Then Zack Snyder's daughter committed suicide and he stepped down from the project.
Joss Whedon got brought in to finish it off, more rumours of production problems of different kinds. The thing with Henry Cavill's moustache. Generally poor reception of other DC releases etc. all set it up to fail.
The theatrical release is a bit rubbish in places. Some people love it, some hate it but I think it's just sort of OK, with a VERY dull CGI antagonist and terrible boss fight at the end. It looks like a movie that went through development & production hell.
Snyder got back into working, didn't like what he saw and buoyed up by his fans finally got momentum to rebuild his idea of what Justice League should have been.
This is that movie. Sort of.
It's also obviously not that movie.
In another world, Snyder would have got his way and made the two-parter with grand sweeping scope and this maybe demonstrates that he could have pulled it off.
Except that never happened.
Here's a movie where the story works better, it gives more space to the new characters, fits in cameos from others, even Jared Leto didn't grate, and is indicative of what could have been. In places it's great.
Except it's one movie, not two.
It's one movie that's FAR too long. One very long movie is not two movies.
It feels like nobody said "no" at any point during post-production and this round of post-production really came too far after production for them be able to fix anything anyway.
There's a terrible old joke about asking for directions that includes the line “Well, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.” and that sums it up for me.
Much as it is has things to recommend it over the dull original, it too is dull for different reasons and it's not just the length.
Better than the Whedon theatrical release but y'know some things just weren't meant to be 5/10.