I don’t hate Zack Snyder but I have hated a lot of his films. I have laid into Snyder so often it’s beginning to feel like a personal vendetta but it really isn’t; he’s just one of those directors who can’t help but divide opinion. To many critics he has inexplicably failed upwards, casting his moody spell over ever-greater swathes of popular culture. To others he is a genius whose vision must not be denied. At least that’s the impression his fans gave off during their occasionally toxic #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign.
The fans, and Synder, got their way: his as-originally-intended, four-hour version of Justice League – the DC superhero team-up movie, which he departed in 2017 after a series of disagreements with Warner Bros – was released on HBO Max in March. It was the end of a complicated saga: in 2017 Snyder suffered a personal tragedy (his 20-year-old daughter killed herself), while around the same time, Warners lost faith in his dark, glum vision for the DC universe, as showcased in his earlier Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, and – after he quit – replaced him with Joss Whedon. I had already lost faith in Snyder long ago, over his self-penned Sucker Punch, which felt like a perv’s fantasy dressed up as “female empowerment”, and his rendition of Watchmen, which was, er, dark and glum.
This has always been my primary complaint about Snyder. He is a consummate stylist with visual flair to spare; his alternate-history opening montage to Watchmen is a masterpiece in its own right. But he seems to have no sense of humour. His fantasy-art imagery is perfectly suited to comic-book material but he wants us to take it all deadly seriously. He is only really funny when he’s not trying to be – as with the beefcake excess of historical epic 300. Sure, he shoehorned a few lame jokes into Justice League, but Snyder has acknowledged the movie was suffused with his own personal grief, and it showed.
Freed of the responsibility of propping up the DC franchise (and failing), Snyder seems to actually be having fun with his latest work, though. Army of the Dead is a heist movie set in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested Las Vegas, replete with undead, strippers, show tigers and Elvis impersonators. This is not exactly a new mature phase for Snyder, more a new immature phase, which is what he needed. It is a return to the spirit of his debut Dawn of the Dead, revelling in the excess and absurdity of its premise but also smuggling in the social commentary. The fact that its setting uncannily mirrors our current pandemic, with quarantining and temperature checks and mass death, is apparently coincidence, and not, admittedly, particularly cheery, but it looks as if Snyder has found his happy place at last.
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