In film school, some professors use the familiar example of Star Wars to teach Campbellian mythmaking, the theories that identify and codify the narrative units re-contextualized since Grecian times. But by the end credits, expecting anyone to come back and find out feels like asking a lot. (Longtime Snyderheads may happen upon the epiphany that his trademark slow-mo action tableaux look like screensavers more than anything else.) There’s still time for him to add character development to his ragtag band of cardboard cutouts, a tactility to his nondescript greenscreened locations, a deeper sense of meaning to the stultifyingly generic plot, and everything else that leaves a sort of polished nothingness in its lack. One hopes that Snyder has saved the good stuff for his climactic conclusion, and not just the grand clashes conspicuously absent from an adventure that fits and belongs on a laptop. If it can be considered complete at all, that is – this 134-minute film really only covers the getting-the-gang together phase that most movies in the genre knock out within the first half hour, a fragment of story to be wrapped up with a second installment next year. Yet the finished product has only the vaguest contours of ambition, diminished by a half-assedness dinkifying the latest CGI-jammed saga to decide the fate of the universe.
