I always felt a little bad about the lost potential of Justice League. What started as one man's vision of the film became the project of someone else, and what Joss Whedon completed was not what Zack Snyder began.

For those who aren't in the know, Snyder was directing the big-budget JL movie when his daughter Autumn died and he stepped away from the job. Whedon, who without question had done a brilliant job with Marvel's Avengers, was brought in to finish the film, but the two men had very different ideas about what the finished movie should be. Whedon's version, released in 2017, had good moments but was not a good film. Now, Snyder has yielded to pressure from fans to finish the movie his way and release it anew.

Far be it for me to question the time and money spent to redo a movie like this. But there's no question that Snyder's Justice League is the superior product.

Then again, he produced something that was less a movie and more a miniseries. Spanning four hours and broken into episodic chapters, Snyder's JL certainly could have been released as a series (which was reportedly the studio's plan at some point in the process).

According to interviews, there actually wasn't a lot of new footage filmed for the movie, but a lot of scenes that Whedon had discarded were restored -- and stuff that Whedon had included was cut. (For example, the hardscrabble Russian family living in the danger zone at film's end has, mercifully, been deleted entirely.) And there was a lot of new CGI work for Snyder's version; for instance, the villain Steppenwolf was completely redesigned into something looking more alien and, let's be honest, cooler.

When JL was released in 2017, only Superman (Henry Cavill) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) had headlined previous films. Ben Affleck's Batman, who had only appeared in a brief cameo in Suicide Squad, was largely an unknown quantity, and Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) were entirely new to the screen. Unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which produced films about individual heroes before bringing them together as a team, DC opted to give us the team before introducing the characters. I'm still not sure that was the wisest course but Snyder at least gives the characters a much fuller backstory than Whedon did.

It's hard to compare the two versions of the movie, since only the bare skeleton of the plot remains the same. And it's hard to know how much of Snyder's work was done with the benefit of hindsight -- knowing how poorly Whedon's version had been received. And yes, it's quite likely Whedon's version also would have improved if he'd been given the extra budget and a four-hour run time to play with.

All we can really judge is the movie itself, and yes, Snyder's version is better. It's not perfect, but at times it is great.

The action sequences are powerful. More importantly, the story makes much more sense, and it progresses with a greater sense of foreboding as the threat of Steppenwolf -- and, lurking in the background (a la Thanos), Darkseid -- becomes clear. And the characters finally get their due; I feel like we understand them better now than we did before. The Flash and Cyborg in particular were sidelined in the Whedon film, but Snyder makes them vital to the plot.

Zack Snyder's Justice League is good on its own, and it sets up the DC universe for sequels that could, if properly handled, rival Marvel's recent successes.

Perhaps the bottom line is, although I watched most of the Marvel movies at least twice, I never felt the urge to revisit Justice League. The Snyder cut, however, I think I will watch again.

Sadly, there are currently no plans to make a sequel, despite ending the movie on a big cliffhanger and teasing fans with hints of heroes to come, such as Martian Manhunter and the Atom. If Snyder had been able to finish the movie as planned, I'm sure the series would have continued, but after being derailed, this Justice League appears to be a one-time outing.

Perhaps the fans who clamored for its release can sway the Powers That Be into reconsidering.