When Wonder Woman—starring Gal Gadot as the iconic lasso-hurling, metal-cuffed, super-strong Amazonian hero—came out earlier this year, it seemed like DC Comics films had finally managed to put an end to a long-running bad spell. The first major superhero film to be directed by a woman, striking just the right balance between gravitas and playfulness, and with due credit owed to an extremely likeable lead, Wonder Woman was everything DC’s other recent efforts—2016’s Suicide Squad and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice worst among the lot—had not been, and seemed to signal a new, more promising direction for DC movies. Well, prepare to have those hopes dashed right to the ground, my friend: It’s a swift turn back to square one for the franchise with the new Zack Snyder-directed Justice League, another one of those bloated, joyless, CGI-addled monstrosities that are, unfortunately, threatening to become the norm rather than the exception when it comes to superhero blockbusters today. 

Justice League, picks off where BvS left off: Superman (Henry Cavill) is dead and the world is a much worse place for it. Crime has jacked up, morality all askew, and as if that weren’t enough, there have been increasing sightings of strange airborne bug-like creatures all over. Watching all this with a wary eye is Batman (Ben Affleck), who has rightly deduced that these ‘Parademons’ are working surveillance for some larger, darker alien force, staking out a now-vulnerable planet for an invasion of some description. That force, as it turns out, is Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds)—an evil god who had been lying dormant for many years, but is now risen and raring, as all such entities in such films often are, to Destroy the World As We Know It and usher in some sort of horrible hell-scape in its stead. But, to be able to do this, he needs to collect three ‘Mother boxes’, whose origins, you’ll find, share some glaring similarities to that of Tolkien’s rings of power in the Lord of the Rings. 

With the MacGuffins laid out and the doomsday clock thus set, Batman decides to assemble a team of what he’s chosen to clunkily brand ‘metahumans’. The first of these is Wonder Woman, but thankfully, she’s well-aware of the urgency of action and doesn’t need much convincing; also happy to tag along is the gawky Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), a high-schooler blessed with superhuman speed, thereby earning him the moniker of the Flash. More work goes into getting Victor Stone (Ray Fisher), a young man who had been cybernetically resurrected after almost dying in an accident to become the half-man, half-machine Cyborg; and Arthur Curry (Jason Momoa) aka Aquaman, the underwater hellraiser who spends his days drinking and swimming like the proverbial fish, on board. The fivesome is later joined by an additional surprise guest—not really all that surprising if you’ve watched enough of these films—before setting off to stop Steppenwolf from bringing his dark vision to fruition. 

Superhero ensembles have been all the rage since Marvel brought out The Avengers in 2012, arguably one of the most enjoyable comic-book films of all time. But in the lead up to that smash-up, Marvel had actually spent time introducing us to most of the players individually, and while not all these standalone installments had been effective, at least we knew—to an extent—who we were dealing with, and what their backstories and motivations were. But with Justice League, in what feels like a greedy rush to join the lucrative ensemble bandwagon, DC appears to have skipped more than a few essential steps—more than half of the League members we’ve never seen before, at least not as part of the revamped Extended Universe that’s unfolding of late. Of course, the plan is probably to plug them here and roll out the individual films later, which might seem to make perfect commercial sense, except it does this particular installment absolutely no favours: There are just too many characters and too little time to get to know anything substantial about them, with the result that it’s hard to care about anything that’s going on.

There are also some stark tonal shifts in Justice League that make for patchy viewing, no doubt in large part because Snyder—known for his none-too-successful attempts at grimming and grittying up superhero tales (BvS and Man of Steel are some recent examples)—had to relinquish directing duties part of the way owing to a family tragedy and hand over the reins to Avengers helmer Joss Whedon. Like oil and water, their two sensibilities don’t ever fully come together and the tussle becomes all-too-evident in some places: Justice League tries hard to shoehorn some of Whedon’s trademark jokey banter into the broody moral philosophising and numbing action of Snyder’s making, and while certainly lighter on its feet than, say, BvS was, the film just feels very disjointed, the quips coming off unnatural and strained.

Speaking of unnatural, the special effects here are some of the worst I’ve seen in a long, long time in a big-budget film like this—Steppenwolf, for one, is a CGI disaster, Hinds’ otherwise expressive face now lost behind a cheap-looking digital mask. There’s the Flash’s running sequences, all cheesy blue electric lines, and Aquaman’s underwater domain, a muddy, murky mess. And what are those weird, purple tentacly things wooshing around everywhere in the climatic scene? Indeed, I was given to wonder if the actors’ paychecks were so large that the makers simply ran out of funds for the visuals. 

The one bright spot in the film is Gadot’s performance—she might not be an incredible actress per se, but there’s a distinctive warmth about her that lights up the screen. Of course, one can instantly spot differences in how the character is treated under male direction here as opposed to the Pat Jenkins film: There’s much more obvious ogling at Wonder Woman’s body in this film, her outfit a little more glued to her curves, which is a shame, but Gadot still manages to rise over it. Compared to her, the others don’t really register much: Affleck still looks like he regrets the day he signed on that dotted line for DC, Fisher is a yawn, and Momoa is just sulky. There is Miller, whose character was clearly meant to bring a bit of excitable young fanboy energy into the fold—much as Tom Holland was expected to do for Marvel with his version of Spider-Man—but who gets more contrived and annoying by the second.

Needless to say, I did not enjoy Justice League at all. Not. One. Bit.