Justice League Photos Reveal Deleted Invasion History Lesson & Darkseid
Even though it’s been nearly a year since Justice League’s theatrical release, we’re still regularly learning new things about Zack Snyder’s original intent for the movie. Thanks to Joss Whedon’s reshoots and a 2-hour runtime mandate, the movie we got in theaters was significantly different than the “Snyder Cut,” but fragments of the director’s vision are still regularly dug up, giving fans a taste of what could have been.
This newest reveal comes from a moment that was removed from the movie entirely but had already been teased by Snyder on Vero earlier this year when he posted an image of a deleted scene of Wonder Woman for Gal Gadot’s birthday. In the image, Diana Prince is in a dark room with a torch, examining something. Behind her, a mural can be seen displaying the three Mother Boxes.
Without context, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on in the scene, other than the fact that Diana is likely learning something about the Mother Boxes, but with her back turned to them, it looks like there might be something more interesting about the wall she’s facing.
Thanks to new images uncovered by DC Films Hub in collaboration with Screen Rant, we now know what three walls of the room of the look like, and it chronicles the same history lesson Diana tells to Bruce about Steppenwolf’s first invasion. The images below show a mural of Humans, Atlanteans, and Amazonians coming together to fight what appears to be Darkseid himself (although it could also be Steppenwolf, who we see in the live-action version in the movie, and he’s just been anthropomorphized through the telling of the story), complete with fire pits, boom tubes, parademons, Apocolyptian priests (presumably reading the Anti-Life Equation), and some ancient text threading the length of the image, likely telling the story of the battle.
Given the fact that it matches up with the image of Diana with the torch previously released by Snyder, this could be an alternate scene explaining how Wonder Woman came to be involved in the plot. The theatrical cut had Queen Hippolyta shooting a flaming arrow to alert Wonder Woman, and she instinctually knew something was wrong and went to meet up with Batman.
The use of Hippolyta’s arrow has all the markings of a narrative tool to cut down the movie, similar to Whedon’s rooftop Batman scene. Whether or not it was a reshoot, its ultimate use in the movie was as a shortcut, likely to remove this scene, where Diana learns about Steppenwolf’s first invasion – information she didn’t have when Bruce first told her he was preparing for an alien invasion in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The DCEU has a history of incorporating artistic history lessons, like Man of Steel’s depiction if Kryptonian colonialization or Wonder Woman’s story about the origin of the Amazonians, so it’s possible something similar would happen here, tying into the live-action flashback of the invasion we see later.
The big question now, though, is what’s on the wall Diana’s looking at? It’s the only one missing from these particular images, and it’s also the one with the big reveal for this scene. Considering Zack Snyder just recently revealed Batman’s “something darker” line was referring to Darkseid, and we know the Lord of Apokolips was supposed to have a bigger presence in the Snyder Cut, it’s the easiest conclusion to jump to.
The idea of Darkseid being in the history lesson battle is an enticing one indeed, and that definitely wasn’t the case in the theatrical cut. A significant portion of the movie was redone, but on such a CGI heavy scene, removing Darkseid for Steppenwolf would be no small task, so more than likely the decision to switch to Steppenwolf was made earlier on before Snyder even left the project.
Original Link : https://screenrant.com/justice-league-deleted-scene-invasion-mural-snyder-cut/