In the ‘Justice League’ Synder cut, a bad movie becomes a long movie — but it’s Zack Snyder’s bonkers obsession that’s so worth our time

Maybe you’ve heard about “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” and wondered if you should care? The answer is no, you should not care, you should not care at all — certainly not about the movie. But you should care about what “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” says about creativity and infatuation, because in that context, “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” matters a great deal.

It just doesn’t matter in the way it thinks it matters.

It is the movie equivalent of a man wearing a top hat on the subway at 4 a.m. — you should not approach or engage in any way, but still, you can’t help wonder about what’s going on there.

Indeed, a lot is going on there.

See, I have stood at the gates of madness and thy name is “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” aka “The Snyder Cut,” aka “The Justice League” movie nobody liked in 2017 now stretched to four endless hours, with 800 additional special-effects shots. That’s not me being snarky, that’s Snyder’s own boast — this new “Justice League” has nearly 500% more special effects than the “Justice League” from four years ago, which contained a mere 200 special effects. I’m grateful for that information, for such an analytic approach to polishing a pig. It’s nice to know because, to paraphrase Edgar Allan Poe, as I watched “The Snyder Cut,” I grew insane, with intervals of horrible sanity. Like anyone made claustrophobic by the intense tunnel vision of an artist, my DNA felt altered. Hours passed where I wondered if the outside world had vanished.

I am a superhero person. I like superhero comic books, I like comic book conventions and I like movies about superheroes; I can hold my own in a conversation about whose Batman run was better, Tom King’s or Scott Snyder’s, but I don’t own a full-size replica of Iron Man, cosplay as a Green Lantern, posses much knowledge of B- and C-list X-Men members or even buy comics monthly.

I’m not completely nuts.

But I am just nuts enough to recognize a rabbit hole of self-delusion and obsessiveness inside which Zack Snyder has not only taken up residence but knocked down a wall and installed a second bathroom. I recognize it because I often admire this quality in artists, including in Snyder. Probably, you do, too. Chicago has created its share of such artists, driven by a singular vision: You don’t always love the work, but they are always themselves, ambitious within a register. They refuse to leave well-enough alone. Think Billy Corgan, Hebru Brantley, Michael Shannon.

Think careers that dissolve that thin membrane separating personal style from repetition.

Before I continue, some background:

“Justice League,” the 2017 fiasco, partly shot in Chicago, played like a self-important and grim, grim, grim take on the more popular, buoyant “Avengers” movies from Marvel. You should not seek it out. Instead, google “Sad Affleck,” the YouTube video of Ben Affleck (Batman) and Henry Cavill (Superman) doing press for “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Snyder’s endless prelude to “Justice League.” (Yes, as preparation for understanding Snyder’s four-hour “Justice League,” you should probably sit through an additional three hours of “Batman v Superman.”) Anyway, as their interviewer notes the film’s terrible reviews, Cavill, the Boy Scout, goes into a long, corporate-sounding defense. Meanwhile, whomever edited the clip cues “The Sound of Silence” and zooms slowly into Affleck, whose abject expression suggests a man in a joyless job.

That’s all you need to know about the first “Justice League.”

Keeping with Snyder’s trademark style, its images were weightless, humorless, baroque, exceedingly green-screened and progressive-rock cheesy, ideal for the side of a 1974 Chevy van, oppressive in a multiplex. That said, Snyder wasn’t satisfied himself with the film. Because of family tragedy, he left the production just before finishing. Ever since, true believers have pleaded with Warner Bros. to release “the Snyder cut.” Not that they really needed to plead: Snyder had already added 30 minutes to the video release of “Batman v Superman.” A longer, more grandiose “Justice League” was always an inevitability. And so, after months and months of tinkering, the Snyder cut arrives Thursday on HBO Max, in this age of doubling-down. It gathers all of the forces of pretension, kitsch and glut that distinguish Snyder, and then some.

