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June 12, 2019 10:49 AM

Kneel Before Zack [The Ringer] “This is the story of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, the most bizarre sustained fan campaign in modern superhero-movie history, arbitrary and fearsomely dedicated, fascinating and bewildering, possibly hopeless and legitimately inspiring. It is led by people who wish Justice League were more than three and a half hours long, but also, in their defense, an entirely different movie. ”
posted by Fizz (52 comments total)

All I want is a cut of Justice League where Cavill has his facial hair from Mission Impossible. We can make this happen, since he in fact was bearded during the reshoots.

stupid sexy bearded superman
posted by dis_integration at 10:54 AM on June 12, 2019 [8 favorites]

What I want to know is who the hell has ever watched a Zack Snyder film and then said, “I need to see more stuff by this guy,”?

Seriously. How this guy has a career is completely incomprehensible to me.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 11:12 AM on June 12, 2019 [46 favorites]

Seriously. How this guy has a career is completely incomprehensible to me.

(psst! its called "the patriarchy," pass it on)
posted by entropicamericana at 11:16 AM on June 12, 2019 [14 favorites]

The remake of Dawn of the Dead was fun at the time, ya'll.

Snyder is garbage. Anyone who likes Snyder is garbage. The only good thing about this "movement" is making these people easier to identify so that they can be avoided.

Someday I'll be able to come into one of these threads and not instantly feel like I don't belong in the world. (I don't like the DC movies but that is irrelevant.)
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 11:44 AM on June 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

“I was actually happy with Justice League, at first,” says Chris Wong-Swenson, a 36-year-old YouTuber from Hawaii who first joined the platform in 2016 specifically to defend Batman v Superman...

...But Wong-Swenson and other loyalists—to Snyder, to the darker and more realistic portrayal of Superman first introduced in the late-’80s and early-’90s comics, to the DCEU in its far grittier original form—quickly realized they hadn’t gotten the movie they’d been promised

There is an interesting story that exists in the ellipsis between these two sentences. A story about how someone went from being not only being happy with the movie as released, but defending it, to the feeling that you didn't get want you were "promised". That would be a story I would like to read, but it isn't in here. I guess it's my version of "the Snyder Cut".

I see that Snyder has moved on to work on an adaptation of The Fountainhead. Of course. Of course.
posted by nubs at 11:51 AM on June 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

300 bored me to sleep. Watchmen crucified everything important about the source material. I haven't seen anything by Snyder since, and I really don't think I'm missing out.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:54 AM on June 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

Because Superman and Batman will always suuuuck.

Excuse you, the 90s animated Superman and Batman are awesome.
posted by praemunire at 12:02 PM on June 12, 2019 [32 favorites]

Ok, playing around of Devil's Advocate:

The Dawn of the Dead remake was fun. 300 was gorgeously shot. Watchmen had a terrific opening sequence.

That's as far as I can go. I can understand how Snyder got started, but I can't understand why people still give him money for major projects. Like Shyamalan, he's one of the major arguments against auteur theory: indulging the whims of the director produces cinematic monsters.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 12:03 PM on June 12, 2019 [13 favorites]

The Dawn of the Dead remake was fun. 300 was gorgeously shot. Watchmen had a terrific opening sequence.
Couldn't agree more, in addition; Sucker Punch was, visually enticing but so yucky (yay, fight the patriarchy and misogyny with even more of both, right?...).

And, his DC comics outings have all left me feeling just wrong, something was missing. Very visual, stylistic - but ultimately missing something "je ne sais quoi"
posted by jkaczor at 12:15 PM on June 12, 2019

Excuse you, the 90s animated Superman and Batman are awesome.

Bruce Timm

Paul Dini

Dwayne McDuffie (RIP)
posted by mikelieman at 12:16 PM on June 12, 2019 [13 favorites]

In the service of if-you-can't-say-something-nice-don't-say-anything, his movies make very pretty trailers. So, he's good at moving tickets?
posted by chromecow at 12:20 PM on June 12, 2019

It’s not surprising that there’s a clamor for an alternate version of Justice League given how poorly received the final product was. With it being a Frankenfilm started by one director and finished by another, it’s a hop, skip and a jump from “the production was deeply troubled and that’s reflected in the movie” to “everything bad about it is the fault of the guy who had final say.”
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:24 PM on June 12, 2019

(I should note, of course, the fatal flaw of this line of reasoning: Snyder was in charge of Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman from beginning to end, and both of those movies are also bad.)
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:25 PM on June 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

A story about how someone went from being not only being happy with the movie as released, but defending it, to the feeling that you didn't get want you were "promised".

