Since its release, there has been debate over who shot what in the bifurcated production process that Justice League went through. Although first director Zack Snyder is the one who receives on screen credit, writer/director Joss Whedon stepped in to oversee a period of reshoots for the film when a family issue forced Snyder to drop out. And while the authorship of some of the scenes is fairly easy to determine, some has not been. And in one case, it seems as if the assumption for who was responsible was erroneous.
This morning, Whedon admitted in a tweet that he picked the song for the montage that opens the film, Sigrid’s cover of the Leonard Cohen tune “Everybody Knows.”
(I stuck it in JL too)
— Joss Whedon (@joss) December 4, 2017
That so many attributed the choice to Snyder is understandable. The director has used montages scored to pop songs before as a means of conveying story or setting background. His best use of this technique was in the opening credits to Watchmen where he had a long version of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’ Changing” as accompaniment to a montage of how the world of movie evolved with superheroes in its midst. Snyder opened Batman V Superman in a similar fashion with the song “Beautiful Lie” underscoring a montage retelling of the deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents. Justice League‘s opening montage paints a world as having sunk into despair and hatred following the death of symbol of hope Superman. The slow motion action and color-desaturated cinematography does seem more in line with Snyder’s Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice aesthetic. If anything, the whole sequence seems to be a call back to the montage near the end of that film showing the sadness around the world over Superman’s death. That sequence was scored to the traditional hymn “Amazing Grace.”
If anything, this indicates that the ongoing dissection of who contributed what to the film may not seem as cut and dry as some may have first assumed. Whedon said when he first took on the reshoots that he was going to work to keep Snyder’s vision intact. And at least here, he succeeded to a point that fooled most people.
