• Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies had heart.
  • Christopher Nolan’s Batman films had brains.
  • And Zack Snyder’s DC trilogy had a stinky asshole rubbing on your face.
  • Aggressively.
  • Imagine: you are on the floor, supine.
  • Zack Snyder, henceforth known as Z-Dog, is standing above you.
  • Your head is between his feet.
  • And now he squats so low, so deep and low–
  • Excuse me.
  • –and you quiver in ecstasy to receive the Salve of D’murm.
  • Dude.
  • What?
  • Stop making up occult bullshit and talk about the movies.
  • The Snydology–The One Where A Million Fucking People Die, Handsome Man Punches Armor-Face, and The One With Wonder Woman And Aquaman–is almost, but not quite, perfectly dreadful; it is also disappointing and confusing at several identifiable levels, precipitating near-constant cries of “Why is he doing that?”
  • Sometimes one asks about creative choices.
  • Sometimes one asks about character choices.
  • Never is a satisfying answer provided.
  • For example, there is the look.
  • (Film is a visual medium.)
  • In 1983, a gypsy cursed a hooker in Newark, New Jersey, but the gypsy was drunk and ended up embuing the hooker’s L’egg’s pantyhose with immortality.
  • The hooker wears those ‘hose to this day, and still hooks.
  • Those pantyhose are the colors of 2.5 films out of the Snydology (we’ll get to it): gray and brown and explosions.
  • There is a small bit of green in the first one, and the third one has a dash of red in it, but mostly it’s gray and brown then boom.
  • Blade Runner without the neon.
  • Every movie Z-Dog has ever directed looks like it takes place two years after a nuke went off.
  • Not immediately after, but shit is still fucked up.
  • Appropriate for a zombie picture, but this is the superhero game, baby; did it translate?
  • It did not!
  • Hey, I’m sorry for that question-and-answer thing back there; weird and out-of-place; I regret its inclusion.
  • Another choice the casual viewer might question is making Superman such a fucking mope.
  • More powerful than a locomotive pulling a car full of girl’s blouses and sad diary entries, ya pissy widdle fuck.
  • Z-Dog’s Superman listens to The Smiths.
  • And still, in 2019, defends Morrisey.
  • This is because–and here is the core defect of these films–Z-Dog does not understand Superman on any level including visually.
  • He shouldn’t loom.
  • That’s Batman’s thing.
  • Truth, Justice, and the American Way; golly and shucks and ma’am; posture to emulate in front of the mirror: that’s Superman, and he’s not grim and gritty.
  • Superman is not Gritty, either.
  • (18 months ago, that sentence wouldn’t have made sense to you. Welcome to the future.)
  • Z-Dog’s Superman spends a great deal of time:
    • Gnashing his teeth at people.
    • Regarding humans with contempt.
    • Threatening to melt someone’s face off with his heat vision.
    • Hanging with his two dead dads.
    • Superman usually only has one dead dad, but this is a Z-Dog production, man.
    • These dead dads go to eleven.
  • And killing randos.
  • Far before the grand and terrible ending where he snaps Zod’s throat, Superman ended the lives of oodles of bystanders in Manly Steel.
  • He kept throwing Kryptonian warriors into occupied buildings.
  • I don’t know what that’s called legally–murder or manslaughter or whatever–but it’s definitely Superman’s fault those people are dead.
  • This is before Zod levels up and goes Super-Saiyan all over Kal-El and Metropolis.
  • Before the ending fight scene between Handsome Man and Michael Shannon with George Clooney’s haircut from 1995 even ramps up, hundreds of innocents are dead or seriously injured.
  • Smallville’s infrastructure is in ruins.
  • This is a farm town, you’ll note.
  • At any moment, Superman might have dragged the fracas to one of the fields surrounding the small outpost of civilization in the vast Kansas plain.
  • Instead, he chose to scrap in the IHOP.
  • The Man of Steel does not fight in a House of Pancakes.
  • Daredevil could have a great fight scene in an IHOP, but not Superman because Superman fights are so fast and energetic that there is a radius of lethality to them.
  • Like a shuttle launch.
  • The true magnitude of Superman’s abilities and might had always been well displayed in the comics, but never on screen; the technology didn’t exist.
  • The first two Christopher Reeve films aren’t beloved for their blistering action sequences, which–in the DeLaurentis family’s defense–were the best they could do in 1979.
  • In 2013, the best they could do was photorealisitically recreate what a Kryptonian fight would look like in a major city: it is genocide.
