Justice League is not a particularly good movie. It isn’t as much of a punish as the fumbling, painful dirge that was Batman v Superman, but it’s absolute tonal mess which was clearly hacked together from the work of two different directors – Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon. The whole time you’re wondering if there’s an alternate, Snyder-only cut that would be marginally more cohesive, before you remember that this hypothetical film also would have sucked ass.
But there’s one thing which absolutely held my attention for the one hour and fifty-nine minute runtime of the film: Henry Cavill‘s digitally removed moustache.
You might recall during the film’s production that there were reports Cavill was sporting a lush mo’ for his role in the next Mission Impossible flick, and that the reshoots for Justice League clashed with the former’s production schedule. So Cavill was forced to play Superman with a thick moustache, and digital artists were to remove it in post-production.
The result is that, well, Superman looks like a character from The Sims 2. Delete the pool ladder! Delete it!
https://twitter.com/DanaSchwartzzz/status/931325744667680768
Having actually seen the monstrosity on-screen, I can safely say that it is one of the worst uses of CGI in a film in modern memory – though absolutely not as bad as The Rock in The Mummy 2, which will always occupy the top spot. It’s bad. The space between his nose and his upper lip constantly looks like it has been smeared with Vaseline.
This is what Cavill said recently to Fox about the process to obliterate all hair from his upper lip with the magic of computers:
It’s nothing to cover it up. What we do is we try to put it back on the top lip as much as possible. So they kind of wax it up. And then I had dots all over my face. And they try to put dots, which are barely visible, sort of in the various points on the face where you would see them during normal… not face replacement, but whatever CGI aspect they may be applying to a face. And yeah. I was covered in dots, and had a big mustache. It was definitely a new look for Superman.
This reads to me like a man traumatised by the sheer effort required to digitally remove his crumb catcher.
A few things I noted (here there be spoilers):
- Cavill’s awful upper lip can be used as archaeological evidence to determine just how extensive Justice League‘s reshoots actually were. It was suggested that Whedon was just tightening up Snyder’s product, but Superman has a blurry lip in literally every shot save for maybe one scene. This either suggests that Superman either had a much different or smaller role in Snyder’s original film, or the scenes were bad enough that this abomination was worth reshooting for.
- Okay, so Paramount refused to allow Cavill to shave. That’s a bummer, and it left Warner Bros in a pretty tough place vis-à-vis his fluffy lip fungus. But did they have to include so many extreme close-ups of Cavill’s face?! They’re basically begging the audience to say, “It appears this Superman fellow has been drinking a tall cup of slime and forgot to wipe his lip afterwards”.
- Any amount of money would have been worth it to pay off Paramount to allow Cavill to shave. This should have been a situation where top execs slam a briefcase packed with cash on the desk of Paramount’s CEO and demand removal of the ‘stache.
- You must see this film if only to stare at the lip. It is a monument to the hubris of man. Stories will be told in a century of a decadent and forgotten age where it was generally accepted that a man’s moustache could be erased from a film. We will apologise to our children and grandchildren about this, as if it was a monumental collective failing for which we are all responsible.
Cheers for reading 650 words about Henry Cavill’s weird upper lip.
