Warner Bros. and DC debuted a new trailer for Justice League at Comic-Con on Saturday, and it looks like director Zack Snyder brought something new to the next installment in the DC Extended Universe: the color red. Don’t panic: Gotham City still looks like the Joker just set off a bomb at the Prussian blue factory. But a few shots, seemingly associated with supervillain Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds), expand the palette past its usual limit of “DC Orange” and into as-yet-unexplored realms of carmine and crimson. (Snyder worked with Game of Thrones cinematographer Fabian Wanger instead of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s Larry Fong this time around.) It’s not exactly Jack Cardiff territory, but it’s redder than the Flash’s purply-brown uniform, and that’s gotta count for something.
And shades of red aren’t the only novelty Justice League offers: As the first trailer revealed back in March, the film also includes “jokes.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this groundbreaking narrative technique involves the use of “thing[s] that someone says to cause amusement or laughter,” and based on the new trailer, they are also the Flash’s superpower. Graduate theses will no doubt be written determining which touches of humor came from Snyder and which from Marvel Cinematic Universe stalwart Joss Whedon, who was brought in to write additional scenes for reshoots and then took over postproduction when Snyder admirably stepped down following the death of his daughter. But there’s no mistaking the authorial voice behind the nonsensical conversations about the meaning of heroism, the massive computer-generated imagery battles, and the shameless lifts from blockbusters of the not-very-distant past, from Jurassic Park all the way to Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. That voice isn’t Whedon’s or Snyder’s, as comfortable as they both are with it: It belongs to DC and Warner Bros. And as the trailer makes clear, they’re drawing their biggest superhero movie with their biggest, most expensive box of crayons.
