I think I’ll just flag this review of Justice League by Mark Kermode up today. I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t comment on it’s veracity; but I must say it echoes my own recent musings about film. I finally got around to watching one of the Marvel films last week. I bunged Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer into my DVD drive, intending to watch all four and then pen a lengthy review. The film was such godawful crap however, that that idea went out the window. It was just one CGI sequence after another, with very little plot in between. What narrative there was reminded me of the crappy American soaps I used to watch in the summer holidays in my early teens like California Dreams: nauseatingly cliche and sickeningly melodramatic. By the end I could barely wait for the credits to roll.

The cinema seems to be becoming saturated with these comic book films. If Kermode’s review is anything to go by, I think it’s fair to assume that they are all as dire as the one I saw – all just as derivative, assuming a gravitas but actually being childish pap churned out by a studio for easy money. When I recall how magnificent film can be as an art form, these comic book offerings seem to insult it. My fear is that this is what the cinematic art is increasingly becoming: rather than being used to say something about the human condition, like Star Wars films, comic book films ply the viewer with the visual equivalent of monosodium glutamate, hurling computer generated images at us justified with the minimum of plots and poorest of acting.