Justice League: 10 Over-Looked Positives

A common complaint about the DCEU has been its complete lack of humor. From the marketing it was clear Justice League would be going in a different direction tonally and this led to a fair amount of pre-release anxiety. Luckily, the humor is on the whole handled well. The jokes are very spare and are deployed infrequently throughout the film, while the humor is on the whole very dry, so it fits in with the film's dark aesthetic well.

A lot of humor would have been a very foolish creative idea, but the film gets the level of humor right. Justice League didn't need a lot of humor, since that would have clashed with the darker tone. At the same time, a relentlessly gloomy tone wouldn't have properly worked either given that it's a film about some larger-than-life and OTT superheroes.

With the pleasingly minimal yet effective use of humor on display in Justice League, the franchise is moving away from the dull grimness of the earlier films but it crucially holds onto its darker tone to some extent, which has allowed it to establish an aesthetic identity to stand on its own.