fevered.earth

Tag: Zack Snyder

  • Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire

    The retro styling on the title card is very nice — I almost want the rest of the film to be this nostalgic.

    “Zack Snyder is making his own Star Wars.” It’s a bold premise. For better or worse, the film immediately begins to take shape in your mind — and from a filmmaker whose divisive reputation precedes him, there’s a strong temptation to assume what kind of film this will be before seeing a single frame of it. Zack Snyder’s Netflix production Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire wasn’t made on a shoestring budget, and by definition it can’t capture the blissfully ignorant innovation of making an off-brand Star Wars — a Starcrash or a The Man Who Saves The World with the ambition to do it all from scratch, in a period where the image of Baby Yoda wasn’t plastered on every lunch box. But there’s still some of that cheeky thrill in hearing “Zack Snyder’s doing an R-rated Star Wars,” as if you might have heard it on the playground at school and immediately started calculating how you would trick your parents into renting it for you.

    There’s already so very much Star Wars nowadays — mostly vented from the great Disney+ orifice, but it’s still only been four years since The Rise of Skywalker arrived on the big screen. People once had to wait sixteen long years for a new cinematic Star Wars experience. Unimaginable now in a world with Ahsoka and Andor and The Acolyte and so on. So the challenge for this new two-part space opera is to shake itself free of diminutive comparisons and distinguish itself as an original science fiction movie and setting.

    The first question is: which Zack Snyder is at the wheel? The contemplative, existentialist director of Man of Steel? The director wedged into the mythic/pulp aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Or the artisanal lens enthusiast of Army of the Dead? Naturally there’s a bit of each (especially that last one, with some truly beautiful lenses put together for this one ), but more than any other self-reference Rebel Moon sees Snyder return to the blushing, hyper-stylized action of 300, albeit with the benefit of hindsight and many years more experience.

    The soft focus is paired with rich, deep shadows for a unique, ghostly look.

    Much like the under-appreciated Jupiter Ascending, which had the Wachowskis exhibiting a similar competency, Rebel Moon treats its classic pulp sci-fi locales as a given, trusting the viewer to immediately clock the idyllic space-farm, the hive of scum and villainy, the Blade Runner city, the old West and so on. These varied settings are bound by a rich saturation and contrast in the colors that forms a coherent visual throughline; a comforting intensity that’s established in the lurid opening shots on protagonist Kora’s home moon of Veldt. As well, the infamous slo-mo — which has often been restrained or absent in Snyder’s work post-Watchmen — is back here in force, ratcheting the tension up in a way that will make you sad this initial release isn’t actually R-rated and can’t yet feature the heavily implied explosions of blood.

    The visual coherence helps the viewer keep up to speed, as the film moves at a breakneck pace through the second half of the story. The plot of Rebel Moon is explicitly that of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai — or more directly John Sturges’ adaptation of that story, The Magnificent Seven. The traditional peasant village comes under threat from an evil empire and sends out representatives to recruit itinerant heroes, any they can find, to defend it. The opening act is given the most time and attention, laying out the lives of the villagers in such a way that their plight is apparent and human, as well as showing the evil empire engaged in some classic evil empire behavior: more Caesar than Palpatine, the fight is over grain tribute rather than lofty ideals (at least at first).

    The dreadnought in low orbit evokes similar imagery from last year’s The Creator.

    Similar to Magnificent Seven, the gathered recruits only get the space of a single vignette to distinguish themselves in. Even these, though, have evidently been cut to the bone to hit that two-hour runtime. It’s still intelligible — all we need to see is the indentured blacksmith strutting confidently towards the beast-too-wild-to-be-tamed to understand what’s going on, for example. Unlike this year’s other novel sci-fi epic, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, there’s never a sense that the film has engaged the plot compression unit to such an extent that things have become dreamlike and abstract. The worst thing you’ll suffer is disappointment that we don’t get to spend more time with the various rogues who end up getting recruited.

