Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Skippable only in the sense that it duplicates a film you may already have watched. Watch this instead of the 2017 version, not as well as it: the two cover the same events and seeing both is four extra hours for the same plot.

It exists because of a sustained online campaign, which the studio eventually accommodated with a reported seventy million dollars of additional work and a streaming release. Whether that was a vindication or a capitulation is still argued about, and the campaign itself had an unpleasant fringe that its organisers never adequately disowned.

The film is better. At four hours it is absurdly long and it is coherent, which the theatrical cut is not: Cyborg becomes the protagonist and his story, about a young man's body rebuilt without his consent by a father who could not let him die, is genuinely affecting. Steppenwolf is redesigned and given a motive, the Flash is introduced properly, and the tonal whiplash is gone.

It is also self-indulgent in ways nothing would have survived in a cinema: a 4:3 aspect ratio, a chapter structure, several songs played in full, and a lengthy epilogue setting up sequels that were never made. Worth it once if the material interests you at all.