I’ve tried to keep my mouth silent on my love of Zack Snyder films out of fear it might taint whatever small reputation I might have here, even though my focus is on genre films and Snyder specializes in genre films, but I cannot remain silent any longer.
At some point in time, Zack Snyder became known as the “Director Cut” guy. This is despite the fact that up until recently with the release of Rebel Moon (2023/2024), Snyder had more “untampered” releases than he did Director’s Cuts. I think the reason for the designation was that whenever he released a film that was poorly received (an understatement), there was almost always a better version of the film locked away until the physical release or hidden away until fan demand and a global pandemic forced a newish streaming service to dig through the vaults. His adaptation of Watchmen (2009) was met with criticism that he didn’t understand the source material and that it felt too rushed, after the release of the Director’s Cut, his film has since been praised as being ahead of its time. Suckerpunch (2011) was accused of being misogynist with bizarre cuts and logical leaps in the story due to the necessity of delivering a PG-13 cut to the studio (a trend). It was only after the offending material was added in the extended cut that the film made more coherent sense. Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) had 30 minutes cut from its theatrical release to fit more theatrical screenings in a day (as the rumor goes). Along with further complaints that Snyder didn’t understand the characters of Superman or Batman, there were complaints that Lex Luther’s plan didn’t make sense, there wasn’t enough Superman, and overall the film felt jumbled. Those who braved the “Ultimate Cut” of the film discovered how much more coherent the story became with those extra 30 minutes added in. Due to studio interference and a personal tragedy, Snyder was forced to step away from the filming of Justice League (2017). His directing duties were taken over by “Nerd King” Joss Whedon who reshot a significant portion of the film and recut it to a nearly unrecognizable Frankenstein monster of a film. The story of the “Snydercut” as it came to be called has been written about extensively elsewhere, but the film we eventually got was about two hours longer than Joss Whedon’s version and fell more in line with the more epic and mythological themes Snyder had set up in Man of Steel (2013) and Batman V. Superman. It has become a symbol that epitomizes everything that his fans love about his work, while at the same time becoming cannon fodder for those who hate the man with an unnecessary, burning passion. After that way-too-length introduction, we come to Rebel Moon (Part 1 and 2), another set of films that I believe epitomizes Snyder’s work and highlights what makes him unique and better than people give him credit for.
A little backstory: Rebel Moon started off as a Star Wars pitch Snyder made to Lucasfilm back before Disney bought them out. The focus of the story was a small village on the outskirts of the empire and the inevitable attack they are about to face at the hands of an Admiral of the Empire. The easiest way to describe it is Seven Samurai in Space. There are laser guns and laser swords, a bar with a rough crowd, homogenized planets, Nazis in space, and a whole bunch of other comparisons that seem to be totally ripped off from Star Wars, but at the same time wholly separate. It’s lazy to view Rebel Moon as a Star Wars ripoff when the DNA of Seven Samurai is so much more potent. Rebel Moon harkens back to the pulpy sci-fi fantasy stuff that George Lucas was inspired by in the same way that Quentin Tarantino is inspired by the exploitation films he saw in the 70s.
It is hard to look at what happened with the Director’s Cuts of Rebel Moon and not feel like Netflix was attempting to manufacture its own Snydercut moment. The PG-13 cuts released at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 felt like neutered versions of the story. Both were at least an hour shorter than the Director’s Cuts. This highlights one of the areas where I think Snyder excels and audiences feel disconnected from his work. Snyder likes long films. I will not say the longer his films are the better they are, but more often than not, the more his films are given room to breathe and build the world they exist in, the more fulfilling they often are. Part of what makes Zack Snyder’s Justice League so enjoyable is the fact that it spends the first two hours or so building up the characters and introducing the central conflict. Rebel Moon is no different. The Director’s Cut of Rebel Moon Part 1 succeeds where the PG13 cut fails because we have more time to establish characters as they are added to the small group of rebels at the core of the film. Longer films are often received positively if they are more “artistic.” Scorsese can make long films (even if people still complain about it), Villeneuve can sometimes make long films, Christopher Nolan can make long films, along with numerous others, but not Snyder. Because Snyder often makes films that look like big, CGI-fest, blockbusters, it seems audiences are confused and angry when the film lasts longer than 90-120 minutes because that is what we are used to seeing. I would like to call this the efficiency fallacy - the belief that all films would be better if cut down to 90 minutes. The problem with this belief which is becoming increasingly prevalent, is that it does allow for differences in storytelling or genre to play out. We do not expect all books to be 200 pages.
In the midst of the complaints about Snyder’s runtimes, one criticism is often brought up: too much slow-motion. It has become another categorization of Snyder’s work. He is the slow-motion guy. Snyder developed the technique he uses while making the film 300 (2006), which is called “speed ramping,” where the speed of the film moving through the camera is sped up and slowed down while shooting. The effect creates dramatic moments of slow motion in the middle of longer shots of regular 24 frames per second. This allows him time to emphasize particular moments of action while not interrupting the shot with a cut. He originally used this method of shooting on 300 because it allowed him to recreate shots from the original comic book while maintaining the necessary motion of the film medium. He would go on to use the same technique in Watchman and then again through the rest of his films. Even if he was not directly adapting a frame from a comic book with his speed ramping technique (yes, he still uses singular slow-motion shows), it gave his film the look of a comic book that most directors don’t utilize.