    The final act is the least complete, given the difficult task of not resolving the plot before part two arrives in a few months’ time. It’s a hard sell, as hard here as it was for Across the Spider-verse or Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning earlier in the year. A movie should have an ending. There’s an action showdown as you might expect, all flashing lights and dramatic violent flourishes. But without the catharsis of final victory or the establishment in that tight runtime of something like a Death Star to blow up, it feels like what it is: a midpoint. But even if this finale is more “wait and see” than it is overwhelming, the stinger right at the very end promises a sequel which might upend all sorts of expectations for how this story plays out.

    It casts the hexagonal grid motif the Marvel movies have settled on in a certain light.

    Being a knock-off is permission to break all the rules, and Rebel Moon knows this full well. Is there a C3P0? Yes, and he gets shot. Is there a cantina? Yes, and it’s flirting with being a brothel. Is there a Han Solo? Well, no spoilers. And will it be trashy as all hell? In a clear statement of intent, the film opens with a girthy, tumescent space cruiser crossing the threshold of a great yonic portal.

    Despite the headlines, Star Wars (and Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven) aren’t the only inspirations Rebel Moon is playing off. Excalibur is another obvious one, with the king dead or dying and his errant knights sickly and dispersed across the land. The Perceval here is Anthony Hopkins’ entrancing ‘Jimmy’, the C3P0-like pacifist robot who immediately breaks from that mold by shooting someone dead and fleeing into the forest to discover himself, only reappearing at the close now decorated with deer antlers. Comic relief, Jimmy is not.

    The taming-the-beast sequence owes much to Avatar, though I somehow doubt featuring in a Zack Snyder film will quiet the “no cultural impact” crowd. Of course, George Lucas never shied away from having a character mount a great computer-generated beast — there’s one in all three prequel films. The Bennu, a griffin-like winged beast, is a fine addition to this canon.

    Star Wars is when there’s a weird little guy in it.

    The most notable element of classic Star Wars that is missing is, sadly, the space politics. A much-mocked Lucas fixation, the scenes of machinations in the galactic senate or boardroom tables full of Imperial officers griping are lacking here. The tone is more in line with Dune, with us meeting or hearing about individual power brokers within an Imperial hierarchy but without even the token bureaucracy represented by Dune’s Mentats. And (delightfully for this PG-13 cut) we get to see just a little Baron Harkonnen moral decay on the part of the Imperial forces, and a touch of eXistenZ-aping body horror in the process.

    There’s more than a little of The Witcher creeping in around the edges too, especially in Kora’s flashback retellings of the story of the young princess. The backstory of Snyder’s universe here is more fantastical, more Lord of the Rings than Lucas’s tragedy of the republic — it’s good Kings and bad Regents, and prophesied children who will bring peace to the realm. And with a gothic God-King, a great empire across the stars that’s just maybe a little bit fascist, and a concerning undercurrent of implied necromancy , it’s hard to escape the touch of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 setting.

    A caped figure looms over a youngling.

    It’s unclear if Rebel Moon will be the Zack Snyder film to win over his detractors. Having made himself deeply unpopular in some circles with his mythopoetic take on DC’s superheroes, applying the same techniques to another sacred cow risks solidifying his reputation as an iconoclast — or worse, a contrarian. Netflix, who you can assume would very much like to have ‘Netflix’s Star Wars’, have engaged in an all-out marketing blitz, plastering the film across their media outlets and building small interactive moons in various cities. The film itself risks being swallowed up in all this external drama, but it’s enjoyable and distinctive enough to stand by itself. There are few big-budget films with a comparable ambition of style and motion and a director visually talented enough to realize that ambition. Rebel Moon is worth seeing on that justification alone.

    Is it Star Wars? Perhaps predictably, what makes Rebel Moon most interesting is all the ways in which it’s not Star Wars. Able to vary in characters, mood, setting and tone, Rebel Moon is fresher than any attempt to do this sort of thing since Jupiter Ascending. That film was compromised by running out of the hard cash required to see the full vision on screen. The fate of this film has been gambled on what has so far been a losing proposition, the two-part film epic. Like young Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine, we can only hope the old master has rigged the dice, and Rebel Moon realizes all this potential when part two lands next year.

