul-mouthed woman complains about her husband being kidnapped by extraterrestrials. For the rest, I was trying not to nod off. 

Then, there is the writing, the godawful and risible writing and those senseless plot developments. What is SteppenwoIf's agenda, really? What, in God's name, are those Mother Boxes and why is it so easy to hold them? Why do all the Amazonians run like the unforgettable John Cleese' Sir Lancelot in 'Monty Python And The Holy Grail'? And yes, I was rolling my eyes in some of the dialogue. Amy Adams' Lois Lane nuzzles up to Henry Cavill's newly resurrected Clark Kent in the midst of a Kansas field and says, thoughtfully, 'You smell good'. And a couple of lines, even when said by the naturally effervescent Gadot, don't make any sense at all. Even the occasional punchlines are extremely lame. Did Whedon really co-write this stuff?

Predictably, as if to offer some faint sense of superheroic wonder in the typically overblown climax, Superman shows up, played by Cavill in a refreshingly light and low-key fashion, allowing himself the welcome luxury of a hearty laugh at the end of it all. But it is too late to save the party. 

'Justice League' is not just a stinking piece of entertainment. It is also a film that stinks even as a superhero film. It does not even know what to do with the elements even if they are in place. This is a film which plays John Williams' 'Superman' theme in the background when the said hero is instead beating up his own comrades to a pulp. 

Let's pray that this band breaks up without any further delay. 

My Rating: 1 and a half stars out of 5

Amazing Adaptations: Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange'

When I was in college, I watched 'A Clockwork Orange' one afternoon, expecting, being the lascivious young lad at that impressionable age, it to be a racy skin flick. What it turned out to be, other than a few scenes of (it must be said) gratuitous nudity, including a particularly titillating scene of rape, was something that dashed all my hopes. I was even nauseated, eventually, by just how sick it all felt in aftermath and I resolved never to watch that film again, neither for sinful entertainment or for insightful enlightenment. I had enough satisfying options for both. 

It was only in ripe adulthood that I did watch Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange' with the now-mature perspective to discover a real, seminal classic of cinema. I have gushed about my experience in my review here and while I admired all the trademark Kubrick elements to be found in his other films, namely the deceptive emotional coldness and the stunning use of technique in audio-visual storytelling, what amazed me the most was its central argument: a cure for crime and depravity can be more criminal and depraved if it deprives a person of his soul and self-respect. More than being just an anarchic film, it was an experience that made me think.

I document these seemingly redundant and separate experiences of watching and understanding this radical film not just for nostalgia's sake. Rather, the point that I wish to make is that there is more to 'A Clockwork Orange' than just its strident cry of rebellion against the hollow concept of correctional therapy. 

That additional dimension is what is evident, not in the film, but rather the source that inspired it in the first place. Written and published in 1962, Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange' was, like the cinematic adaptation, a shocker and sensation in equal terms. It was banned from many an American high school syllabus and yet it also elicited some of the finest praise for being a truly ground-breaking work of postmodern literature, at a time when that genre still needed to be defined in the real sense by the upcoming spree of American and English authors. Burgess himself dismissed as too preachy to be effective and was particularly critical of Kubrick's version of the story (something that I will come to later). 

But both the book and the film continued to be legendary, albeit not only for the uncompromising portrayal of nihilism, violence and political manipulation rooted into a near-future urban society. A large part of its popularity and quotability is also attributed to the nearly suicidal yet ultimately spectacular linguistic trick that Burgess employed and that Kubrick (to give him further credit) followed slavishly. I am talking, of course, about Nadsat. 

At one point, we, who have all been part of gangs at school and college, can relate to the idea that our choice of language and vocabulary in those days of latency period would have been our own to use and merely a trifle or amusement for the grown-ups around us. Burgess understood that perfectly when etching out his protagonist and narrator, the unforgettably flawed yet wonderfully endearing and ernest Alex, as a fifteen-year old teenager who, with his 'droogs' (Nadsat for 'friends'), sets out every night on a spree of 'ultra-violence', including mugging, physical assault, breaking-in and rape. The language that they banter in, called as Nadsat, is a fascinating, maddeningly heady blend of slightly tweaked Russian words, Cockney slang, schoolboy lingo, Biblical phrases and even an occasional dash of old English and even Arabic. And yet while the words themselves can be quite confounding to say the least (I would urge every novice to keep the dictionary of Nadsat handy), such is Burgess' mastery of a highly absorbing, atmospheric storytelling, especially his vivid sense of detail, both morbid and mesmerising, that you are going to read it all in a trice even if you do not quite get some words or the way they are used. 

Naturally, it would have been a tall order to be so faithful to the source so as to even use Nadsat as the primary language in the film. But Kubrick, being Kubrick, did it nevertheless and the result is an unexpected success (I found myself saying frequently 'Appy polly logies', 'devotchka' and 'eggiwegs') both as an experiment and a path-breaking narrative device that sucks the viewer, as it did to the reader, into the morally twisted universe of Alex' world. It is also worthwhile to observe that Kubrick nails the dislocation of Alex from the rest of the world through the combined medium of language and music. None of the characters around him speak Nadsat as trenchantly as he does and at the same time, none of them even share his passion for music, especially the work of the maestro Ludwig Van Beethoven, which also puts him in a different league than the others, thus adding to his eventual predicament. 

