Hollywood director Zack Snyder’s latest assault on the senses proves once again that he is not just a bad filmmaker (and that’s putting it nicely) but a cruel, twisted sadist who delights in torturing audiences that aren’t already in love with his uniquely awful style of filmmaking.
Now, I could sit here and recount the numerous plot holes his films contain, or the bad performances of stilted, poorly-written dialogue that permeate every second of his bloated opuses (the parts that aren’t in slow-motion, anyway), or how nauseous his movies make me feel with their faded, washed-out color palettes of brown and grey, or how he just blatantly shoves product placement in your face like he’s shooting a fucking car commercial, but then I’d be stuck here writing this article longer than one of his stupid movies lasts.
Instead, I’m going to explore just why Zack seems to have a weird, childlike obsession with violence and why he values imagery over things that make movies good, like character-development and storytelling.
The problem with Zack Snyder extends all the way back to his first foray into the world of filmmaking, with his 2004 remake (or is it a “reboot” now that he’s got another zombie movie on the way? Eh, I don’t care), “Dawn of the Dead”, the movie that singlehandedly resurrected the modern-day zombie genre (unless you count “28 Days Later”) and is almost entirely responsible for AMC’s adaptation of “The Walking Dead” which, much like its undead antagonists, is also a shambling corpse that will not die…
Snyder’s film is a remake of a classic horror film from George A. Romero that uses zombies to give us a scathing critique on capitalism, consumerism, white supremacy & police brutality. Snyder’s movie takes all of the themes from the original and throws them out the fucking window in favor of ZOMBIE RUN FAST, CAR GO CRASH, HELICOPTER GO BOOM, GUN GO BANG-BANG, OOOH BLOOD, SO COOOOL…
Its message (if it has one at all) appears to be the complete opposite of what George Romero was trying to warn us about in 1978. In 2004, a time when Romero’s movie was perhaps more relevant than ever, Zack Snyder took one look at it and said, “Nah, fuck that shit, let’s make zombies run”.
The only thing Snyder managed to achieve with “Dawn of the Dead” was that he somehow made the worst zombie film ever fucking produced (and no, I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that) and simultaneously redefine the zombie genre in the average American’s mind. His version is the one most people now think of when they hear “Dawn of the Dead”, and frankly, that should be a federal crime.
But Snyder was just making a zombie movie that appealed to the most basic American sensibilities; violence and a fear of “others”. The opening credit sequence features some footage of Muslims praying, mixed in with footage of zombies eating their way through society…very subtle imagery there, Zackary…
It doesn’t stop there either, the movie is obsessed with dehumanizing anyone outside of the main group of characters (kind of the way America tends to dehumanize anyone outside of its borders). There’s a particular scene in which the characters make a game out of shooting what used to be a living human person in the head with an automatic rifle. This is nothing original (like all of Zack’s work), a similar scene appears in Romero’s 1978 film too. The difference is that it’s rightly treated as something disturbing and wrong by Romero’s characters, and in Snyder’s film, it’s meant to be an endearing moment that brings us closer to his characters…
He even manages to sprinkle some homophobia in there (because gay stuff is gross, you guys!). So of course a majority of Americans prefer his version to that boring ass old movie about losing our humanity in excess consumption or some shit.
And therein lies what I think is most overlooked about Snyder: His movies aren’t just bad, they’re kind of dangerous (and not in the cool, bad boy way he wants them to be). His next two films, “300” and “Watchmen”, further cement this.
“300” in and of itself is a story with so many problems that I could write an entire article about that movie alone (there’s a reason it was screened for U.S. marines at Camp Pendleton to get them all hyped about killing brown people), so I won’t go into it here, but his adaptation of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” completely missed the point, so much that he thought Rorschach was the fucking hero of the story. He even sympathizes with The Comedian, a sadistic character who attempts rape at one point...a scene which Snyder shot in a way that was so fetishized, I’m surprised it wasn’t in slow-motion…
Snyder’s motif seems to be taking iconic American stories that have an important message about the human experience (with the exception of “300”) and perverting them beyond the point of their original intention in order to fit his own “vision”, to the point where it actually becomes the complete opposite message. That’s why his Superman is a total dick who stands for nothing but himself…hey, just like Snyder!
Speaking of “Vision” (no, not the lovable one), that’s one thing that I’m so fucking sick of hearing about in all of this overblown hype over Snyder’s completely unnecessary cut of “Justice League” … “this is truly a victory for Zack Snyder’s creative vision”…please, spare me. I’ve been exposed to Zack Snyder’s “creative vision” for nearly 20 years and I don’t think it really needs any more victories, okay?
Warner Bros pretty much gave him full creative control over “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman”, and it was a gamble that did not pay off for them, no matter how many times Snyder fanboys tweet “#RestoreTheSnyderverse” after chugging a can of Monster and review-bombing the latest blockbuster movie in a pathetic attempt to make Snyder’s “Justice League” look better than it actually is.
At the end of the day, in Capitalist Hollywood, box office money butters the bread that makes these superhero sandwiches we keep going back for, and I hate to break it to his cult of sycophantic suck-ups, but Zack Snyder’s “creative vision” is just not a bankable commodity. Once you get past all the schmaltzy shit about his “creative vision”, his version of Justice League suffers from all the same problems that make his other movies so unwatchable.
But why? Why aren’t his movies as successful as Marvel’s? Why isn’t the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) tearing up the box office the way they should be, despite carrying the three most popular superheroes in the genre?
I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with the fact that it’s centered around some fucking dude-bro hack who thinks it’d be cool to see Batman get raped in prison (yes, really). Maybe it’s because, up until his departure in 2017, the DCEU was being spearheaded by a dick-brained popcorn fart who’s such a fucking “visionary” that he scoffed at the idea of a Captain America movie while promoting his adaptation of “Watchmen” back in 2008.
“The average movie audience has seen — well, I can’t even count the amount of superhero movies. Fantastic Four, X-Men, Superman, Spider-Man. The Marvel universe has gone nuts; we’re going to have a fricking Captain America movie if we’re not careful. Thor, too! We’re on our second Hulk movie. And Iron Man — $300 million domestic box office on a second tier superhero!”
Iron Man actually grossed $318 million domestically. Snyder’s “Man of Steel”, a film about the most famous and recognizable superhero in the world, didn’t even get to $300 million…
As for Cap? Over $400 million. Who’s “second-tier” now, Zackary?
Now, if you’re reading this and you actually like Snyder’s films for some reason, I know what you’re probably thinking; “You’re just a Marvel fanboy! You can’t handle Snyder’s dark edginess because Marvel has spoiled you with their sugarcoated kiddie movies!” Couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m actually a DC fanboy, Batman is my favorite superhero ever, and anyone who knows me will attest to my affinity/obsession with him.
That’s why I get so pissed off about Zack Snyder and his awful fucking movies. I watch movies like “Captain America & The Winter Soldier” or “Captain America: Civil War” (which are very serious films with very dark subject matter) and I think of how great it would be to see my favorite superheroes in movies like these. Then I watch “Batman v Superman” and…it’s just a fucking joke. Zack Snyder took my heroes and turned them into a fucking joke.
By making everything Dark™ and taking himself super-serious and treating everything super-seriously, the result is so ridiculous that none of it can be taken seriously, especially when it feels like it was scripted by a 12 year old playing with his DC action figures (not to mention whatever the fuck Jesse Eisenberg was trying to do with his portrayal of Lex Luthor)
Snyder gives us no reason to care about either Batman or Superman as each hero just takes turns brooding in dreary, poorly-lit scenes for 2 hrs and 45 mins while doing nothing that resembles heroism, before the big titular showdown that lasts about as much screentime as it takes me to make a smoothie in the morning; a short, schlocky slug-fest that looks downright cartoonish in Snyder’s Dark™, super-serious world and ultimately gets resolved in the stupidest fucking way imaginable (I won’t spoil it here if you still haven’t seen it but let’s just say it makes the name “Martha” into a punchline).
Moreover, Snyder proudly and flagrantly displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes these characters so beloved and, when challenged on it, told his detractors that they are actually the ones who don’t understand these characters…nevermind that we’ve been reading these characters for years, we’re just not as insightful and interpretive as Zack Snyder apparently is…
“Someone says to me, ‘Batman killed a guy!’ I’m like, ‘Fuck, really?’ Wake the fuck up! Once you’ve lost your virginity to this fucking movie and then you come and say to me something about, like, ‘My superhero wouldn’t do that,’ I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ I’m, like, down the fucking road on that! It’s a cool point of view to be like, ‘My heroes are still innocent. My heroes didn’t fucking lie to America. My heroes didn’t embezzle money from their corporations. My heroes didn’t commit any atrocities.’ That’s cool. But you’re living in a fucking dream world!”