The movie he defended was a different movie (BvS).
posted by snofoam at 12:27 PM on June 12, 2019

I was bored to tears by The Dark Knight Rises and given the reviews about all the grimdark, I haven't seen any of the DC movies since then (except Wonder Woman, which was great fun) so I have nothing useful to say on topic.

But I did want to say: Well played on the post title!
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:39 PM on June 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

It is led by people who wish Justice League were more than three and a half hours long

I'm pretty sure the version I saw in the theater was at least five hours long, maybe six.

(Edit: Oh, no wait I'm thinking of Batman v. Superman. I definitely didn't see Justice League in a theater.)
posted by straight at 12:44 PM on June 12, 2019

The thing that bothers me most about Snyder is his inability to establish a sense of place. Every setting is just a backdrop for where that scene's action happens, and sometimes he doesn't even bother with that (as in most of Justice League, with vague green and red hallways and plains). Even in 300, where the story is 90% confined to a single small geographic location by narrative necessity, I struggle to remember what the place even looked like.

For this reason I nominate him to write/direct the film version of House of Leaves.
posted by FakeFreyja at 12:47 PM on June 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

There's an alternate universe where Zack Snyder is a very in demand production person, maybe cinematography.

However we do not live in the optimal timeline
posted by The Whelk at 12:49 PM on June 12, 2019 [14 favorites]

I want them to release George Miller’s Justice League.
posted by octothorpe at 12:51 PM on June 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

I'm glad to read this because I thought this hashtag was just some right-wing dogwhistle, which it appears it is ... not, unless griefers feel like it is, so ... that clears that up.

This article is full of cursed passages. ("That’s fine. No, no, no, that’s fine. I have many friends around me who don’t care for [Batman v Superman]. We’re still friends. They respect my opinion. I respect their opinion. We’ll hang out. It’s cool. It’s fine.”) The guy who noticed the "significance" of "214," if he's in his 20s, worries me some. Young people who suddenly find themselves seeing patterns in numbers and gestures by public figures ... it doesn't lead anywhere good.

Yesterday I made a schmoopy comment about how much I loved the possibilities of fandom. But this, too, is a possibility of fandom: unhealthy personal enmeshment. Go have some coffee with cream or something.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:52 PM on June 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

Zach Snyder mostly sucks. He can make a great action scene. That's it. The prison fight in Watchmen is great. The Batman V Superman fight scene where Batman bursts up through the floor to rescue Martha Kent is the best Batman fight scene ever filmed. The rest of the movie sucks, but those two minutes are fantastic.

Justice League has nothing close to those two minutes. The problem with Justice League is not resolved by a "Snyder Cut". The problem is it tried to cut corners and get to the big crossover payoff without doing nearly enough setup. It was doomed from the start.
posted by The Man from Lardfork at 12:56 PM on June 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Excuse you, the 90s animated Superman and Batman are awesome.

I'm also a fan of the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons, which are amazing.
posted by touchstone033 at 12:59 PM on June 12, 2019 [14 favorites]

Part of the fun (alright, almost all of the fun) of Justice League was playing who-directed-this-scene during the film. That the end result was not completely dire, just mostly so, is a minor miracle.

Anyway, it is completely possible to recreate the Synder Cut at home with only the released movie, a pair of neutral grey semi-transparent glasses, a bluray player capable of playing scenes at 0.75x speed, and a copy of Now Thats What I Call Shitty Rock Covers volume 12 to loudly play over the action.

On a related note, I firmly believe that when aliens inevitably put humanity on trial, Sucker Punch will be a key prosecution exhibit.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:01 PM on June 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

I see that Snyder has moved on to work on an adaptation of The Fountainhead. Of course. Of course.

The 1949 movie adaptation starring Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper is actually highly entertaining, in its own batshit sort of way. Director King Vidor made something approaching art out of the worthless dreck of its source material in much the same way Mary Harron would do 50 years later with American Psycho.
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:03 PM on June 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

Synder does have his talents, with the right writer and a firm guiding hand his style could really produce engaging work. Lets see what he is up to next:

Snyder himself, who declined an interview request through a publicist, has long since moved on to other projects, including the Netflix zombie movie Army of the Dead and an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Well, that is not encouraging news.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:08 PM on June 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Gary Cooper would have been amazing in the role of Bruce Wayne.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:10 PM on June 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

The remake of Dawn of the Dead was fun at the time, ya'll.

Yep. It was noted for its brisk, no-padding/no bullshit pacing, genuine regard for and interest in its characters, and a pleasing combination of deep regard for genre and a cheeky spirit of invention.