In the early days of cinema, directors, and writers were inspired by the stories they grew up with. Their stories were adaptations of the literary canon, famous historical events and figures, or biblical epics. As cinematic language was eventually developed, each new generation of filmmaker was inspired by the previous generation’s films instead of works of already established art like plays or literature. Over time, this inspiration from previous generations has devolved into a desire to replicate the films of the previous generation. Scream 5 (2022) doesn’t have the same cultural and emotional impact as Scream did when it came out in 1996. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015) checks all the boxes for a Star Wars film, even retreading much of the same plot as Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), but it feels too glossy and manufactured. While other blockbuster directors are trying to repeat what was already successful, Snyder is drawing from his inspirations: comic books and pulp magazines. In interviews before the release of Rebel Moon Snyder explained that the film was inspired by the magazine Heavy Metal a sort of pulpy, sci-fi, anthology magazine. It was a magazine filled with fantastical stories meant for adults. No wonder the PG13 cuts felt neutered. This comic book inspiration is most evident in the speed-ramped slow-motion shot style mentioned in the above paragraph. An eternity of time exists in the lines between comic book panels. Our minds fill in the gaps using the information from the next panel. Snyder has adapted this concept to film. In taking his inspiration from comic books, usually ones with more adult themes, his films don’t have the same copy-of-a-copy feeling as a lot of modern blockbusters have. So much so that it is difficult to classify his films as blockbusters. Especially when they have more in common with other genre films.
Even Snyder’s detractors will claim he has one good film, and it oscillates between his Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake or 300. It is still unclear to me why these are the two films cited as being his best when they carry many of the same hallmarks of his later work. The point I want to make about these two films in his oeuvre is that they are both more like genre films than they are blockbusters. Should we assume any film with capes and masks is meant to be a blockbuster (remember what I said about intention)? Dawn of the Dead is a zombie film for the 2000s era. It features fast-moving zombies, zombie babies, and paranoid survivors (how many other films does that describe?). 300 updates the sword and sandal epic for the modern era. Gerard Butler and his brethren march and fight in near nudity with muscles that look like they are ripe for a marble statue. The narration is long and eloquent, reminiscent of early storytelling and early cinematic epics. Those who complain about Snyder’s films will cite the writers as the reasons why these two films are so great (James Gunn or Frank Miller, writer of the 300 comic), but that seems like a convenient scapegoat when so much of Hollywood and our discussion around filmmaking revolve around the director. It is important to remember, that a majority of the time, the creative decisions all get approved by the director.
Snyder’s later works follow the trajectory of building on genre films and adding a sense of epic scale to them. Suckerpunch, perhaps the most derided of all Snyder’s films, features numerous battle scenes that borrow from Japanese and military cinema. The film nearly follows an anthology format with the fight scenes serving as individual “stories” within the overall narrative which is essentially a women in prison film. Watchmen is unique in that it critiqued superhero films in a time when superhero films barely existed. It was 10 years early. It utilized the tropes of the earlier films to make a statement (almost a warning in hindsight) of what was to come. All of it wrapped up in a nice, hyper-violent, dramatic package. Snyder shifted away from critique when he started his unfinished five-film arc for Superman. With Man of Steel, Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021), instead of focusing on genre, Snyder mythologized, deconstructed, and reconstructed our modern idea of superheroes. I could probably write an entire essay on this topic alone, but there are already several much better ones out there. Army of the Dead (2021) is simultaneously a heist film, a zombie film, and a sci-fi film all wrapped up into a length two-and-a-half-hour film. After a brief shift into mythologies, Snyder is returning to his genre film roots.
I supposed if I am going to title this piece after Rebel Moon I should should comment on the film itself. Rebel Moon, in many ways, feels like a culmination of everything Snyder has worked toward. The visual style is his translation of a comic book to screen with the constant emphasis on slow-motion shots and speed ramping, both during action and intimate moments, the story has an epic scale to it (surprising with the small budget the film had) spanning several planets within the world of the story, each with their own fully realized cultural mythologies, but also the pulpy, adult elements that influenced him so deeply. What does it mean when I describe the film as “pulp?” Pulpy is a reference to cheap, trashy novels that usually feature sensational ideas, over-the-top scenes, and characters, and are generally considered to be “low art.” Those familiar with Giallo films will know that the small, yellow novels the films are based on are considered pulp. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction borrows from this idea in a story that is sensational and over the top. Most often, these pulp novels were sci-fi and horror-related. In Rebel Moon we see alien tentacle sex, robots sneaking through the wilderness waxing eloquently about the state of things, gladiators, slave masters, sex robots, imprisoned alien goddess engine thingies (I genuinely have no idea how to describe the giant woman who powers the evil space ship), space Nazis, wheat farming, and a whole manner of other over the top ideas.
These are all things people can nitpick about Snyder’s work. Seemingly nonsensical elements on their own obviously seem silly. The important question to ask is whether to not those elements work within their established world. At no point in Rebel Moon do we stop to say the elements do not work. The film establishes its over-the-top world thoroughly, and while many of those elements seem like ripoffs of Star Wars (Space Nazis and Space Bars to name a few), we have to acknowledge that Snyder, like George Lucas, was building on decades of cinematic, comic book, and written tropes and cliches. Lucas did not invent Sci-Fi any more than he invented the rogue with a heart of gold, outpost “watering holes,” or gatherings of heroes. These are all elements of storytelling that have existed as long as people could tell stories. They just change over time. Snyder would know since he is a huge fan of Joseph Campell, the English professor who studied the elements of storytelling and the monomyth.
I started writing this shortly after the Director’s Cuts of Rebel Moon were released, then I continued writing while I lost power for a few days, and hoped by the time I posted it I would have a better clue how to end it. I do not. Instead, I will end on this point. Zack Snyder loves filmmaking. In the same way Howard Roark is an architect for himself first and foremost, Snyder is a filmmaker for himself first and foremost. He makes the films he wants to see, which is often advice given to beginning writers and directors. I think because of that, many people are frustrated and confused by the films he makes, believing they should be one way when they are not. Like all filmmaking, it is necessary to engage with the work as it is so we might better understand it.