    If you enjoyed this article I have conveniently already reviewed Rebel Moon Part 2. I’ll probably end up reviewing the extended cuts when they arrive in the summer also; subscribe to get them by email when I do. If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. Then back to Suicide Squad. Then The Fanatic again. If you’re after more text, subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

    This article was originally written for Blood Knife which is currently on hiatus.

  • Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver

    Mild spoilers for Rebel Moon and The Tortured Poets Department.

    That’s Jimmy.

    In Dave Moore’s multipart essay on Taylor Swift, ‘How You Get the World’, he speculates that the media conditions of the late 2000s produced a generation of ultimate media: acts and brands and series that came from the era of universal appeal but which persisted into the era of Spotify and Netflix, where we are all so micro-served in our wants and desires that the sun has set on fame or success at that level. There may be more acts as talented as the Beatles, but their success will be diffuse, celebrity arriving in dribs and drabs instead of a supernova explosion of fame. Taylor Swift, as you might expect, is Moore’s primary example of this in modern music. For cinema, Moore cites the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

    For over ten years the MCU was inescapable in pop cinema, an Imperial march through the box office the successes of which were only accentuated by the tragicomic failure of every attempt to replicate it. Warner Bros sank their own battleship trying to ‘fix’ Justice League to the Marvel formula; the less said about Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’ the better. Even Disney — who bought Marvel wholesale — couldn’t keep Star Wars going for more than a handful of films.

    Getting the pictures of grain in early so I can fit them all.

    Now it seems likely that we are in the twilight of the MCU, with tepid entries like the sequel to 2019’s billion-selling Captain Marvel failing to make back its budget and upcoming fare like Deadpool 3 leaning on the ageing, uncertain legacy of the Fox X-men films for appeal. The Achilles’ heel of the MCU was always the unbroken chain of continuity; the fear of missing an essential entry and slipping from the zeitgeist. In this Disney have prepared the MCU a shallow grave, the integration of streaming service TV shows into the core narrative turning an occasional pleasant visit to the cinema into something you need to devote hours of downtime to keeping up with. Even a smart director like Sam Raimi can’t make an attachment to the six hours of 2021’s WandaVision completely optional.

    Taylor Swift by contrast has retained her throne, for now, as a new round of reviewers tangle with the fear that her popularity might be driving their positive coverage rather than vice-versa. The roles of critic, taste-maker and customer advocate are never as intertwined as they seem and fresh off her enormous stadium tour and movie Swift seems likely to shrug off any negative reviews for her new album The Tortured Poets Department, released April 19th (Paste’s review was posted anonymously for fear of fan reprisals). A double album is one of the traditional marks of an act falling to hubris, and Swift’s detractors might be hoping that 31 songs with lyrics like “What if I can’t have us/I might just not get up” will be enough to bring her down to earth again. Personally I wouldn’t take that bet. This kind of uncomfortably proximate emoting is Swift’s trade, her authenticity, and what might appear cringeworthy to outsiders is the beating heart of her appeal to fans.

    The Rebel Moon title cards are an absolute joy.

    A world away from all this but on the same day, Zack Snyder finalises his own double album with the release of Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver. The journey of this one seems to have taxed whoever is in charge of managing releases at Netflix to a point beyond all comprehension; it’s hard to imagine a more unhinged market strategy than “two films, each with two cuts, but not at the same time, and they’re each about five months apart”. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and five months is not long enough to forget that the first part suffered deeply from being cleft in two like this. Arriving too soon to demand a rewatch of the first part, and effortlessly defeated in epic stakes by the recent blockbuster success of Villeneuve’s Dune, this latter half has not been set up for success. As with Ms Swift though, Snyder has a habit of beating the odds and confounding the critics — who may never forgive him for the trump card he pulled on all the nay-sayers and industry insiders by seeing his Justice League through to completion.

