Are Zack Snyder’s badly reviewed movies actually ahead of their time? Your answer to this question will depend on whether or not you adhere to Snyder’s hyper-polarizing brand of cinema.
His highly-stylized direction is instantly recognizable: brooding frames, ultra slow-mo, dark interiors and exteriors, and a penchant for the camera zooming in and out of action. You don’t have to like him to admit that Snyder is an auteur. He clearly has style, themes and vision that he keeps going back to time and again
I’ve been reading The Atlantic’s Snyder profile, “The Director People Love to Hate,” and here comes Christopher Nolan defending, again, Snyder’s influence on cinema.
In fact, Nolan, who’s interviewed in the Snyder/Atlantic writeup, says Snyder’s influence is so dominant that his stylistic flourishes can be felt in any “superhero science-fiction film coming out these days.”
There’s no superhero science-fiction film coming out these days where I don’t see some influence of Zack. When you watch a Zack Snyder film, you see and feel his love for the potential of cinema. The potential of it to be fantastical, to be heightened in its reality, but to move you and to excite you.
This isn’t the only time Nolan has been praiseful of Snyder. It seems as though, with any chance he gets, Nolan wants to tip his hat to Snyder. In November, he praised Snyder’s “Watchmen” as being “ahead of its time.”
Let us also not forget that a little more than 10 years ago, Nolan was quoted as praising Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” as some kind of prophetic statement:
I believe that what Zack has done in Man of Steel will define Superman for our time. [...] I've rarely seen such focused visual power. And I've rarely seen the promise of such imagery actually delivered onto the screen. But that's what Zack does.
Unlike Nolan, whose Batman trilogy was praised by critics, Snyder is used to not betting a fair shake from critics. “Snyder is an overkill director,” Wesley Morris wrote in his review of Man of Steel.
Reed Tucker, the author of “Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle Between Marvel and DC,” tells The Atlantic that Snyder “does bloated masculinist spectacle: Baz Luhrmann with ankle weights.”
A Snyder fan has become a sort of political statement, almost. It’s like you’re a Trump fan or something.
Whatever praise Nolan bestows on Snyder, it seems genuine. As genuine as National Review critic, and Snyder superfan, Armond White who has described Snyder as the greatest living mainstream filmmaker and even picked “Man of Steel” as the best film of the 2010s.