o this month, one senior Biden appointee said political tampering under the Trump administration had “compromised the integrity” of some agency science. She cited specific examples, such as political leaders discounting studies that showed the harm of dicamba, a popular weedkiller that has been linked to cancer and subsequently ruling that its effect

More blasts! More impalings! More decapitation!

But what does the franchise hope for?

But that’s where the hope of the narrative clashes with the hope of the franchise:

emo phase

The cinematography, by Fabian Wagner, is dark, as though the whole movie were filmed in the bat cave, infected with Bruce Wayne’s brooding. The few attempts at breezy dialogue, and the film’s heavy-handed deployment of Miller as comic relief, fall leaden in this funereal atmosphere.

Next week marks the start of spring, and people are heading to the park. People are getting vaccine shots. I probably don’t need to explain how hope looks right now, after the year we just had — and, in fact, for you it might look different. But I do know one thing, that it doesn’t look like the dead bodies of a villain and his henchmen at the end of a great saga. It’s something lighter, brighter — so much more than the dark.

Snyder self-consciously mashes as much story into the time frame as possible, tagging the end with countless dangling threads that could have been woven into a larger tapestry of future DC Comics movies — had his cut seen release earlier.

But Snyder’s never been one for nuance. “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” is divided into six parts (for the six Justice League members, get it?) and an arduously long epilogue packed with enough teased story lines and both new and familiar faces

Hope isn’t manufactured.

For worse: Snyder also plods through seemingly endless (and pointless) exposition, adding enough back story for each Justice League hero to strong-arm us into investing in these characters so we care when they finally put on the team jerseys and step out onto the court.

But let’s begin with the story, which you may already know from the 2017 theatrical release. (That version of the movie was taken over by the director Joss Whedon, and fans have been calling for Snyder’s original to be restored.) Superman (Henry Cavill) is dead, after the events of “Batman v Superman,” and an alien warrior named Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) has traveled to Earth to collect three Mother Boxes, sources of endless destructive (and regenerative) energy that, when combined into a “Unity,” can destroy a whole world. Batman (Ben Affleck) recruits all the supers he can find — Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and, later, a resurrected Superman — to stop the impending apocalypse.