In the years since Justice League was released in theaters in 2017, there has been a grassroots online movement to get director Zack Snyder’s original cut of the film released. As many fans already know, The Avengers director Joss Whedon was brought in late in the production cycle to complete the film after Zack Snyder stepped away following a personal tragedy. At the time, Snyder had broad creative influence over the DC Extended Universe films. In addition to directing Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, he also produced Wonder Woman, and had a hand in casting the actors to play all of the heroes from those movies. After the mixed critical and audience reaction to Batman v Superman, there was some behind-the-scenes musical chairs at Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment, and Snyder ended up without a seat.
Some passionate fans of Snyder’s work feel that the director was unfairly denied the chance to complete his vision for Justice League, which ultimately ran way over budget with reshoots and was an expensive disappointment for the studio. #ReleasetheSnyderCut has been a battle cry that has recently picked up renewed steam in part due to support from Ben Affleck (formerly Batman) Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) and Jason Momoa (Aquaman).
— Ben Affleck (@BenAffleck) November 17, 2019
Here’s why I’m not excited about seeing a Zack Snyder cut of Justice League. After seeing most of his feature films, I feel like I’ve given this director enough chances and I’m kind of over him. I find his storytelling instincts vapid and feel that his work overemphasizes visual style over narrative substance. His aesthetic calls to mind the kind of movie a 13-year-old boy might make with a $200 million budget, or perhaps a feature-length Limp Bizkit record. Most concerning of all, Snyder’s movies have a really problematic record of sexual violence that shouldn’t be ignored. I don’t begrudge his fans for wanting to see what might have been if Snyder had been allowed to finish Justice League on his own terms, but I can think of far better ways for Warner Bros. to invest the money it would likely take to finish and distribute that version of the film.
"“This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy it” — Theron to Queen Gorgo in 300 as he forces sex on her"
Let me be clear: I’m not an unabashed hater of Zack Snyder or DC superhero films. 300’s striking visual style hooked me when I first saw it, and I saw Watchmen and Man of Steel in the theater on their opening weekends. I have been a DC Comics kid for life and couldn’t wait to see my favorite characters realized on the big screen. How many men do you know who saw Wonder Woman three times in the theater? I even took a day off of work to see Batman v Superman on opening day, a decision I regretted after leaving the theater.
There are several reasons why I find Snyder’s creative sensibilities questionable, but I want to start with the one that I find the most disturbing. While I’ve found it mentioned sporadically online, I haven’t heard nearly enough conversation about Snyder’s depictions of sexual violence, including rape and attempted rape, in his body of work. One might argue that this concern is irrelevant to a discussion about a mainstream superhero film like Justice League, which likely won’t be allowed to feature any material like that. Talking to Entertainment Weekly in 2008, here’s what he said about Christopher Nolan’s Batman films:
"Everyone says that about [Christopher Nolan’s] Batman Begins. “Batman’s dark.” I’m like, okay, “No, Batman’s cool.” He gets to go to a Tibetan monastery and be trained by ninjas. Okay? I want to do that. But he doesn’t, like, get raped in prison. That could happen in my movie. If you want to talk about dark, that’s how that would go."
Snyder told us that given his way, his Batman origin story would have seen Bruce Wayne get raped in prison. We have no reason not to take him at his word, given his track record of filming sexual assaults in 300, Watchmen and Sucker Punch, and writing a child rape into 300: Rise of an Empire, which he did not direct.
As of this writing, Snyder is in post-production on a zombie film called Army of the Dead, a Netflix sequel to his 2004 reimagining of Dawn of the Dead. Reportedly, the original version of the movie included male zombies raping and impregnating human females until Netflix intervened and dialed it back. Snyder has also announced his plans to direct a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a novel that happens to include a rape scene. And there’s Sucker Punch, which Snyder wrote and directed himself. That film includes no fewer than three attempted rapes, and keeps its young female protagonist in pigtails and skimpy clothes throughout the story.
Snyder is far from the only creative person in Hollywood to overuse rape as a plot device. But it is telling that he casually throws out the idea of Bruce Wayne getting raped in prison without providing any story justification for it. I shudder to think what might have happened had the director not been shackled with having to deliver a PG-13 rating for his DC films. What would that plotline actually add to the story? How would it contribute to the development of the character? What essential truth would it teach us about who Bruce Wayne is that we didn’t know by seeing his parents get murdered right in front of him at a young age? Snyder’s cavalier answer seems to be “it’s dark!” which he somehow sees as a virtue unto itself.
"“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.” – Zack Snyder at a Watchmen screening and Q&A in 2019"
That propensity toward darkness for darkness’ sake seems to drive many of Snyder’s choices. The director appears to have a fixation with shocking his audience regardless of whether it makes sense for the story. The decision to have Superman kill General Zod in Man of Steel has been debated extensively online, and I’m not going to relitigate it here. However, I can’t help imagining him in a meeting with WB executives pitching how “badass” it would be to see Superman snap someone’s neck. Snyder argued at the time that Superman needed to kill once in order to realize that he never wanted to kill again, but since when is murder a prerequisite for not wanting to kill people?
In a similar vein, I think killing off Superman so early in the DCEU’s life — he died at the end of Batman v Superman — was a misguided decision that only hurt Justice League. At that point, he had only actually been acting as Superman for less than two years. When Tony Stark died in Avengers: Endgame, it meant something because we’d grown to love that character over many films. Imagine if the MCU had instead killed Stark way back in Iron Man 2 only to revive him in the first Avengers film. It wouldn’t have had nearly the impact that his death in Endgame did.
The death of Superman was a huge moment in the comics, and it should have been a huge moment on the big screen. It wasn’t. It led to an awkward marketing campaign for Justice League that couldn’t include the world’s most recognizable superhero for fear of giving away his resurrection. This was another instance where Snyder made the edgiest or most extreme choice rather than the right one.
Unlike Superman and Justice League, Watchmen already had plenty of edgy material built in for Snyder to work with when he adapted it for the big screen in 2009. His film recreates the graphic novel faithfully…sometimes too faithfully. As a fan, it’s thrilling in places to see the panels of the book come to life. That said, film is a different medium, and Snyder did the material no favors by having characters read long monologues and narration that were never meant to be read aloud. HBO’s recent Watchmen TV show has demonstrated a few ways that Alan Moore’s original work could be given new life by delving into topics that he didn’t explore, like race relations or the consequences of the US annexation of Vietnam. While Snyder adapted Watchmen nearly panel for panel in some spots, the TV series actually seems to do a better job of capturing its bold spirit.
Zack Snyder is not the devil. Millions of fans have enjoyed his films, and he has brought several geek fantasies from the printed page to the multiplex. However, his lurid fascination with sexual exploitation and his tendency toward shock value over meaningful character development are the main reasons I won’t be lining up to watch a Snyder cut of Justice League anytime soon.
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