I have a weird relationship with Zack Snyder’s DC movies. I’ve been a defender of Man of Steel ever since it came out, and I always thought the criticism levied at it was unfair. Though if I’m being honest, I do have a history of being too forgiving of movies right after I see them…I could walk away from basically anything and tell you it was pretty good, no matter what the quality actually was. Part of that’s recency bias, part of it’s not wanting to admit that I wasted time and money on something bad, and part of it’s the fact that I generally want to see the good in things. And that was complimented by the fact that Man of Steel gave me several things I’ve always wanted from a Superman movie but never got before.
The original Christopher Reeve Superman is one of the absolute best super hero movies ever made, and unfortunately no Superman movie that came after it did anything all that different. That movie had four sequels that all felt like worse versions of the original, and rarely ever added anything new and exciting from Superman’s history. The closest thing is Superman 2 giving us Zod and some evil Kryptonians to fight, but that’s basically it.
So when Man of Steel showed up and gave us the first cinematic interpretation of Superman to ever break away from what had been established by Christopher Reeve and Richard Donner in 1978, it was like a breath of fresh air, finally we were getting something different. And I was so happy about that, I found myself being even more forgiving than usual. I was willing to take the movie on its own terms, and I still think that’s fine…there’s nothing wrong with making a darker Superman story if you’ve got something to say. But everything changed for me once this stopped being just a new Superman movie, and started setting the tone for a universe.
I am not one of those guys who’ll tell you that the only way to correctly adapt something is to exactly translate the source material. You can’t adapt something without changing it, and on some level that’s the whole point of making an adaptation. And I watch these movies expecting to get new stories, or at least new takes on old stories, because if I just wanted to see the source material again I’d just go read it. However that doesn’t mean that anything goes when it comes to an adaptation…there’s one thing you have to get right, because it’s the foundation that everything else you do is built on, and it’s one extremely basic concept: if you don’t understand the core of the character, then there’s no point in using that character.
Now I’m going to say something that’ll probably annoy you if you’re a Zack Snyder fan. Not because I have anything against Zack Snyder or against you…it comes from a literal lifetime of me reading, watching, and thinking about these characters. And it’s the fact that Zack Snyder does not understand what’s so great about DC super heroes. He says so himself. During a 2008 interview with Entertainment Weekly about his upcoming Watchmen adaptation, Snyder is quoted as saying “I had a buddy who tried getting me into ‘normal’ comic books, but I was like ‘No one is having sex or killing each other. This isn’t really doing it for me.’ I was a little broken, that way. So when Watchmen came along, I was ‘This is more my scene.” There is nothing at all wrong with liking Watchmen more than other works of superhero fiction, and a healthy love and appreciation for that source material is usually a good quality for a director to have when they’re going to be adapting that material into another medium. But if you understand that Watchmen and the Justice League are different enough from each other that you could have a strong affinity for one while not really caring for the other, it should go without saying that you can’t do justice to both by treating them the same way. To put it bluntly: making the Justice League feel more like the Watchmen ignores what so many people have always loved about the Justice League.
There have been plenty of stories across most forms of media that depict darker, more violent versions of DC characters who have no problem playing dirty and killing their enemies. What a lot of people miss is the fact that these stories are almost always meant to show us how bad things would be if these characters actually behaved that way. I can’t even count the number of times stories have hit us over the head with the fact that if Superman wasn’t the nicest guy who ever lived, he’d make the Earth into literal Hell because he’s so powerful that nobody could stop him. The darker and more violent version exists to show us why it’s so important for Superman to not be dark and violent. Snyder’s movies don’t recognize this at all, and interpret Superman through a pretty bleak world view that’s best exemplified by the most infamous scene in Man of Steel, the moment Superman kills Zod to save the lives of a family.
We’re supposed to believe that either he lets Zod kill that family, or he saves that family by killing Zod first. The movie asks us to accept that this was a no-win scenario, where something bad was going to happen no matter what, and the hero had to make a terrible choice that was the lesser of two evils. The problem is that the movie expects us to believe that SUPERMAN accepts this as a no-win scenario. This movie has a very cynical, nihilistic view of death and destruction being an unavoidable part of life…except it’s not unavoidable, because Superman is right there, and Superman doesn’t trade lives. He’s not the kind of person who’d kill Zod to save that family. He’s the kind of person who’d throw himself in front of that family and take the hit for them, without a moment’s hesitation.
Every one of us has at least one moment in our lives where we try to do the right thing and we get punished for it, and we’re left with the depressing feeling that it’s just the way the world works, that idealism is nice but eventually you have to wake up and face reality. Superman doesn’t have those moments. Because of his upbringing, he’s an incredibly idealistic and friendly person who’d do anything he can to help…and because of his powers, very little is actually impossible for him. Superman is a power fantasy, but it has nothing to do with how tough he is or how much damage he can do in a fight. The real power fantasy of Superman is that because he can do anything, he’s immune to everything that pushes us down, that limits us. The fact that someone like him, who can do literally anything he wants, chooses to spend his time using his power to help people and just be an all around nice guy without a drop of cynicism IS the fantasy of Superman, because he represents the polar opposite of those moments where we’re punished for trying to do good. He’s a rejection of the idea that reality and idealism have to be different.