It has everything: turtlenecks, Nazis, dog walking, tridents, lightening, moody cyborgs, Jared Leto doing his discount Joaquin Phoenix, Willem Dafoe doing his crazy eyes, Amazons, Vikings, Genghis Khan, Celtic lullabies, tidal waves, tea-making tips, Shetland sweaters, giant fly people, rivers of lava, Amy Adams about to cry, leather pants, the Crain Communications Building, Grant Park, Millennium Park, gods, horses, wet mops, Sauron and Wall Street. This is a film so deeply committed to its vision, not only does Gotham City play Wisconsin in football, we watch the highlights. This is a film so complicated that whenever Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman takes a moment to explain the plot, she speaks in the slow clear voice of someone speaking to Alexa.

And yet, and yet, and yet ...

Without the myopically committed, creating their works touched by fire, a little light would go out in the world. A culture as ingratiating and predictable as ours needs the compulsive egos of its Zack Snyders, however mediocre the results. These are the artists who push against our preoccupations with range and resist transforming themselves wholesale from work to work. They remind us an artist can spend a career sowing the same patch of ground, pulling everything possible from it. In fact, much richer and more rewarding examples are too numerous to count. But think of Suellen Rocca, who died last spring. Part of Chicago’s influential Hairy Who, she spent a lifetime on jittery images so repetitive it verged on hieroglyphic (her own word for her work). Even Van Gogh’s many sunflowers, inseparable from his attraction and legacy, have been worked into the logos of an immersive (and largely sold-out) new exhibit of his art in Old Town.

Of course, Snyder is not even close to being the only filmmaker to rework the same muscles over and over until he edges nearer to his picture of perfection. Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu remade his film “A Story of Floating Weeds” as the immortal “Floating Weeds.” Watching Hitchcock’s first “Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934), then his remake in 1956, is to watch a director shaking off the flourishes of youth for the solid professionalism of craftsmanship.

Or think of Kanye West, who, for a time, reinvented himself with every new album — until “The Life of Pablo” in 2016, from which he seemed unable to move on. For several weeks after the album was available commercially, he tinkered with its digital download, creating newer versions of the album, swapping out lyrics and revising mixes and adding new songs. You might argue, judging by the distracted, undercooked output that followed “Pablo,” West still hasn’t moved on.

Blair Thomas, the longtime Chicago theater director and puppeteer, has created four different Chicago productions of “Moby-Dick” in the past 18 years — and that’s not including the eight or so fragments of “Moby-Dick” he’s also staged. “From the outside it looks like an obsession,” he told me, “but to me, returning again and again, I see it more like fidelity and consistency.”

With each new staging, he’s rendered waves in new ways. Tweaked whales. Altered Ahabs.

“What you find (by returning to a work) is the questions raised were never answered, so the interest persists,” he said. He noted painter Frank Stella’s own obsession with “Moby-Dick,” which lasted years; Tom Stoppard’s habit of frequently rewriting published plays. “Certain artists keep their relationship going with certain works — long as they’re alive, they are working on it.”

They are chasing legacy.

Stepping back only when their time or curiosity is up.

Of course, in Hollywood, revising material is much harder, and more expensive, when it costs hundreds of millions of dollars. In that sense, the stamped-in-stone “director’s cut” of a movie becomes an expression of clout — you can almost trace the growing might of director Ridley Scott over the past 39 years by the countless number of times he’s returned to “Blade Runner.” Still, a director’s cut marketed as the final, unqualified “Director’s Cut” is also an act of whittling away hundreds of name in the credits, reducing it to the one above the title. It’s all ego, power and fetish, though perhaps, for the best. “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” feels like the absolute truest expression of Zack Snyder. I am certain only four hours of footage exist. Otherwise it would be five. It is a 14-year-old’s idea of gravitas. Epic, violent, full of naughty words, told with the lyricism of a pharmaceutical ad about bloating. And more importantly, for now, it’s complete.