Much more than the fairly faithful loyalty to the book's major narrative and its central argument (though I do wish that Kubrick had given even a brief mention of the allegorical meaning of the title), it is always intriguing to see how Kubrick breathes life into the material. The film's visual palette, with low-angle spaced-out photography and flashes of orange and milk white to punctuate the bursts of violence and depravity, is almost stunning aesthetically while the use of slow-motion and orchestral swells to punctuate certain pivotal scenes is still unrivalled in sensory impact. And the writer-director also adds a new dimension to the penultimate climax of Alex' troubles- that of revenge, which is just implicit in the original novel. 

It is at this point that the differences between the novel and the film should be mentioned for it is these detours that illustrate just why the source should be more or at least equally essential than the adaptation. 

To begin with, even as 'A Clockwork Orange' does not refrain from depicting almost all of the sexual violence and brutality portrayed in the book, there is a difference in how the author and the director approach the same. Burgess' portrayal of the anarchy is gritty, incisive and grim, with little room for cynical laughter; Kubrick, on the other hand, delivers it as a form of amusement and even, and this is troubling, thrilling entertainment. And this is not just about how the film posits Alex almost as a twisted image of the archetype action hero, especially in his brawl with rival Billyboy, but about how it amplifies the sleaze to an almost gratuitous level. 

The evidence of this is not just the rape scenes that exaggerate the nudity involved to guiltily exciting levels (the film has more scenes of bare breasts and bodies than the book) but also the often-overlooked scene in which Alex seduces two young girls from a record store into engaging into a threesome with him. Kubrick's version is purely an experiment of technique, the scene shot in frenetic sped-up rate so as to bluff the demanding censors and blur the details of the actual activity; in any case, the situation in the film feels positively consensual and even sexually normal. In the novel, however, the same scene is much more macabre, with Alex drugging these girls and forcing them to submit to his own wild sexual impulses, clearly then a case of indirect rape. There is nothing even remotely pleasurable about it in the book while, in the film, the same thing becomes merely a fanciful joke. 

While it is far-fetched to call the director emotionally indifferent, his sympathies in 'A Clockwork Orange' are so single-mindedly with the brash exploits of Alex that the overall emotional heft feels distinctly one-dimensional. Burgess took care to make Alex a more believably world-weary youngster from the start, a slightly skeptical prankster who only comes in his element when listening to his favourite music; he is also more sympathetic towards his parents and even willing, in a genuine way, to improve his wicked ways. The film, on the other hand, revels comfortably in the unabashed nihilism of Alex. Sure, Malcolm McDowell's spectacular, utterly slimy yet searingly honest performance is impossible to fault but Kubrick lets us sympathise with him only after his fate has been dealt out. That, too, is an incredible trope of masterful emotional manipulation. 

But let's not forget the most pivotal difference. 

Most fans of the film, who would have read the novel either before or after watching it, opine that Kubrick did the right thing by excising the controversial 21st chapter from the original British edition of the novel. For novices, I would like to explain that this chapter serves as an epilogue to the happy conclusion of Alex' struggles for sanity and self-respect. In this, Alex is back on the streets as a freewheeling creature of the night as before but he is getting, inevitably, disillusioned and even disgusted by the futility of his activities even after he has been 'cured' of all the side effects of the Ludovico Technique. He even goes to the extent of leaving his new group alone and, on meeting his old mate Pete, who is now married and totally reformed for good, even contemplates marriage and rearing children as an inevitable outcome of growing up. 

For Burgess, this final chapter makes complete sense. And one has to agree because it enriches its cry of protest against behavioural conditioning with a conclusion in which Alex is not forced anymore to be good or responsible but rather he himself makes a conscious choice to leave behind his adolescence. This itself establishes firmly the gist of the story, that goodness and virtue cannot be imposed by force on even the most flawed human soul. 

It also extends on the original meaning of the title superbly. 

'A clockwork orange', as explained by Burgess, is just an old phrase for a person originally full of juice or personality transformed into a soulless clockwork machine and expected to live according to an imposing routine. From what happens to Alex, all that is evident. But in this epilogue, the author tosses his biggest surprise. Alex muses, in one of the most evocative paragraphs of the book, that the wildness and impulse of youth itself makes a human being a clockwork toy without a sense of direction and purpose and that youth serves no purpose if it is spent without being devoted to some artistic or practical initiative. 

Kubrick's justification for the omission of this chapter is a bit of a miscalculation in two ways. Firstly, the director claimed that he had based his script from the American edition, the one that excised totally the final chapter with the publishers complaining to Burgess that it did not just fit into the overall narrative. In his foreword, the author mused that the American reading public wanted a Nixon-style perspective of morality and evil rather than the Kennedy-like opinion that every human being is capable of goodness and initiative if they are not enforced upon him or her. 

Secondly, Kubrick justified the omission by agreeing to the general American opinion that it did not just fit into the narrative. For all his brave insistence of amping up the anarchy and ensuring that Alex remained as wicked as always in the end, he missed up a grand chance to bring in an unexpected dimension of perspective into the narrative. Both the book and film are about the vitality of freedom to choose either good or evil, regardless of the pre-conceived notions of the same laid down by some authority or a society. But for all the marvels of Kubrick's adaptation, it is Burgess' novel that really reveals the infallible truth that a person can be productive, responsible and virtuous and still be happy as long as he or she is not compelled to be a 'clockwork orange' by extremes of both youthful, infantile impulses or by a domineering state.