    In my review of Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire I speculated that Snyder was returning to his roots in doling out crowd-pleasing action with simple moral messages, with the risk being that Star Wars was yet another revered cultural artifact he might be perceived as mistreating. Star Wars is serious business, even now, and there’s something typically audacious in Rebel Moon’s refusal to emulate it too closely. There’s no force, no monks, no robot peasants. In this second part there isn’t even any planet hopping save for flashbacks and recaps. Snyder is mythopoetic where Lucas is spiritual — what unites his band of adventurers is life, living and working, and much of the first half of Part 2 is given over to seeing the protagonists of Rebel Moon working the land in common with the villagers they have come to save, sharing food and drink and dance. It’s an earnest message that casts into relief the difficulty of such human connection even in Snyder’s own superhero efforts — Batman v Superman in particular hinging on the distance Superman’s existence puts him and the people he aids. The MCU often inelegantly sidestepped this by having the heroes defend property in the quickly achieved absence of people; cars and buildings and other totems, Thanos meeting his final defeat when he knocks over the campus building. The lack of humanity can become distracting — the Avengers famously share a shawarma, but they don’t share it with Happy Hogan. Rebel Moon is deeply concerned with human behaviours — love, work, sex, violence — in a way that is often absent in modern films.

    It was a shame to watch this one on the small screen — there apparently were screenings in London this time but I wasn’t aware of them.

    Being in essence a two-hour final act, there’s not much room for structural game-playing here. We get an hour or so of beautifully shot grain harvesting with the expected nods to Magnificent Seven where they should be, and the brief story of how Admiral Noble got his groove back — in a joke that’s just a bit too arch for this movie, we’re repeatedly told that the resurrection process (a visual reference to The Matrix) may have turned him into a deranged psychopath. Naturally, his behaviour doesn’t change at all. Following this we get the scene which most resembles the first movie, as the members of the troupe who didn’t get to show off their deal in that movie fill in the gaps here in a series of vignettes. This includes a delightfully theatrical recounting of Kora’s killing of the magic princess, beginning with the King deciding to call his biggest, ugliest ship the ‘Peacemaker’ and ends with the string quartet playing a gun-toting Kora out of the room. It’s playful and stagey without being ridiculous or self-indulgent.

    More so than Part 1, the new film does flaunt some significant references to Lucas’ work. The invasion of the village, with walker tanks being airdropped in alongside ground troops as dust flies past the camera is a loving reproduction of the final battle from Attack of the Clones, and the topsy-turvy swordfight between Kora and the resurrected Admiral Noble at the climax has a similar sense of outlandish fun as the Obi-wan/Anakin duel in Revenge of the Sith, along with the spectacle of a great flagship crashing through the atmosphere. Closing the film out on a funeral pyre also highlights the affection this film has for that series. The comparison does throw up some areas where Rebel Moon’s reach exceeds its grasp, with the personal enmity between Noble and Kora always seeming more like pathetic competition than ideological clash. It’s not just that Vader is Luke’s father, it’s also that he’s a symbol of paternal authoritarianism to Luke’s hippy freewheeling. Kora on the other hand, though we’re shown that she has instinctually picked up the communitarian values of the village, is herself a product of the same Empire that Noble serves.

    Notably, there’s no contrivance to give them different coloured blades — in the end, they’re fighting over just one.

    What the interpersonal conflict doesn’t show though, the incidental details are happy to express — the extended sequence of communal labour is contrasted with what we see of the inner workings of the enemy dreadnought, with a clear reference to the class strata of Titanic whereby workers in the engine room shovel coal into great raging furnaces. Above this is some kind of spectral angelic computer, evoking Evangelion among other things, bound in a position of sedate submission as Kora installs explosives across its broad forehead, eyes flickering to light with the interaction. In the flashback, the senators of this Empire are aged and grotesque, the old stereotype of the Prussian noble, as they endorse Balisarius’s antiquity-themed coup. Old men of the future, in command as ever. There’s something pathetic in Noble’s repeated assertion that capturing Kora will win him a place on the senate — for all his love of the society he represents he is extremely blinkered about how it loves him.

