Zack Snyder composes a single frame as well as anyone working at his scale: enormous men in half-light, slowed until they look carved. Give him a story someone else has thought through and the frames add up. Left to himself, they sit there, handsome and inert.
Fi1m perspective
A man, usually a large one, is in the middle of hurting someone, and the film slows down so that we can look at him. The blood hangs in the air. Then everything speeds up again. Zack Snyder has done this since 300 (2006), often enough that people call it Snyder-mo, and it tells you what he cares about, which is the frame. He trained at an art and design college before he made films, and it shows: his shots are compositions first, many taken straight from the comic panel, and nearly all of them would make a poster.
The career divides cleanly. He began with the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), broke through with 300 and then made Watchmen (2009), which worked because Alan Moore had done the thinking first. Then the Superman years: Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017), reissued as his own cut in 2021. Since leaving the studios he has made original stories, Army of the Dead (2021) and the Rebel Moon films (2023 and 2024), with no source material to lean on.
Batman v Superman is where we would send anyone who wants to understand the problem. Its first ten minutes are the best thing we have seen him do. Bruce Wayne drives into Metropolis while the battle from Man of Steel is still overhead, runs towards the dust, and the Wayne tower comes down in front of him; Larry Fong shoots it from the pavement and David Brenner cuts it with no slow-motion at all. It caught us off guard, because for once a Snyder city was falling on people rather than posing for us, and we wanted the film to pursue the grievance. It does not. The rest of its 152 minutes run four stories and several dreams at once and end in a computer-made brawl in the dark. Most critics were harder on it than we were; we thought Ben Affleck's bruised Batman and ten good minutes of Gal Gadot deserved better from the reception as well as the script.
Fong, who has shot several of his films, gives Snyder the half-light and the carved-looking bodies he likes; Brenner has cut several of the DC films and those after; Deborah Snyder has produced everything since 300. The team is consistent, and so are the complaints: that the pictures come at the cost of a story anyone can follow, and that the darkness and the operatic pitch tip into muddle, as they did in Sucker Punch (2011). Snyder said in 2023, "I'm interested in masculine tropes. But as tropes." We believe him. On screen the first sentence is plain to see and the second is hard to find.
He now has what he seems to have wanted: his own stories and no studio to answer to. We have not reviewed the Rebel Moon films and will not judge them here. They are the first time he has had to do the thinking himself from a blank page, and whatever else happens, the frames will be handsome.
Biography
Zack Snyder is an American film director, screenwriter, producer and cinematographer. Born Zachary Edward Snyder on 1 March 1966 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he began his career directing commercials and music videos before making his feature debut with the 2004 horror film Dawn of the Dead.
He is known for directing 300 (2007), Watchmen (2009), Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017), as well as the 2021 director's cut Zack Snyder's Justice League. Snyder also directed, wrote and served as cinematographer on Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023). His wife Deborah Snyder has produced several of his films.
