The Snyder Cut is so much better that watching the theatrical release of Justice League would be downright painful now. Whedon's version plays almost like a satire of Snyder's version. Ray Fisher's restraint is remarkable in retrospect - he was vandalized in the original cut.
Snyder gave the DC characters something that really set them apart from Marvel's hugely successful and highly entertaining movies: a sense of awe and grandeur, wonder and terror. There aren't a lot of important "normal folks" in his movies because that's us - the audience.
Snyder was driven by that sense of how incredible, overwhelming, and terrifying it would be to see these superhuman titans and their astounding feats - his cut of JL clearly positions the superheroes as successors to the "gods of old." A daunting but exhilarating perspective.
Marvel's characters are mostly action-movie heroes with superpowers, coming off like relatable, regular people with a lively sense of the absurd even when they're supposed to be 2,000-year-old godlike beings. That's one way to handle superheroes, and it's fun.
The Marvel approach is an easy audience-pleaser, and DC sold some tickets by emulating it with Shazam and Aquaman. They got silly and people had a good time, but they're losing something by abandoning Snyder's sense of fearsome wonder, of mankind discovering the supernatural.
Of all the people who retold Superman's origin story over the decades, Snyder seemed to best understand that it wasn't just the beginning of a great superhero career - it was also childhood's end for the human race, first contact with the cosmos.
He carried that vibe into Justice League, also a turning point for humanity - a vast epic that would bring all sorts of forgotten history and legend - Amazons, Atlanteans, aliens - back into the everyday world. It was the beginning of a new age, not just a cape brawl.
JL works better with its ambitions intact, even if we'll never get to see the rest of the trilogy Snyder had in mind. It feels less like a paint-by-numbers MacGuffin hunt. Maybe it's too much thematic freight for a superhero story to handle, but it was fun to watch Zack try. /end
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