    Notable by their absence, not compared to Star Wars but compared to the mode of nearly all modern genre films, are the quips. None of the characters of Rebel Moon are a Chris Pratt type and thank the heavens for it. There’s a confidence in the world of the film and the actions of the characters within it that liberates them from having to do the ritual ironic disavowal that pervades modern films. The villagers do not proclaim “oh damn!” on seeing the second wave of troops marching towards them because the villagers are in fear for their lives. The setting is taken seriously, and not just as a sort of pastiche the people within it are performing — the most obvious example of which being the world of The Marvels, where the planet of the sad refugee people is but a hop from the planet of people who just have to sing and dance all the time and so on. Rebel Moon is refreshingly straightforward: the soliders are competent and well-disciplined, the officers obey orders even if they disagree with them, and sensible decisions are made about tactics throughout. It’s a small thing, but it means when we then see Noble personally go on a trench warfare murder spree it’s exceptional rather than ludicrous. George Lucas always insisted that Star Wars was for children, and the comedic incompetence of the Stormtroopers was a reflection of that. Rebel Moon, with its R-rated director’s cuts hanging like phantasms in the distance, does not have such a commitment.

    Special mention to Ed Skrein’s face, even more of a skull mask here than in the first one.

    With hindsight it may turn out that Snyder’s peak of creativity and collaboration was his trilogy for DC, and he won’t seek out such intimate, introspective work on the grand canvas again. It may be that among fans there is much handwringing and disappointment over his experiments with cinematography and writing and the other elements he has, until now, sought out talented partnerships for. It may even be that unlike stablemate Michael Bay, Snyder never sees a broader reappraisal among critics as an auteur (with the concept more out of fashion than ever). Rebel Moon Part 2 currently has 18% on popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Love and Thunder, a movie without a shred of the craftsmanship or soul that is present here, has 63% and is certified ‘Fresh’.

    Believing as many people have that critical consensus will build a universal (American) canon liberates a person from the tyranny of choice. There is no risk of feeling your taste to be inadequate when there is an objective numerical measure of its accuracy. But if the numbers are a fantasy, and the consensus was only ever a reflection of contingent aspects of production and not a guiding factor at all — if The Shawshank Redemption or Citizen Kane or Everything Everywhere All At Once is not in fact the greatest film of all time, certified as top of the list— then every person is in danger of being a philistine. This is a troubling thought. But more troubling is the idea that, captured by engines that only feed back to us what we already like, we end up with nothing but attempts to recreate the MCU. For as much as I don’t hate these films, we end up with The Marvels or Madame Web or Wonder Woman 1984 or Thor: Love and Thunder. Films made by committee, with artistic endeavour a secondary concern. As Snyder himself put it in a recent interview, we end up with the Happy Meal.

    The shot composition is showy all the way through, but they really have fun with Jimmy.

    Snyder’s work is unique and particular, and fervent in its earnestness. Despite all the homage and pastiche and the readily apparent melting pot of influences, Rebel Moon is an original sci-fi universe in an age of adaptations and sequels. Snyder, who once helmed the major competition to the MCU, knows the folly of trying to reproduce it. Even the clumsy sequel hook here is only that, a sequel hook. It’s not the work that destroys all the critics and haters — but then we had that one in 2021 and it didn’t last anyway. It’s just another decent movie by Zack Snyder. Perhaps for his next one he will take a leaf from erstwhile creative partner Christopher Nolan and leave genre behind entirely. Oppenheimer brought the intensity of a Batman film to historical biography. Perhaps Snyder could bring the rich visuals of Rebel Moon to philosophical fiction. Or perhaps he will keep producing these grandiose micro-epics for as long as Netflix will pay him. All things are possible.

    I would be sad to never see another film like Rebel Moon and I don’t know if another director is likely to make one. Everything’s filthy, the lens is constantly trained on the narrowest plane of interest and there’s a healthy, satisfying thunk to every noise and interaction. It’s not a new Star Wars — it may be that nothing can be a new Star Wars, nothing can be a new MCU, nothing can be a new Taylor Swift. But it’s an enjoyable movie by a director who is always pushing his own limits. The lousy division into two parts, the held-off pair of Director’s cut, the fancy lenses and lingering shots of grain and such may not be to everyone’s taste. Few things are. Cynics will sneer at the simple truisms like “connecting with people will help you break an addicition” or “mutual respect can bring people from different backgrounds together”. But Rebel Moon is authentic and honest in a way that will overcome all cynicism to those who care — an inimitable talent for reaching people that Zack Snyder shares with Swift — and that alone is more than enough to save it.

