I read an interview with director Zack Snyder in which he said that his director’s cut of Justice League was something he never thought would get released. He figured he’d have a rough version of it on his computer as a memento: “We would just show it to random people who stopped by, like our friends or whatever.”

It gave me a thrill of tender pity for any visitor to the Snyder home in that scenario. You can picture it, can’t you? Some unsuspecting pal, or a relative, perhaps — or, even more poignantly, a delivery person or someone cleaning the pool — minding their own business, just trying to get through the day, and suddenly they’re corralled into watching the four-hour Zack Snyder’s Justice League on his laptop, probably with him leaning over their shoulder, pointing out the “cool” parts.

He’s a true enthusiast, you’ve got to give him that. Snyder wants to make his superhero films achingly profound, to the point that everyone must bear witness to their greatness as Our Modern Mythology. That desire does, indeed, come across, because Snyder tries so hard to be impressive, especially in the film’s ten-minute opening credit sequence, that he achieves true incomprehensibility. If you haven’t been living and breathing DC film plots, you’re not going to know what’s going on in that opulently overdone chopped salad montage, so here’s a brief plot summary to save you the trouble of piecing it together over the course of several hours: