In Defense of Zack Snyder

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Ben Affleck, left, and Zack Snyder on the set of 'Batman v Superman.' Photo: Warner Bros./Everett

Zack Snyder is misunderstood.

Reviews for his new movie, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” have been mostly unkind, with several singling out the film’s bleak tone. “Blunt, humorless, and baffling, it collides the brutish directorial stamp of its director … with the most shameless instincts of our latter-day superhero franchise bubble,” Jonathan L. Fischer wrote for Slate.

But Snyder didn’t just make a would-be blockbuster with “Batman v Superman,” or his previous film, 2013’s “Man of Steel.” Or even his adaptations of Frank Miller’s Spartans-vs.-Persians war comic “300,” which was a hit, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s cerebral superhero deconstruction “Watchmen,” which did tepid business. Instead, he has made movies that showcase his unique sensibilities – big doses of Freudian, mythic and religious imagery, for instance — even when he’s tasked with laying the foundation for a superhero-movie franchise. These are art films with Michael Bay budgets.

Take, for instance, the dream sequences in “Batman v Superman.” The WSJ’s Joe Morgenstern called them “howlingly pretentious,” but the scenes enable Snyder to explore themes and characters in visually adventurous ways. From the opening moments, the director prepares the audience for what will be the most bizarre, intricately personal vision for a major superhero movie since Ang Lee’s 2003 film “Hulk,” which divided critics and audiences with its deconstruction of the big, green Marvel superhero.

“Batman v Superman” begins with a routine origin story. Young Bruce Wayne witnesses his parents’ murders. But the scene gradually loses its realism as the boy runs from his parents’ funeral and falls into a pit before he is lifted by a swirling swarm of bats into the light. His silhouette forms a crude bat shape, signifying his evolution into a symbol. Terror, a key aspect to the Batman character, becomes transcendent before giving way to a nightmarish reality of super-beings using a crowded city as their personal boxing ring.

Snyder stuffs “Batman v Superman” with as many resonant and weird touches as he does explosions, superhero punches, plot fragments and hints about future DC Comics movies from Warner Bros. At one point, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) reflects on his ancestors: “They were hunters,” he says in the rotting hulk that used to be his family’s home, before he stalks toward a forbidding wilderness. At another, Wayne dreams of a bat-demon bursting forth from his mother’s bleeding crypt, the ravenous manifestation of guilt and fear. Without giving anything away, it all eventually leads to a psychological breakthrough – and spiritual conversion — for Batman, with dream logic trumping straightforward narrative logic.

Snyder’s defiant approach to Superman, perhaps the most sacred of all pop cultural sacred cows, has the hero experiencing moments of doubt and pain, even resentment, as humanity argues over whether he’s a force of righteousness or a force of destruction. “No one stays good in this world,” Superman (Henry Cavill) says at one important juncture in “Batman v Superman.”

Snyder lets his images do much of the talking. In one “Batman v Superman” scene, Superman, illuminated by the glow of a raging fire, is surrounded by reverent Day of the Dead celebrants. Several faces are painted like skulls, echoing a memorable image from “Man of Steel” in which he is swallowed by a sea of skulls – literally consumed by humanity. In another, Superman lies wounded among crumbled pillars and facades, like Samson amid the ruins of the temple he destroyed.

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From 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice' Photo: YouTube

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From 'Man of Steel' Photo: YouTube

Snyder’s take doesn’t sit well with fans and critics accustomed to the big blue Boy Scout version of Superman who’s reigned supreme for the bulk of eight decades. “It isn’t that Zack Snyder misunderstands Superman, it’s that he actually hates the character,” critic Devin Faraci wrote in his review of the new film. Film Freak Central’s Walter Chaw wrote: “BvS is brutal to nostalgia.”

Snyder does put Superman through the ringer (and then some) and gives him all-too-human flaws, but the filmmaker still views the character as a god capable of doing great amounts of good. Heroes are supposed to strive and suffer, and it makes sense that the greatest hero of all should suffer the greatest. When Snyder talked to the Journal about Superman’s evolution in his movies, he stressed that he wanted to leave audiences an impression of a Man of Steel who embraces his humanity and takes on the weight of the world.

He summed it all up with this paraphrase from Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” which he intoned with the rhythm of a prayer:

“Where I thought to find an abomination, I found a god. Where I thought to slay another, I slayed myself. Where I thought to travel outward, I traveled to the center of my own existence. And where I thought to be alone, I shall be with all the world.”

Years down the line, when cultural historians and critics look back and study the age of superhero blockbusters, they’ll see how Christopher Nolan resurrected Batman and how producer Kevin Feige masterminded the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they also might find that Zack Snyder left the most unique mark of all.