Yeah, Zackary, it’s called “fiction”. Do you think these are real people you’re making movies about? These are fictional characters, Zack.
Fic-tion-al char-act-ers.
It’s a good thing Snyder’s on-screen heroes aren’t real people, because they would be horrible…just like his movies.
Just who are Snyder’s real-life heroes anyway? What the hell is informing his sensibilities as a (and I use this term loosely) “storyteller”? Where does his “vision” come from?
Well, back in 2008, while promoting “Watchmen”, Zack Snyder was asked about what comics he grew up with and responded thusly:
“My mother saw I was into this comic called Heavy Metal magazine, so she got me a subscription. You could call it ‘high-brow’ comics, but to me, that comic book was just pretty sexy! I had a buddy who tried getting me into ‘normal’ comic books, but I was all like, ‘No one is having sex or killing each other. This isn’t really doing it for me’.”
Huh. Well, that certainly explains a lot, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why he seems to be more interested in superheroes having sex and killing people than he is in telling a rich, engrossing story…
“Watchmen” is clearly evidence of this, it’s filled with stylized killing that unironically glorifies the violence of its satirized heroes. In “Man of Steel”, Superman straight up snaps General Zod’s neck (but don’t worry, because he feels really sad about it afterwards…) In “Batman v Superman”, Batman just wantonly wastes a warehouse of kidnappers, because kidnapping bad. He even uses a gun to shoot the tank on a guy’s flamethrower, which causes him to burst into a fiery ball of screaming death. In his cut of “Justice League”, Wonder Woman slams her gauntlets together, causing one of the robbers to literally fucking explode, right in front of a group of children!
I keep seeing articles from Snyder fanboys titled “Zack Snyder’s ‘Justice League’ Fixes a Problem With Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman”…uh, how? By turning Diana into a fucking Mortal Kombat character?
When he does spend time on characterization, it’s a complete bastardizing of everything the character is supposed to be. His favorite hero is clearly Batman, but his Batman kills people, something that contradicts Batman’s 80-year long moral code, and is arguably the very thing that separates him from his enemies.
And since his favorite hero is Batman and he doesn’t seem to give a shit about any of the other ones, all of Snyder’s other male heroes are just varying shades of The Dark Knight, with his Superman coming the closest to what Batman is supposed to be (well, you know, minus the neck-snapping). His Aquaman and Cyborg are just Batman in cosplay, constantly brooding and speaking in grizzled whispers. The only male hero who isn’t a cardboard cutout of Batman is The Flash, but Snyder even manages to fuck him up by having him use his powers to creepily brush his hand across a helpless woman’s face before touching his wiener — uh, I mean, hotdog…
But his penchant for punishment isn’t just relegated to his on-screen characters, oh no…Snyder also punishes average movie-goers with his stomach-churning visual style and brutal plot contrivances. His cut of “Justice League” clocks in at 4 hours long, with absolutely nothing to justify its ridiculously bloated runtime, and I mean nothing. It took me two hours just to figure out what the actual plot was supposed to be because it takes way too much time to get to the point. If WB wants to tell Cyborg’s origin story, maybe they should, I don’t know, make a fucking Cyborg movie (just don’t let Zack Snyder touch it).
Maybe he could’ve shaved a couple hours off if literally every other shot wasn’t in slow-motion…seriously, has someone spoken to Zack about his use of slow-motion? Does he have to use it every five frames? Does 10% of the movie really need to be in slow-motion? At one point, I wasn’t sure if Jason Mimosa was moving in slow-motion or if it was just because he was underwater. Either way, it gave me motion-sickness.
Even the fucking Flash runs in slow-motion in this goddamn movie, and he’s supposed to be the fastest man alive, Zackary…fucking hell.
