The Politicization of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League”

“Fixated and obsessed with Superman’s ‘whiteness,’ Phillips cannot appreciate a movie for what it is, content instead to completely misinterpret it in order to make her misguided social beliefs more palatable.”

Bad reviews do not come from biased critics. No, the worst reviews come from biased critics who either refuse to admit—or are entirely unaware—that they hold a bias in the first place. Such insidious partiality is the primary fault of New York Times critic Maya Phillips’ recent review of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which was released last Thursday on HBO Max. Replete with meaningless appeals to “hope,” as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of Superman, Phillips’ review is nothing but a poor excuse to push a warped view of social justice.

Six paragraphs into her review, Phillips finally begins to outline her main problem with the extended cut of Justice League: how the movie portrays “hope” or, rather, in her opinion, how it fails to do so. She points out that the movie is “laced with the notion,” culminating in the fledgling Justice League’s decision to resurrect Superman, “not just because of his power but because of the hope he represents.”

To Phillips, this is the film’s biggest mistake—not just in terms of cinematography but from a racial, gendered perspective. She accuses Director Zack Snyder of focusing the whole movie on a “hero ex machina: a white male Übermensch as the default image of hope and salvation,” resurrected to save Aquaman (played by Hawaiian Jason Momoa) and Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot, who, obviously, is a woman). Combined with the dark, sepia-toned landscapes of the “Snyderverse,” Phillips asserts that a hope centered on “one [white] man” is not hope at all. Of course, she does not elaborate on why this is. Instead, after making this extremely provocative and unfounded claim, she pivots to the Coronavirus (COVID-19). For a world that has been through so much, she says, a hope is not “the dead bodies of a villain and his henchmen at the end of a great saga. It’s something lighter, brighter — so much more than the dark.”