Justice League Part I

Let's talk Justice League currently due to come out in 2017.

This movie has so much potential that I'm almost sad that it's being left in the hands of DC Comics.  No offense to the company, which has some excellent comics and amazing characters, but with the exception of the Dark Knight trilogy, they haven't really mastered the art of movies.

Let's consider their track record in the last decade:

• Catwoman (2004) directed by Pitof Comar and starring Halle Berry.  I'll admit that I never saw this movie, but it has a meager 9% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  That's pretty sorry.  Several reliable superhero sources of mine, including the illustrious Dr. Deadpool, with whom I got to take a superhero class during my last semester of college, it was a miserable flop.
• Batman Begins (2005) directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale.  This was a really great and extremely underrated movie.  It's also part of the aforementioned Dark Knight trilogy, and is, therefore, not subject to the DC curse.
• Superman Returns (2006) directed by Bryan Singer and starring Brandon Routh.  This incredible example of a failure to relaunch tried to make itself both a reboot and a sequel for the previous Superman film franchise.  Unfortunately, rather than actually being a sequel to the entire franchise, it picked up after the second movie in a four part series.  This left it confusing for both people who hadn't seen the previous movies (who had no idea why Superman left in the first place) and people who had seen the previous movies (who had no idea why Superman was returning AGAIN).  Ultimately, flop.
• The Dark Knight (2008) directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale and (more importantly) Heath Ledger.  This is a movie that could have (and probably should have) been at least two movies.  It was pretty fantastic, but is also protected from the DC curse by the Dark Knight shield.
• Green Lantern (2011) directed by Martin Campbell and starring Bryan Reynolds.  I can't even begin to explain what a waste of my life this movie was.  I'll admit that some (and I would like to very strongly emphasize the word SOME here) of the graphics made it fun to watch and none of the actors did a career-wrecking job, but this movie was just BAD.
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012) directed by Christopher Nolan and starring a whole bunch of people (because this movie did too much).  I really feel this is an underrated movie.  It didn't live up to the reputation its predecessors in the Dark Knight franchise did, but I really like the movie as a whole, particularly when considered as the ending it was always supposed to be.
• Man of Steel (2013) directed by Zack Snyder and starring Henry Cavill.  This, I believe, has been an incredibly OVER-rated movie.  I think what bugs me most about this movie was the fact that it had all the right parts, but no one put them in the right places.  It had everything going for it (except the most important thing, but I'll come back to that), and still managed to be a failure.  Why?  Two words:  DC.

So here's the big question:  Why is DC so far behind its biggest competitor, Marvel Comics, when it comes to movies?

One obvious answer is that Marvel now had Disney backing them and it never hurts to have the Mouse at your back, but that isn't the real reason.  The real reason is much bigger and a much larger epidemic in superhero movies as a whole.  In fact, I would be willing to argue that virtually every superhero movie that has ever failed fell for this simple little mistake that I can some up in one word that makes my skin crawl:

Dichotomy.

Basically, it's too black-and-white.  The good guys are completely good.  You have to agree with every single thing they do, because it's ALWAYS the right thing.  On the other side, the bad guys and completely bad.  You never doubt whether what they're doing is wrong.  You never question whether it's wrong to hate them, because they are pure EVIL.

Consider Man of Steel (spoilers):  The biggest moral question that Superman had to face is whether or not to kill General Zod.  Unfortunately, the audience had decided long before that his death was a given.  He straight up said that he was genetically programmed to kill.  We never question whether terraforming the Earth was bad because both Zod and Superman showed that it wasn't necessary.  Kryptonians and humans could live on the same planet no problem.  He had no reason except spite and malice to destroy mankind.

This, I'm afraid, is going to be DC's biggest hurdle in creating a movie franchise successful enough to make Justice League work.  They need to corrupt their good guys and make us empathize with the bad.

Batman has worked because he floats around in the grey area.  That's the whole point of Batman.  In the Dark Knight trilogy, he works so far outside the law that he's hunted by the police more passionately than bank robbers.  He actually seems to cause as much trouble as he fixes.  More importantly, his villains are oddly relatable.  They continually show time and again that there is a fine line between what they do and what Batman does, and that is compelling story-telling.

Think about the much more successful Marvel movie characters.  Iron Man is a jerk.  Thor is so arrogant that he was banished.  Loki just wants to be loved.  Hulk has anger management issues.  Captain America can't move on from the past.  Xavier takes over the body of a man with no way of stopping him.  Wolverine kills the woman he loves:  repeatedly.  Magneto is simply trying to save himself from having to live through the Holocaust again.

There need to be reasons to hate the good guys and reasons to love the bad guys.

With this thought in mind, DC still definitely has everything it needs in order to launch a successful Justice League movie.  What do they need to do in order to make it a success?  Check out Justice League Part II and Justice League Part III for my thoughts on characterization and universal development.