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[Originally Recorded March 28, Re-Recorded April 12, 2021] Approaching Zack Snyder’s Justice League in good faith. How did Darkseid forget the location of Earth? Why didn’t Steppenwolf tie the Mother Box to the Defiance immediately? So many questions!
Justice Con 2021 – April 16-18
ASPF.org
Answers, insights, and commentary on:
- Impressions (00:00:58)
- Comparison (00:02:30)
- Gratitude (00:06:20)
- Growth (00:08:50)
- Logic (00:10:20)
- Layers – Black Suit Example (00:11:50)
- Past Nitpicking Plot Holes (00:14:00)
- Death of the Author (00:16:00)
- Q: Did Diana lie to a little girl? (00:24:30)
- Q: Diana says the Boxes are indestructible but they’re destroyed? (00:26:15)
- Q: Why did the Boxes die? (00:27:40)
- Q: Do we know the Boxes are destroyed? (00:29:05)
- Q: Why didn’t the Box reach Darkseid directly? (00:32:30)
- Q: Why did about a month pass before Steppenwolf arrived? (00:34:30)
- Q: Why did Amazonian Box stay awake? (00:38:20)
- DeSaad & Darkseid’s Last Lines Analysis (00:41:20)
- Not Omniscient (00:42:20)
- Lies & Hiding (00:43:40)
- Honor Culture (00:45:00)
- Armada Alternatives (00:48:30)
- No reaction, Let Steppenwolf Die, Boxes at Defiance, DeSaad asks
- Ways Old & New (00:53:40)
- Q: Are there more Mother Boxes? (00:58:30)
- Q: How did Steppenwolf conquer before? (01:05:30)
- Q: How did Darkseid forget Earth? (01:09:25)
- Timeline (01:10:20)
- Q: Doesn’t Diana contradict this? (01:25:35)
- Hearsay, Myth, Rashōmon
- End Notes / After Show [Recorded April 15, 2021] (01:36:00)
- Q&A Summary
To learn more:
Zack Snyder’s Justice League – “We Live in a Society” Extended Deleted Scene
overthinking – original song | Orla Gartland
Web: ManOfSteelAnswers.com
Twitter: @mosanswers
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#RestoreTheSnyderverse
#Releasethewebcamcut. This is giving me Episode 40 Storytime vibe. I know it’s early days but what is your favourite moment in ZSJL currently? Mine is undoutly Falsh reversing time and saving the League. Would a whole MOSAIC episode about time-travel too much to hope for? Thanks again for your hardwork Doc. Have a wonderful day. 🙂
Haha, there’s mountains of bad recordings and ramble roads (from when we used to have commutes, lol) not fit for consumption… when it’s less painful, I might go back and cut out some of the more inspired parts for replay maybe.
That one is definitely up there! I remember saying with the 2017 release, “Flash didn’t do anything that meant anything to me” and that’s completely not true with the Cosmic Rewind which is hitting on all levels. I had a time travel episode in the cards but it was taking a scientific approach to it which doesn’t really flow with the film as is. I’ll figure out what to do with the research eventually.
Still trying to figure out how to approach the film which doesn’t really reward you for using reality as a lens and has a lot of “who knows what when, where, why and how” gaps that feel more like oversight than insight. So, for me, thinking about the film is less a pleasure than the past ones. But I felt that way about BvS initially- due to timing / motivation issues- which have all but faded and made BvS beloved to me now. I don’t take for granted the great meta around JL and what brought it about… but still wrestling with it as a work on its own terms. Just having faith it’ll be worth it eventually.
Snyder´s New Gods are comparable to how Predators are presented in most media. Honor bound space samurai who are hypocrites if you get down to it. Very vindictive too. Most things they do are a performance piece to preserve or even fulfill their role in society.
The Flash time jump in BvS suggested that more than one DCEU um universe exists before TSC and “word of god” confirmed it. The N52 comics Snyder´s team looked at have Darkseid end more than one earth before his final descend on the main one in 2015/16. I wonder if the team for its loose adaptation Apokolips War from May 2020 had access to some of Snyder´s ideas. Or did they simply hunt down leaks? Too many puzzle pieces fit. Even Darkseid killing the GL Corps. Its prequel The Death of Superman eve openly paid homage to BvS and Apokolips War has its own Martha Moment.
