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I don’t know why I keep coming back for more with Zack Snyder. He is quite a divisive filmmaker in that lots of people love his films, and they are certainly commercially successful, but they don’t get well reviewed. It’s hard not to be a film snob when analysing this incongruity but I think it comes down to how demanding you are as a viewer. If you have any expectations around story development, characterisation and dialogue then his movies are really left wanting but if not then you can be happy with the pretty pictures. His work has also become synonymous with a certain type of masculinity and fandom as indicated by the line in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie when one of dolls is broken out of the trance of patriarchy and describes the brainwashed state as like being in a dream where she was really invested in the Snyder cut of Justice League.

Yet still I keep watching his films. I think ultimately it is that I do want to find some value in this small quarter of popular cinema. The fact that his last few films have been on Netflix, so only demand a low level of investment, helps too. (I mean time and financial investment here but they don’t demand any emotional investment either; there are major deaths in this movie but it is impossible to care.) Nope, it’s no good; this film is just as terrible as all of his other ones. The story is utterly predictable, the dialogue leaden, the narrative clumsy and the performances cliched.

There is one area in which this movie shows improvement but only in a way that makes it less bad that what has come before rather than it being in any way good. Up until now, quite aside of all the other ways in which his films are lacking, Zack Snyder’s films have often objected women to the point of lecherousness. You can link this to his supposedly predominately, and perhaps a little toxic, male fan base if you choose but certainly while he favours formidable female heroes, he has a habit of presenting them in a way that totally undermines any possible feminist intentions. The female centred action adventure Sucker Punch is probably the worst offender as is best illustrated by these character posters:

He didn’t treat Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman too badly when he inherited her from director Patty Jenkins but the same is not true of the other Amazonian warriors in Justice League, many of who were kitted out in battle bikinis. Similarly he didn’t dress the protagonist Kora provocatively in the first part of this trilogy (sadly on watching this second one, it does appear to now be at least a trilogy), but again did not show subsidiary players the same respect. In this film though, no one is dressed in an inappropriately sexy manner. Hooray! Well done for not being sexist.

In a recent interview Snyder actually addressed the distain that many people have for his films by saying he didn’t know why people cared so much because they were just movies. That might be fair but what bothers me is all the money that Hollywood is giving him that is not then going to other better film makers. For this reason I’m also a bit cross at myself for give him the boost to the streaming figures. In the end my feelings about Zack Snyder mirrors that of being stuck in a bad relationship; in that while I try not to let it every little thing he does annoys me. Yet I still give him another chance because I remember him being nicer to me back when he made Watchmen.

I think the reason that 2009 film and 2006’s 300 worked better is because Snyder had a very close blueprint to follow with the graphic novels they were adapted from, something he sadly neglected to do with any of his Batman or Superman films. Here he is essentially adapting The Seven Samurai which might be have been fine if that hadn’t already been done better multiple times before. The end of the last movie brought the warriors to the beleaguered town and this one is mostly just the following fight, yet it is still, somehow quite uninspiring. Also, there is not a single character anywhere in this story that shows any intelligence whatsoever. At best this means people acting on impulse and at worst it means they are showing total ignorance.

Still, perhaps having chosen to watch this I can’t claim to have behaved any differently. Maybe this time I’m done with the man.