...And then the amount of scenes you can skip is grand, you can skip more than just the portion of the epilogue that comes after Superman's shirt rip. You don't need the museum attack scene, you can skip majority -or the entirety- of Amy Adams scenes before Superman's resurrection, you can obviously skip the ladies singing for Aquaman.....
For me, one of the strengths of
ZSJL is, in fact, its longform structure. I legitimately enjoyed the extra time and attention paid to character development; to small “character moments”; to minor story details and embellishments (that weren’t, strictly speaking, absolutely essential to the plot); to longer takes of the purely visual elements; etc.
It’s true, however, that at a basic level, the movie’s “superheroes vs. supervillains plot” is pretty standard, boilerplate stuff. So if runtime and “trimming the fat” are overriding concerns, you certainly
could streamline the story down to its bare essentials. And presumably, this is what the lean, 2-hour Whedon cut does (though I can’t speak from personal knowledge — since I’ve never seen the Whedon cut.) IOW, take your pick: long and leisurely or tight and efficient.
I suppose it’s interesting to contemplate what Snyder’s alternative
theatrical cuts (2.5hrs, 2.75hrs, 3hrs, etc.) might have looked like. Is there, indeed, a “sweet spot” that takes the best of the longform but isn’t quite so… well, long? Maybe. But since steaming (not theatrical) was the eventual venue, I’m happy with 4 hours. (In different circumstances, it’s likely that the extra footage would have ended up as “bonus material” on a DVD release. And then someone would have “fan edited” everything into a 4-hour opus
anyway. So Snyder saved them the trouble.
)
