It’s here! Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the four. hour. long. cut of 2017’s butchered Justice League, has arrived. After everything, how did it turn out? Pretty great, according to ScreenRex reviewer Kyle Pinion! I’m less high on it than Kyle is, but it is unquestionably better than the theatrical cut. Still, after years advocating — sometimes in profoundly cruel and toxic ways, sometimes in incredibly generous ones — for the “Snyder Cut,” where is that groups energy to go? Why, to #RestoretheSnyderverse, of course!
The impulse makes sense. The Snyder Cut was a huge improvement, sure. But more importantly, Snyder Cut diehards made a community together pushing for the release of the movie. What happens to that community now that the movie actually exists? Does it just die off? Of course not. The community transforms. It finds a new reason for being. Pushing to #RestoretheSnyderverse is an undersetandable motivation.
It also undermines exactly what made Zack Snyder’s Justice League special.
Snyder-Man
Zack Snyder is, love him or hate him, a singular talent. You can recognize a Snyder movie almost immediately. That’s not a compliment, just a statement of fact. Like Michael Bay before him, Snyder is an impeccable visual stylist with a too-much-is-not-enough aesthetic that people have a hard time recreating. It’s hard to even satirize Snyder’s work, because excess is the point. Anyone who tries to mimic him is going to look like a fool. Believe me: I’m one of the only people who saw 300: Rise of an Empire in theaters. It’s not pretty.
But in part because of that, he’s also one of the few directors who understands the physical body of the superhuman. We’ve had a lot of superhero movies now, and what separates Zack Snyder’s take on the genre is his dedication to the mythic wrongness of it all. The bodies move… oddly. They pose. They affect the world in a tangible, physical way while themselves seeming outside or above it. The only director who similarly understands how to do this is Tarsem Singh — every Snydercut fan should seek out Immortals and The Fall immediately. Most directors use the language of action films; Snyder almost seems to use the language of propaganda films.
But therein lies the problem. Very few people make movies that look like this, for better and for worse. Trying to push them to do so would be jamming square pegs into round holes. If we #RestoretheSnyderverse, we run the risk of recreating the worst aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The Marvel Cinematic Snyderverse
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the biggest pop culture franchise in human history. I say that as a statement of fact, not of quality. I saw and enjoyed almost every entry into the series in theaters. But I don’t love any of them. They’re fun movies, but they don’t really stick with me. A big part of this is because, well… Marvel movies are often made by committee. Many of them look the same. They feel the same. Sure, some of them are playing around with different genre tropes, but they don’t really feel particularly distinct.
This is because they went with a single shared universe. People in that universe look and act a certain way. While individual directors can push back against that to some degree, Marvel Studios want all of their movies to look and feel a certain way. This is how internationally renowned director Lucrecia Martel described them approaching her to direct Black Widow:
“They also told me, ‘Don’t worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.’ I was thinking, ‘Well I would love to meet Scarlett Johansson but also I would love to make the action sequences.’
Companies are interested in female filmmakers but they still think action scenes are for male directors. The first thing I asked them was maybe if they could change the special effects because there’s so many laser lights… I find them horrible.”
I would love to see Lucrecia Martel direct a big action movie. But I want to see what kind of story she wants to tell. I know what Kevin Feige’s Black Widow will look like, to some degree or another. Because a shared universe going off a singular vision is remarkably and profoundly limited.
Into the Snyderverse
On the other hand, look what happens when Marvel lets control slip. Legion is a deeply flawed show, but it’s also fascinating. There are bits of the first two seasons that will stick with me as long as I live. In many ways, it was telling a similar story to WandaVision — someone with too much power and too little control is having a mental health crisis that is tampered with by an outside force manipulating them. But WandaVision ended with a laser fight. Legion had a black-and-white horror movie segment interspersed with a slow-motion concerto meant to stop a single bullet from killing a single person. Legion is a mess, in the end, but it was a memorable mess.
Then we have Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. This is one of the best-looking, best-sounding American animated films in ages. It’s funny and thrilling. There are so many shots in that movie that are just… impeccable, each a little work of art on its own. It’s funny and weird, and it looks nothing like anything else in the MCU. Can you imagine an MCU movie coming up with that upside-down shot of Miles rising into the skyline? The style of Gwen Stacey’s introduction? Spider-Pig?
Compare that to, for example, the Netflix MCU shows. Or to Inhumans and Agents of SHIELD. These are shows that are bland, ugly, simple things, hampered by being stuck with a look and feel and tone pulled from films they’ll never be relevant to. Agents of SHIELD only became a semi-interesting show once it let go of its MCU ambitions and became its own thing. TV and film are different media. They have different strengths, different weaknesses. A one-size-fits-all approach to storytelling is doomed to fail.
Does Whatever a Snyder Can
Right now, I’d argue that DC is in a creatively healthier place than Marvel. If I want grim, dour Superman, I can watch Man of Steel. If I want a more hopeful, fatherly take on the character, I could watch the CW’s Superman & Lois. Harley can exist both as Birds of Prey‘s deranged acrobatic thief and as the foul-mouthed, hyper-violent lead of HBO’s excellent Harley Quinn cartoon. Arrowverse shows have the leeway for the bleak melodrama of Arrow and the madcap inventiveness of Legends of Tomorrow. I can have Ben Affleck’s unexpectedly excellent take on Batman and still be intrigued by Robert Pattinson’s The Batman without my head exploding.
In a healthy media environment, these things can coexist. When I go to the comic shop, I don’t want a wall of comics that look and feel the same. I want Travel Foreman to do Travel Foreman art, not to try and do a knock-off Darwyn Cooke impression. I love that Frank Quitely and Jim Lee draw radically different kinds of Superman. These are characters who have accumulated many different facets and styles and stories over the decades. It is artificially limiting to pretend like there is one ‘true’ interpretation or kind of story you can tell with them. If anything, decades of comics prove that sometimes the best stories are the ones that radically reinterpret a character.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has conditioned so many people to think that a giant, shared universe is a good thing. I disagree. What made Zack Snyder’s Justice League work as well as it did was that it was unquestionably a Zack Snyder film. Shouldn’t other creators have the same kind of freedom to explore and create? Isn’t that the point — that the MCU is stifling and samey?
In the wake of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, we’ve already lost two of the more promising DC films to come: Ava DuVernay and Tom King’s New Gods collaboration and James Wan’s undersea horror film The Trench. I don’t know that those are related to renewed calls for a single shared universe, one vision of each of these heroes led by one man. But I do think it’s worth cautioning fans: Recreating the MCU but sadder is not going to herald a new artistic renaissance of superhero films. It’s just going to become another factory floor for churning out acceptable entertainment.