Justice League hit cinemas with all the verve and excitement of a wet turd. Critics hated it and audiences stayed away in droves, and quite rightly so – it was an absolute abomination of a film, crudely stitched together from the corpse of a much better movie. What’s worse is that everything we hear about the pic we could have gotten, the fabled ‘Snyder Cut,’ makes it sound absolutely amazing.
Now that the marketing hype for the film has died down a little, director Zack Snyder has been teasing ideas for what his vision might have been before he was booted from the project and replaced with Joss Whedon. The latest comes from an eagle-eyed fan on Vero noticing a scene where Steppenwolf’s axe smashes into the ground, making a curious pattern. Snyder responded cryptically to this, saying “Do the math.” It’s not a hard code to crack, either, with the very next commenter asking, “do you mean… the equation?”
He’s talking of the fabled Anti-Life Equation, a brain-bending formula from Jack Kirby’s Fourth World that’s mathematical proof of the futility of living and also a way of achieving total control over the minds of sentient beings. The God of all Evil, Darkseid, is famously obsessed with obtaining the equation, which is said to be locked away in the human subconsciousness. Its very presence in Justice League means that Darkseid can’t have been far behind. And boy, what I wouldn’t give to see the League go toe-to-toe with the iconic villain on the big screen. It’d make Thanos look like child’s play.
Interestingly, in 2005, DC Comics defined precisely what the Anti-Life Equation was in Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle series, writing:
loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding × guilt × shame × failure × judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side
Apologies in advance if by posting that I’ve inadvertently subjected the Earth to an infinity of enslavement under the giant boots of Apokolips. Oops.
Still, what I wouldn’t give to see Snyder’s cut of Justice League. Maybe one day. After all, the Donner cut of Superman II only took 28 years to see the light of day, so there’s still hope for Zack’s original vision to surface, right?