We have to assume that there is just one Fourth World “dimension” in Snyder´s films as this JL won´t withstand an endless stream of Darkseids and whatnot. Endgame of course did things differently but the Black Order doesn´t have gods from another universe in its lineup. A question still remains. Has every version of earth Anti-Life on it (most likely) and are there multiple versions of the Old Gods (for sure as the existence of WW proves).
I assumed that the Mother Boxes were destroyed due to Vic taking out the ghosts in the machine. He ripped apart the GPU while a critical system process was running. Something like that.
The film working around the quickly stated origin of Parademons is noticeable even if one doesn´t know what Snyder wanted to shoot. Having a Parademons creation scene (even with aliens) would have upped the drama and filled in sort of needed lore. Zero Parry White is unfortunate (thx WB), truly bad CG is minimal but stands out (perfectly still Superman lighting up his eyes) and you can feel that the lakehouse epilogue is working around limitations. Having proper GLs presence in the Knightmare and next to MM wouldn´t have hurt either but the studio came down hard on Snyder so what can be done? I admit that I wouldn´t feel this way if I didn´t know what Snyder wanted to shoot with the GLs through. Let´s see if other footage Snyder has will one day randomly drop. A privately shot and paid-for GL meets Ben Affleck fan video? Snyder wasn´t paid after all. Choose your Snyder Cuts. I prefer Batman winning that argument and not Joker but both versions are cool. The Gray edition looks amazing for most of it btw.
I put this film over MoS but UE BvS and DC WM are still a step above. I still consider this impossible behemoth to be his most rewatchable film. An impossible feat due to the double bill runtime but Snyder did it. As Matt Zoller Seitz put it. “32 Short Films about the Justice League” is the best way to view this film. So you can´t cut even a minute for the full effects. All scenes need to play. The 2017 film has the better credit song and Gordon´s missing line at the harbor would have been cool to retain (he is still in the establishing shot) but Snyder seemingly couldn’t work around the forced joke that follows? I don´t miss anything else from Studio League. Going back to it early 2021 to check some stuff out was hard as nails. Even Fant4stic has more dignity.
SS 2016 will realistically be the final DCEU film we may claw back from WB after Gunn got his chance as too much ground has been gained there but I am 99% sure that some sort of SV restoration is possible. We simply need to outlast Emmerich.
I got time and Snyder can always go back to Meduzarts Animation (they did CG for Injustice 2 & the news Mortal Kombats) if he needs to CG animate his dream scripts. Army of the Dead “Zero” had to go CG due to Covid. So can we if too much time to solve any of this passes. Even comparably cheaper 2D animation would work. Those Zacktivations aren´t going anywhere so we might get there sooner than later.
After putting the kids to bed, I caught the tail end of Zack & Chris at Justice Con 2021… and one of the Nerd Queens asked Chris his comic influences where he mentioned Grant Morrison, who famously published his “map of the multiverse” in 2014 acting as reference for research for Justice League. His reckoning of Apokolips is that there’s but one which access to the entire multiverse, which works in favor of losing worlds while being able to easily return to Apokolips.
It’s as if one reaches into a bucket to pluck a single grain of sand… you can effortlessly always grab a grain… and you can always withdraw your wrist back through the mouth of the bucket to where you came from without issue. BUT, if you were to toss that grain back into the bucket… finding it again would be practically hopeless and the effort of prescribing that one specific grain to differentiate it from all the others would be monumental… even if confirming it’s the same grain once you get there, trivial (this is a P vs. NP-complete dichotomy, akin to encryption).
Since we don’t know the source of the ALE, I don’t presume it’s on every Earth, which- to me- would make discovery of the ALE probably too likely… because, like it or not, DC universes always have Earth-Exceptionalism in them… Earth is a fulcrum of attention if not the center of the entire universe in some cases… and if enough Infinite Earths have that trait it’d be impossible for Apokolips to ignore. Instead, if the entity that engraved the ALE is like the Apokoliptians… coming from one of the universal planes accessing all worlds- like Heaven, Hell, Speed Force, etc. then just like the Apokoliptians have to pluck and single world, that entity could have picked and hidden the ALE on just ONE Earth and not all.
Of course, this is all mere speculation at this point.