Now compare that to every other Zack Snyder movie. Okay. Now compare it to the other movies written by James Gunn, the screenwriter of Dawn of the Dead.

Is it really a riddle why DotD was so much better than all of the movies Snyder made? Or is it just a terrific example of how the cult of the auteur overestimates the importance of directors compared to writers?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:34 PM on June 12, 2019 [38 favorites]

So the fans do know that it would take tens of millions of dollars of post production work to produce a "Snyder edit" or do they think a movie is done once it's done filming?
posted by octothorpe at 1:50 PM on June 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

After reading the actual article, I see that they made the same point I just did.
posted by octothorpe at 1:56 PM on June 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'll say it, I thought Watchmen was great. I rewatch it regularly. I wasn't reading comics when the book came out, but I've read it since and I still like the film. If that makes me garbage, so be it.
posted by Huck500 at 2:10 PM on June 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

I am so glad these people have found a cause to work towards that does not involve politics.
posted by benzenedream at 2:18 PM on June 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

This rundown by The Whelk is always my goto for a good rundown of why Watchmen is just a total dud in terms of its filmmaking, its character treatment, its tone, its thematic obliviousness, and its general soullessness. It's so apparent that the guy has no vision beyond "this will look cool for thirty seconds," and that's not enough to make even a stupid-but-fun movie, which itself would suck in the case of adapting the Watchmen but is an otherwise unobjectionable artistic goal.
posted by invitapriore at 2:31 PM on June 12, 2019 [10 favorites]

The prison fight in Watchmen is great.

the fight scenes in watchmen are well directed, but their presence is part of the reason why that movie completely sucks the soul out of the comic's story. night owl is supposed to be washed up and out of shape, and more importantly is totally unsure of himself as a hero. in the movie he grabs a dude by the arm and breaks it backwards at the elbow.
posted by JimBennett at 2:41 PM on June 12, 2019 [5 favorites]

The last Snyder movie I saw was Sucker Punch which I saw for free with zero expectations beyond seeing some extremely dumb action. What I got was the cinematic equivalent of accidentally seeing your dad's browser history.

He's bad, folks
posted by Reyturner at 4:19 PM on June 12, 2019 [9 favorites]

From the article, a quote from the guy who runs the release_the_snyder_cut instagram account:

"The level of depth and complexity that he puts into his films always draws me in, and always gets me to feel emotion, all kinds of emotion. Zack’s movies get me thinking in new ways and perspectives—they inspire me to do better."

I mean... okay, I guess? Different strokes for different folks and all that. But still, I can't help but wonder what other films this guy watches.
posted by mhum at 4:44 PM on June 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

I kinda liked Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:55 PM on June 12, 2019

If anyone here saw Teen Titans Go! To The Movies then you know that DC is not completely irredeemable.

But between that and Wonder Woman, that's about it.
posted by vverse23 at 5:10 PM on June 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

I can't even really defend Dawn of the Dead. It's a slap in the face to the original, an excellent film that is extremely left wing in its politics and critique of consumer culture. Snyder's film is a broham shoot 'em up that ends with a gratuitous male-gaze lesbian makeout shot. I knew when I saw it that the director was a republican, and nothing he's done since then has surprised me. He isn't a totally incompetent filmmaker, but he tends to attach himself to projects he either doesn't understand or thinks he's improving, I am not certain which.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:58 PM on June 12, 2019 [6 favorites]

I like Zack Snyder visually, but as others have pointed out, he's not a great storyteller, and he struggles with regressive depictions of women and a misguided take on feminism. That said, it's particularly baffling that there's such a sustained outcry for a Snyder cut of Justice League. That would require Snyder himself to return to the project, and considering that his daughter died in the middle of the production, I can't imagine a grieving father would want to revisit that period of his life. I would say I'm surprised by the insensitivity, but considering where the outcry is coming from, I'm more surprised at their ability to string three words together.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 7:10 PM on June 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

After reading the article I don't see any real evidence that any sort of "Snyder Cut" is anywhere close to existence - the whole thing seems disturbingly close to conspiratorial thinking, where this tiny handful of fans wants a different version of the movie so badly that they're interpreting offhand Tweets and snippets of interviews in ways that reinforce their belief that an entirely new version of the movie is just a few months of work and a couple of million dollars away and that Snyder would be interested in doing that. (Even if it takes 10 years to make those few months of work happen.) But as far as I can tell from the article, the only version that could reasonably made without a ridiculous amount of work and money would have, like, 5 minutes of static storyboard drawings with voiceovers interspersed periodically throughout, maybe a few shots of actors doing stuff in front of a green screen. There's no market for that.

