But the extended format still works absolute wonders for a lot of this and, unlike perhaps Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (even in its considerably better, longer form), there's less of a feeling of multiple stories being crammed into one movie this time around. Hulk in Endgame), Green Lantern's still conspicuously absent, and this lack of solo introductory films feels like an impossible obstacle to surmount. Flash is still ultimately miscast, Batman still deserves his own movie and his own moment (c.f. There was too much wrong from the start - from the mistakes made in previous DC entries, to the fact that all of these characters demanded their own solo movie first, not afterwards. It's not perfect and, boy, it was never going to be.
Snyder has been given the room to do whatever he wants
Sure, Brian Helgeland returned to his Mel Gibson Payback thriller to deliver a very different version with an entirely new third act, Leone's Once Upon a Time in America is allowed room to breathe in its 4 hour form, Costner's messy Waterworld is gifted a tangibly epic scale in its 3 hour version, Ridley Scott's additional 45 minutes transformed the deeply flawed Kingdom of Heaven into something far closer to a master work, the 37-minute-longer Alien 3 'assembly cut' is a revelation that reintroduces an entirely new mid-section, and the Donner Cut of Superman II takes a very different turn (albeit more familiar due to the plot beats which were used for the end of Superman) but ultimately none of them can hold a candle to Zack Snyder's Justice League, which delivers a staggering THREE HOURS PLUS of new footage. There's likely never been anything quite this staggeringly different in the history of cinema. Whedon's version feels like a badly-edited pre-post-production extended test audience preview for this final product, by comparison. It's a completely different movie, which happens to share the same basic plot but is wildly divergent in terms of build-up, characterisation, meticulous, well-paced story plotting, visuals, scoring, action and sheer R-rated impact. Snyder's Justice League is an entirely different animal to Whedon's 2017 version. Attempting to right a great deal of wrongs, this impossible fan dream is a hell of an experience - a visually striking epic of untold proportions that simply has to be seen to be believed.