    Kora and the engineer share some kind of moment here. The scene I’m most looking to see extended.

    If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews. Thanks to Jimbot and Jamie Faith for feedback.

  • “The ‘Snyder Cut’ does not exist”

    There is a series of article-essays by Jean Baudrillard called, collectively, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place” where the continental philosopher discusses the way in which the mediation of the first Gulf War into images and live TV news constructed a simulated war. This fake war only took place in the perception of viewing audiences, who witnessed a full, proper and dramatic conflict through stories which were essentially fictional. In actuality, Baudrillard claims, the US military essentially walked to Baghdad unopposed, the Iraqi inability to engage in air combat having completely foreclosed on the potential for an actual war. What actually occurred was a pointless, brutal atrocity which would have caused popular discontent had it be represented accurately. The simulation was essential to preserving the image of a free, fair state doing good in the world.

    It is unclear whether or not the YouTube critic Dan Olson, in his video “The Snyder Cut does not exist”, was consciously referencing the aforementioned work by Baudrillard. He’s a sharp and well-read guy, so it may well have been intended as such. However, it is increasingly clear that the analogy is over-accurate: there is a fatal simulacrum in play, but it is not the image of the perfect movie in the eyes of the fans or some such triviality. Like most fans of modern pop culture, members of the Snyder Cut movement will likely expect all positive qualities from the released film and be, in some way, disappointed by the end result. But indeed, the advertising campaigns ran for these big modern blockbusters practically make it their goal to induce such projection, up to and including within the movies themselves — consider the much-derided ‘girl power’ sequence in Avengers Endgame: the realisation of the event could never have been satisfying, but it lent anticipation to the entire feature-length Captain Marvel movie before it.

    No, the interesting fiction in this scenario is that monolithic conception of movies, the movie industry, movie analysis and movie twitter in the perception of people who don’t want the Snyder Cut and are forced, in their own miniature recreation of the pressures on the architects of the Gulf War, to construct a simulation that explains their bizarre, continued level of effort opposing the production of a single film — and why their authority over the subject of movies comprehensively failed to predict its existence.

    Why would you not want a movie to exist, barring cases where the production of the movie would cause material harm? The option to not watch it is a near-universal right. To performatively disavow a movie is to try and say something about yourself, typically a claim to privileged knowledge or good taste. Michael Bay movies, you say, are beneath me. They might be objectively speaking popular, but I am initiated in the rules of being a Good Cinema Fan, whereby we do not like Michael Bay films (of course, as this becomes a popularly held position, the opposite starts to signify an even more refined taste; they’re ‘so bad they’re good.’)

    The works of Zack Snyder, broadly speaking, fall into this category. Properly initiated film buffs, particularly leftist film buffs, know that they are not to like Zack Snyder. There is no uniformity in this dislike — which is one of the tells that it is being actively constructed. They cannot agree which of the films are not bad, which of the films are very bad, and which of the films are actively evil in some way, but they nevertheless agree on the overall point: he is a bad director, whom you must doubly disavow: his films are not enjoyable, and even if they were, you ought not to enjoy them. The development of this conviction is performed in a manner akin to numerology; we are to ignore the basic content of the films and focus exclusively on fringe inferences. A film about zombies in suburban America becomes an anti-Muslim screed based on a half-second in a montage. A film where a man risks everything to save humanity becomes a Randian tract. A satire about baby-murdering Stormtroopers becomes a non-ironic statement of intent. If this paranoia about the minutiae of films seems incoherent, well, it can only be a reflection of the incoherence of this fool director himself.

    Under this fiction, the realisation of the failure of such a Director can only ever be postponed. Box office disappointments, rather than being a fact of life for big-budget filmmakers, are the inevitable reconciliation of the Director’s failings. Internal corporate movement becomes a morality play rather than petty workplace strife. Where the Director succeeds, it is by accident. Where they fail, it is fate.

