JUSTICE LEAGUE (film 2017)

'''JUSTICE LEAGUE (film 2017). Zack Snyder, dir., co-story''' with Chris Terrio. Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon, script. For comic book creators, see IMDb. Patrick Stathopoulos, production design. USA: DC Comics, DC Entertainment, Dune Entertainment (production) / Warner Bros. (US distribution), 2017. See IMDb for complexities of financing and distribution.

The plot is Justice League forms and saves the world, in a world including Gotham, Metropolis, Atlantis, the lands of the Amazons, and some places where SF meets the supernatural. IMDb identifies the genres of JUSTICE LEAGUE as "Action | Adventure | Fantasy | Sci-Fi," and it is these mashings-up in various images that makes the film of interest here, and perhaps more generally.

The character Cyborg combines the human and cybernetic/prosthetic in complex ways and over the course of the film grows increasingly robotic in appearance, more sympathetically human in character. Batman's equipment goes beyond bat imagery to include a land vehicle that looks like a spider and a large aircraft that looks something like a flying whale. The minions of the villain Steppenwolf look like a cross between a demonic Tinker Bell and a robotized giant mosquito, crossed again with an Industrial-style vampire. And when the villain starts to take over what could be Chernobyl, the imagery is of a kind of metastasizing cyberpunk plant. In the ALIEN series, such transgressions of category boundaries are horrific; in JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017), they're mildly scary but over-the-top enough to remind viewers that we’re in a comic-book universe.

RDE, Initial compiler.