But of course, this is a Zack Snyder movie, so we should expect to see him eschew characterization and faithfulness to the source material in favor of his…um, “unique” visual style. Hell, “Style over substance” is practically the theme of his entire filmography. And when people point this out to him, it just emboldens him that much more.
In fact, each of his movies seems to be a spiteful response to criticism of the previous one. “Oh, was Man of Steel too long for you? Well, how about we make Batman v Superman EVEN LONGER, EH? What’s that? Superman was too dark in Batman v Superman? Well what if we just put him in an ALL-BLACK SUIT, HUH?”
His movies don’t even feel like movies, they’re like highlight reels of a movie. Like a very, very, very extended trailer. They’re made in a really pretentious manner that assumes everyone watching is a die-hard fanboy that already knows who all of these characters are and what the hell is supposed to be going on. It’s all presented in a very “Yeahhhh, look at this scene, you know what’s coming, dontcha?” type of way, and if you don’t know what’s coming, the movie punishes you for it by explaining none of it. The only attempts he makes at exposition in “Justice League” are delivered by Gal Gadot, who couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper bag, so she’s not interesting enough for me to pay attention to whatever the hell she was saying about Darkseid or Mother Boxes or some shit.
Warner Bros were not safe from Snyder’s brand of brutality either, as he seemingly got a big kick out of costing them more and more money with his shitty series of superhero exploits, each one more stuffy and self-indulgent than the last, and each bringing increasingly diminished box office returns far below what the studio had projected.
So it should come as no surprise that WB has decided to move forward on the DCEU without Zack Snyder. Even if his movies were good (and let’s be clear, they’re fucking not), it just wouldn’t make sense to keep him on when he’s proven to be so financially detrimental to WB’s plans. Batman v Superman should’ve easily grossed over a billion dollars. But it didn’t. Because Zack Snyder thought it’d be better to make a movie that pissed off fans of both characters rather than a movie that was enjoyable to watch.
His eagerness for edginess goes all the way back to his formative years. As he said in 2008:
“I came to comic books through my mother. I loved fantasy art — I love Frank Frazetta [the famed illustrator known for adult-oriented, sword-and-sorcery, and sci-fi imagery]. I went to boarding school. You weren’t allowed too many posters up, and everything I set up was slightly inappropriate. Frazetta’s naked girls, ripped up guys — the kids were like, ”What the hell?!” They had their Boy George posters up, I had crazy Frazetta!”
And that right there kind of illustrates Snyder’s whole approach to superhero movies. Marvel burst onto the scene with Iron Man in 2008 and turned the world of cinema on its fucking head with its nonstop whirlwind of hit after hit after hit. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can’t deny that Marvel movies have been a phenomenal success. In Snyder’s mind, the “kids” all have their Marvel posters up now, so he’s trying to put up his Frazetta version of DC heroes and make them go “What the hell?!” And this is a quaint notion, if you’re an edgy teenage boy who still faps to Heavy Metal Magazine, but I feel pretty safe in saying that it’s the wrong approach to telling stories about Batman, Superman & Wonder Woman.
Maybe there’s something else to all this though…maybe Snyder is informed by something more than just his preference of comic books…
I don’t find it very surprising that he wants to direct a modern-day adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead”. Much like Snyder’s films, Ayn Rand’s stories are bloated, boring, self-indulgent, and centered around powerful men who don’t care for anyone else, with the overall message being one of selfishness. “The Fountainhead” is the perfect story for someone like Snyder to adapt.
Maybe that’s why his Superman is such an unlikeable asshole who doesn’t really save anyone and goes around moping that he isn’t receiving the praise he feels that he’s owed. He’s basically a copy/pasta of one of Ayn Rand’s shitty protagonists. Rand, it should be noted, was a fucking sociopath who, as a young woman, wrote in her diary about her admiration for serial killer William Hickman…
Wow, that explains a lot about Snyder, doesn’t it…
Perhaps someday, Snyder will finally fulfill his wish of turning his favorite book from his favorite author into everybody’s next least-favorite movie, but in the meantime, as reports of overinflated “Justice League” viewership numbers continue to grow, along with data showing that only a third of the “Snyder Cut” viewers actually managed to make it to the end of its abysmal 4-hour length, we get to watch Snyder’s tenure at WB fucking implode.
And in true Snyder fashion, it appears to be imploding in slow-motion…
