There’s been a nerd war going on for quite some time. You probably know next to nothing about it if you’re not terminally online, but all of nerd culture has become a battleground for a culture war, something that’s been very weird to watch from the sidelines.
When I do work as a critic, I try to take a broad view of the subject and talk about what works and what doesn’t in a piece media: do the jokes land, am I emotionally invested in the characters, are the action sequences well-choreographed, things like that.
A lot of people, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, though, have decided that whether a movie is good or not mostly depends on what “side” they’re on and honestly I have no idea who decided these teams or how they divide up the movies but there’s a whole lot of people getting extremely holier-than-thou about some of the worst movies made in the last decade.
For example, did you know that not liking the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot makes you a bad person? And that making a sequel people who enjoyed the original, actually good movie might enjoy (they won’t, it’s gonna suck) is therefore bad because those people are bad? Yeah, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, too, but someone actually said it.
That guy is actually mad about the new Ghostbusters movie trying to make money.
I’ve been talking about all of this seemingly unrelated stuff for a reason, and the reason is that the biggest battle of this stupid goddamn internet slapfight has been over the so-called Snyder Cut of Justice League. I don’t know why, but for some reason fans of Zack Snyder’s other DC movies thinking Justice League would have been better had he not had to leave it in Joss Whedon’s hands for personal reasons have been deemed bad and a lot of people got very angry at their desire to see his cut of the film.
I admit, the whole “release the Snyder Cut” thing got a little annoying, but I saw way more of people complaining about it or mocking it than I did people actually being annoying about their support of it.
Much to the joy of some people and for some reason the chagrin of others, Warner Brothers has decided they are going to release the Snyder Cut on HBO Max and they’re going to give Zack Snyder $20-30 million more for post-production to finish it.
Snyder’s cut of Justice League is almost four hours long, and there are rumors it might air as a TV series of sorts like Tarantino’s extended cute of The Hateful Eight on Netflix. It’ll still be better than the absolute turn Joss Whedon crapped out, though. Man, what the hell happened to Joss Whedon? We all saw the first Avengers movie and he followed that up with Justice League and Age of Ultron? It’s like watching Van Gogh draw a stick figure.