  • Perhaps you remember the jokes, or articles declaiming the violence, or perhaps you saw the film when it came out and it has slipped from your mind, so allow me to attest: the ending of Man of Steel is fucked up and Z-Dog should go to jail for it.
  • Allow us, for not the last time, to compare the Snydology to a Marvel movie: The Avengers.
  • The climax of each story has our hero/s battling a semi-inifinitely powerful enemy in the middle of a city.
  • An honest reading of Avengers must reveal many dead New Yorkers.
  • Those giant armored sperm-dragons were knocking buildings over.
  • Monster-faces were shooting at pedestrians.
  • People fucking died.
  • Yet the film only presents “innocents” in terms of the heros; there are two shots of normal people during the entire sequence: in one, Captain America saves a group of them, and the Hulk comes to the rescue in the other.
  • Civilians are not in danger so much as moderate distress (on screen).
  • Z-Dog goes a different way.
  • Full 9/11.
  • Shots straight-up cribbed from documentaries I forced myself to stop watching several years ago.
  • Still recognize the angles, though.
  • Running along with the crowd, only to look back and see the dust cloud approaching.
  • Skyscrapers crumbling.
  • Confused survivors dusty like ghosts.
  • Trust me on this one: the man consciously aped the semiotic language of September 11th.
  • For a movie about Superduperman, who punches crime, and has a cape.
  • You should go to jail for that.
  • Honestly, what happens is beyond 9/11.
  • It’s 9/11 squared.
  • It’s 81/121.
  • Swathes of business and residential areas are razed as these two numbskulls kick each other in the super-nuts.
  • Multiple buildings of 50, 60, and 70 stories are toppled.
  • Chris Meloni is also in this movie, and that’s always welcome news.
  • He is General Military, and Toby from West Wing is Dr. Scientist.
  • Amy McAdams plays plucky reporter Girlfriend Girl.
  • In the spirit of comic book movie leading women since the inception of the genre, she requires rescuing.
  • She falls off shit a lot.
  • The leading ladies in both the Raimi and Nolan trilogies fell off of shit a lot, too.
  • More correctly, the bad guys threw them from heights.
  • (The Green Goblin chucked Kirsten Dunst off the Queensboro Bridge; the Joker dropped Maggie Gyllenhall off the balcony of Wayne Tower: it’s a recyclable trope.)
  • Amy McAdams has a face.
  • I’ll leave it at that.
  • If you asked her about it–
  • “Hey, is that your face?”
  • –I feel as though she’d answer,
  • “Yes, it is.”
  • And offer no further response, nor a countering query, just sit there quietly being Amy McAdams and having that face.
  • There’s also a My Two Dads thing going on with Waterworld and Gladiator, instead of Greg Evigan and Paul Reiser.
  • I would’ve killed for Evigan, man.
  • It’s time to bring that guy back.
  • The Eviganaissance.
  • We did not get BJ.
  • We get RC, all 900 pounds of him.
  • He’s in one of those dopey “I’m an alien” tactical suits, and there’s thousands of dollars in illegal whalebone holding Russel in there.
  • Nothing but real whalebone for the Gladiator.
  • At one point, Z-Dog forced Russel to karate with some stunt men; one can only imagine the limpid flailing that went on because the final product contains a cut every fifth-of-a-second with no regard as to your eye placement or the background light source.
  • In the cinematic language of today’s blockbusters, this means “excitement!”
  • But it is not exciting.
  • Gladiator is fat.
  • Waterworld, on the other hand, is old as shit.
  • His mother brewed the family fresh sarsaparilla, and they lived in a Hooverville.
  • And he’s like,
  • “No, Clark, no. Don’t ever use your powers. Be a giant pussy.”
  • And Gladiator’s all,
  • “Fuck that shit. Put on the cape and be awesome.”
  • Then they both die, but Gladiator dies twice because he comes back from the first death as a hologram and then Michael Shannon unplugs him.
  • Too bad, so sad, dead dad.
  • You know the ending, with the snapped neck and all the yelling and sadness: it is unearned, and was not set up in the story, and Zod’s death is necessary in the extreme.
  • What are you gonna do, throw him in the hoosegow?
  • There’s no way to toss him back into the Phantom Zone, so he’s simply gotta go.
  • Can’t have a pissed-off Kryptonian wandering around the planet.
  • Not good for business.
  • Jesus, this is 1500 words and I haven’t gotten past the first turd.
  • To be continued!