Zack Snyder's Justice League: All Endings, Cliffhangers & Setup Explained. Zack Snyder's Justice League brings Snyder's initial vision for the DCEU to HBO Max, with various endings, bringing some plots to a close and teasing plans for others that have been abandoned for a long time.
While the basic plot ideas are identical to the 2017 theatrical cut of Justice League, the film has a new beginning, multiple endings, and a lot more character development than Joss Whedon's version.
The four-hour movie is twice as long as the 2017 theatrical cut and features an aesthetic overhaul, a new Junkie XL score, restored character arcs, an alternate design for Steppenwolf, and the restoration of multiple characters, including villains like Darkseid and DeSaad, plus the addition of Jared Leto's Joker.
These new additions all add up to a brand new experience, fleshing out multiple characters and story arcs and paying off some major threads started in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, all while setting up a number of long-since canceled projects from Snyder's original DCEU plan. Here's what it all means.
Family has been a major theme through all the DC movies, but especially Snyder's films. Man of Steel was about fathers, with Clark torn between two worlds and two fathers, while Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is about mothers, culminating in Batman's realizing Superman's humanity upon hearing Clark call out for Martha, starting his own path to redemption, so it's only fitting that Zack Snyder's Justice League would bring the team together with themes of family lost and family found.
Batman lost his parents and his adopted son, Flash lost his mother and his father is unjustly imprisoned, Diana is separated from her mother and sisters, Aquaman is split between two peoples and resents his mother, and Cyborg's arc brings it all home with the prominent story of the loss of his mother and father. Of course, while Superman is missing from the first half of the movie, but when he returns he's reunited with Lois, who's going to be his wife (and is potentially pregnant with his child), and we get dialogue of Jonathan Kent and Jor-El telling him to love the world as his parents loved him.
Cyborg's rejection of the temptations of the Mother Box is a major step in recovering from the grief of his losses. He knows his parents and his body are gone and he can't have them back. But that doesn't mean he's broken or alone. All the League learns this in one way or another, but it's Victor's story that provides this throughline for the movie as he comes to forgive and accept Silas, his father twice over as both his biological father and the creator of Cyborg. Likewise, Bruce, the most troubled of all the heroes may have found some semblance of peace. He forms the Justice League, then gets to hear Martian Manhunter tell him his parents would be proud.