    The existence of the Snyder Cut is a rupture into this fictional world, potentially throwing the whole thing into doubt. Snyder’s films have fans, and so are not universally held to be unpopular. Those fans have weight with the studio, so they must be significant in number. The movement raised money for charity and seems generally diverse if apolitical — it is not associated with the right. The original release of Justice League is so obviously lacking in quality that little meaningful attempt has been made to redeem it against a future ‘worse’ Snyder Cut. Having set the boundaries of a world where Snyder cannot possibly succeed, the leading figures in this loose movement are forced to explain what has gone so terribly wrong.

    And so the Snyder Cut itself, and all of its fans, must be replaced by a series of simulacra. The original cut cannot have existed: instead of the simple fact of a box of film reels, there is the image of Snyder himself performing a catalysing deception, stringing fans along on a hopeless crusade that will never see success. In place of a film director happy to be allowed to finish a project, there must be a scam artist, ill intent behind his every motive. Will he trick the fans, lying about reshoots that will never take place? Will he trick the film studio into spending money on a doomed project? Or is he producing malevolent propaganda for his Ayn Rand views by hiding it in mass media? Take your pick. In place of a small popular movement which funded a few billboards and flyovers, as well as raising a modest amount for charity, there is an organised harassment campaign that we have a moral duty to stand against to the bitter end. And, most ridiculously, the movie studio, rather than participating in funding an (albeit unusual) project they expect a certain amount of success from, has been hoodwinked and lead into grave danger because they did not pay enough attention to the warnings of Twitter film personalities.

    “Zack Snyder has tricked Warner Brothers into spending an outrageous amount of money on a movie no-one want except right-wing maniacs” is the ridiculous line we are expected to believe, requiring us to — merely — suspend our disbelief that a single director can pressure an entire movie studio, that a modest production budget is a moral outrage, and that the organised right are wasting their time procuring a four-hour cut of Justice League. And for what? So that we can maintain the image of a world where having the correct taste in pop culture can decide whether or not we are good people.

    The “Snyder Cut”, as discussed online, is a fictional object loaded with every meaning up to and including the success of evil over goodness. Each new development, each step in the marketing cycle of leaking news, has to be met with the same level of incredulity. Budget news is more spurious waste. Casting news is more people tricked aboard a sinking ship. Filming news is more proof that the original promise was a lie — and if the people actually anticipating the film don’t see it that way, it’s more evidence that they’re credulous idiots. So the Snyder Cut will not exist. The Snyder Cut does not exist. And post the release of the film next year, expect eagerly to hear that the Snyder Cut did not exist.

    If you’re interested in more writing on the work of Zack Snyder, please check out my essay “Morality and choice in Man of Steel”. I have also produced a long-form video essay, “Sixteen attempts to talk to you about Suicide Squad”.

  • Morality and choice in Man of Steel

    This article transcribes a video essay available here, titled “Man of Steel is not objectivist.”

    The awkward truth, of course, is that we are all Clark Kent — there is always, for all of us, more we could be doing, risks we could be taking, effort we could be expending in the pursuit of being a better person. In the 2012 film Man of Steel, young Clark Kent is grappling with the knowledge that he has extraordinary powers, which he knows he ought to use to help people — given the opportunity. When his school bus crashes into a river, he swims it to the shore, saving everyone on board. A crisis is only narrowly averted; if Clark’s superhuman abilities were attributed to anything other than a mysterious ‘act of god’, his family life would be destroyed. Clark’s extraterrestrial origin is not compatible with a quiet upbringing.

    Clark’s dilemma is easily put: he did the right thing, but in doing so he put his family and all their lives in danger, so how can it have been the right thing?. But as he says to his father: “What was I supposed to do? Let them die?”

    His father responds: “maybe”.

    Some people think that Man of Steel is an objectivist film — objectivism being the mid 20th Century philosophy of Ayn Rand, a philosophy characterised by a radical selfishness and near-total rejection of the existing body of human philosophical thought. Like 80’s philosophical bitcoin. But people who think Man of Steel is objectivist are, to put it bluntly, wrong. And they’re wrong for many different reasons, but the one that interests me most is that — when I first gave it thought — it seemed obvious to me that Man of Steel cannot be an objectivist film because it’s so straightforwardly influenced by existentialist thought.