Superman is the embodiment of unfettered idealism. The real reason he and Batman didn’t get along at first is because Superman is too happy and friendly to fit into Batman’s world view. The very existence of someone like Superman challenges everything that Batman thinks he knows about people. The life Bruce has lead tells him that someone like Superman shouldn’t be able to be real, someone that kind and altruistic must be running some sort of scam. Superman is the guy who’s too good to be true, who turns out to actually be true.
If you want to explore darker themes with the big DC characters, you’ve got Batman right there. Again, the entire basis of their relationship is the fact that Batman is darker and more jaded than Superman, and you can get a lot of milage out of having these two characters interact with each other and react to the same things totally differently. But again, you still have to understand the core of Batman’s character to make it all work…and this is where Snyder’s films stumble again. They give us a version of Batman who’s comfortable with killing, and who uses guns.
It feels really weird having to even say this, but Batman is completely, utterly, 100% anti-murder and anti-gun. And that’s not me forcing my own agenda, or projecting my own beliefs onto the character, that’s me reciting to you the most famous story in superhero fiction. Batman exists because his parents were murdered by gun violence. He became Batman to keep other people from suffering the same way he has. Batman hates guns as much as he values life. And to drive the point home, there are times when Batman does pick up a gun and point it at someone, only to be horrified by his own actions, when he didn’t even pull the trigger. During Infinite Crisis, it looked like Deathstroke killed Nightwing…Batman thought he saw his son murdered right in front of him and he freaked out, grabbed a gun, pointed it at Deathstroke, only to recoil in horror and disgust when he realized what he was doing. Hell the entire inciting incident for Batman Beyond is Bruce resorting to using a gun for self defense when he was too old to put up a fight, something that affected him so powerfully that he swore off ever being Batman again, because he almost did the worst thing he could imagine anyone doing to someone else. Batman doesn’t kill because his life was ruined by a murderer. It was burned into his ten year old mind that murder leaves behind loved ones who’s lives are ruined, and that guns are the weapon of the enemy. The idea that Batman should kill people misses the point of his origin story. The idea that Batman should use guns misses the point of him even being Batman. There’s a reason that when DC had to come up with hordes of nightmare versions of Batman, each representing a scenario where Bruce’s life spiraled out of control into darkness and horror, one of them was a Batman decked out like the Punisher. This is literally Bruce’s nightmare, this is everything he’s spent his life building, being turned into the very thing he was trying to stop. He’s not alright with murder as long as you shoot the right people, he’s against all of it.
I’m not going to go down the list of the entire Justice League and supporting cast, just know that the best characters on this team are the ones where forces other than Snyder were able to exert some level of control. Wonder Woman’s portrayal has been pretty great, and a big part of that is the influence Patty Jenkins has had on her appearances in his films. But if there’s one thing they could’ve done to make Justice League a better movie across the board, it’d be this: don’t show us the origin of the Justice League.
Picture this. The movie opens, and the Justice League has already been a team for a long time. They know each other, they’re used to working together. And our POV character is Cyborg, a brand new hero who’s showing up at Justice League headquarters for his first official day as a member of the team. He’s the least famous character on this cast, so making him the audience surrogate would allow us to get to know him pretty well, while also exploiting his status as the new guy to let him ask all the questions that we the audience would have about all the people, places, and things important to the movie. I understand the impulse to want to follow something new from the beginning, but the beginning isn’t the only viable starting point. We don’t need to see the formation of the team to accept them as a team, we don’t need to see their first meeting to understand why they’re friends.
…and that’s a big thing that you lose by starting all of this at square one. You lose the fact that they’re friends. These people have known each other for years, they like each other. I just read a comic where the Flash invites Green Lantern to spend Christmas with his family. There’s so much richness to these relationships that you lose the ability to incorporate by starting at the very beginning, at a time when none of those relationships exist.
The reason I like Wonder Woman so much is because they got the core of her character right. The reason I enjoy Shazam so much is because while they deal with some dark topics, they still keep an upbeat attitude and have fun. Because superheroes are fun. They’re bright, fun, inspirational characters that let us explore all aspects of ourselves, not just the grim parts. There’s more than enough room for grim dark stories…but not all the time. And not at the expense of the characters.
I’m making this before the release of the Snyder Cut, and I considered waiting until after I’d watched it, to see if it ended up being a better experience than the theatrical cut…but ultimately I realized that it wouldn’t really make much difference, because there’s nothing they can add that’ll change the core of who these versions of the characters are, which is the biggest problem. It doesn’t matter how much longer you make the movie, if the main foundational element is flawed, then a longer movie is just more of the thing that doesn’t work. And I would love to be wrong. Hell, I hope the Snyder Cut proves me wrong. But an accurate representation of who these characters are and what they mean was never what Zack Snyder intended to make.
Ok, I just had to get that out there. I’m gonna go back to talking about Green Lantern now.
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