(Also, the only real reason you would cast Affleck as Batman (besides the chin) would be because you want him to be Effortlessly Charming Billionaire Bruce Wayne - Affleck can do charming - and if you don't bother to put any of that in your movies, then . . . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
posted by soundguy99 at 8:59 PM on June 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't even remember if I've seen this movie. A lot of grey, right?

(I do like the Batfleck suit design though. Batfleckmobile is pretty meh.)
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:07 PM on June 12, 2019

I see that Snyder has moved on to work on an adaptation of The Fountainhead.

I for one look forward to seeing a Howard Roark neck-snap.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 3:34 AM on June 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

I like Snyder's stuff 90%, and absolutely LOVE his Watchmen. I've been told a million times that "he doesn't understand the source material," to which I always say "maybe he did, and just wanted to make the movie better than the comic?"

That being said, he was the wrong person to form the DCEU around. I like long, dark, and grim movies just fine, but for an interconnected film universe that contains the Flash and Wonder Woman? It's impossible and inadvisable to sustain that tone over so many films before it becomes utterly wearying.

Here's hoping that Wonder Woman 1984 and James Gunn's Suicide Squad and Aquaman II: The Wetter, the Better and Robert Pattinson's Twilight of the Batman all succeed wildly and form some kind of new, brighter core to the DCEU, and that the grimdark genesis of Superman kind of fades into their collective past.
posted by Chronorin at 4:37 AM on June 13, 2019

I like Snyder's stuff 90%, and absolutely LOVE his Watchmen. I've been told a million times that "he doesn't understand the source material," to which I always say "maybe he did, and just wanted to make the movie better than the comic?"

But see, that's the secret, Captain -- if he thinks that's better than the comic, that means he didn't understand the comic.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:39 AM on June 13, 2019 [14 favorites]

I'd be interested in seeing a pair of charts comparing "Fervor Over the Snyder Cut" with "Amount Paid for a Superhero Statue" - I suspect they'd correlate pretty closely.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:31 AM on June 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

But between that and Wonder Woman, that's about it.

I went into SHAZAM! with a huge chip on my shoulder about how much I've disliked what the comics have done with the character for the past decade (and ruined one of the great classic superhero costume designs). But it won me over with humor and heart and pretty good writing (and some great dunking on the rest of the Justice League in the credits). It's got some good surprises and a few very solid jokes you might want to catch before they get spoiled.

If they ever make another Justice League movie, they should totally include Billy Batson as the league's Ant-Man (and give the Flash a break from trying so hard to be funny).
posted by straight at 8:16 AM on June 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

night owl is supposed to be washed up and out of shape, and more importantly is totally unsure of himself as a hero. in the movie he grabs a dude by the arm and breaks it backwards at the elbow.

I liked this detail, personally. I felt like it implied that superheroic feats don't necessarily come from physical conditioning as much as they do from some sort of transcendent psychological state, or even from detaching oneself from the bounds of conventional morality. It certainly seems to work that way for Rorschach – the mask helps him subsume his humanity in favor of a terrifying archetype, and soon he doesn't even need it. Nite Owl likewise only seems to come alive in his suit, but he still struggles to maintain his mortal life.

I don't know if this was an entirely intentional pseudo-Nietzsche thing, or if the action scenes weren't simply augmented to look cooler – probably a combination of the two – but it did make me think, and I can't say that for most of Snyder's oeuvre.
posted by lumensimus at 10:04 AM on June 13, 2019

Conspiracies are born from trying to reconcile two conflicting ideas, in this case (1) Zak Snyder is a genius and (2) the existence of Justice League.
posted by benzenedream at 10:43 AM on June 13, 2019 [3 favorites]

Even in 300, where the story is 90% confined to a single small geographic location by narrative necessity, I struggle to remember what the place even looked like.

In all fairness, Frank Miller has the exact same problem.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:51 PM on June 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

watchmen (the comic) is about latent fascism and personality disorders

watchmen (the movie) is about "look at this, bro, isnt this shit badass"

so yeah, missed the point
posted by entropicamericana at 1:54 PM on June 13, 2019 [6 favorites]

Might not be fair to be too hard on Snyder for missing the point of the Watchmen comic when pretty much the entire comics industry spent 20 years missing the point in exactly the same way. (O HAI Wolverine!)
posted by straight at 12:51 AM on June 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've been told a million times that "he doesn't understand the source material," to which I always say "maybe he did, and just wanted to make the movie better than the comic?"

Welcome to Metafilter, Zack!
posted by invitapriore at 9:58 PM on June 14, 2019 [5 favorites]