    The issue at hand is whether the questions raised by Man of Steel — questions including “what was I supposed to do?” are questions which reveal a moral flaw at the heart of the film. Is Zack Snyder an objectivist? Possibly. But Clark in Man of Steel would make a poor objectivist hero (At no point, it must be noted, does he consider going in to private enterprise). His villains (chiefly Zod), can’t be said to be collectivists or moralising philanthropists. They’re eugenicists, and Nazis. There is no recourse sought in the film to an objective moral code — in fact, this lack of an objective ethics is often cause for criticism of the film.

    Objective morality is represented best in the film by Zod’s Kryptonians, who are explicitly eugenicists.

    So, I want to talk through what I consider to be the ethics of the film: existentialist ethics. Man of Steel is full of scenes of anguished choice, absurd decision-making and bad-faith morality. As well, we’ll touch on the ethics of heroism in other action movies and then at the end talk briefly about the bottle city of Kandor and the bad faith of the Kryptonians. But first, this charge levied — that in picking at these moral scabs Man of Steel fatally undermines all morality — was indeed one faced by the existentialists in response to their focus on the actions of the individual

    This charge levied, that in picking at these moral scabs Man of Steel fatally undermines all morality, was indeed one faced by the existentialists in response to their focus on the actions of the individual: Simone de Beauvoir characterises the reaction against existentialism as saying that: “To re-establish Man at the heart of his own destiny, they claim, is to repudiate all ethics.”

    I have gotten ahead of myself.

    Clark saves the workers on the oil rig, but is paralysed by decision. Doing individual good deeds is not an end in itself.

    Existentialism is a philosophy of radical freedom popularised in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Well-known philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard contributed to existentialist thought. Existentialism breaks from previous western philosophies in its emphasis on the radical freedom of the individual, in part derived from knowledge of the fixed inaccessibility or absence of a God — the idea that we are alone, and our whole lives have to be lived through without ever really knowing what morality “actually is”. Existentialism went out of fashion, both culturally and as a topic of philosophical investigation — but much of what existentialism says about human life and existence cannot be meaningfully said to be wrong.

    To paint in broad strokes, the existentialist says that a person is free: that though they may be influenced or pressured or predisposed, in the moment we each ultimately make the call, and there is no-one but ourselves to see into our hearts and evaluate the mode in which we made each decision. For Kierkegaard, who introduced the ‘leap of faith’ into the lexicon, our belief in God and our actions as such would be worthless, if they were not freely chosen in the face of a God who never responds. This absurdity is the true value of faith.

    In contrast, almost, much of action cinema and much of superhero cinema is, in being a power fantasy, often really about not having very much freedom at all — if you had to make agonising choices over which there were no clear correct paths, that might take a little of the fun out of it. The origin stories of superheroes are pressure cookers, running the protagonist through a life-altering series of reactions where the choice, when it is put, is more ceremonial in significance than taken in anguish. Spiderman, for example, is imposed on, first by the bite of the radioactive spider, then by the untimely death of his uncle, then by the threat the super-villains pose to his family and friends. He does have a famous great choice to make, where “with great power comes great responsibility” and so on and so forth, but the choice itself is not difficult — Peter has clear and direct moral guidance on this point, he was never going to turn around and say “actually, screw this”.

    When Peter’s morality does break down in Spider-man 3, it’s his personal morality, not that relating to his heroics.

    Similarly, Iron Man’s Damascene conversion from arms dealer to action robot is not one taken under introspection. His life as an arms dealer reaches a dramatic pre-ordained end: violence begets violence. His choice is between dying as an arms dealer or executing righteous justice on his jailers — some choice! And this is the power fantasy aspect of it — it’s a shared human fantasy, of being found in the righteous spotlight, compelled and justified in doing or saying something we’d otherwise feel ashamed of, because it’s something rude, or something disproportionate, or something illegal.

    Expressing these power fantasies in film isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either morally or in terms of making a great movie: in Assault on Precinct 13, a rag-tag bunch of individuals are forced by circumstance and morality into mounting a last-ditch defence of a police station against seemly never-ended waves of punk kids. To this end, they kill indiscriminately for most of the film’s runtime. Much of the thrill of the movie revolves around seeing — forced in the moment — whether or not the criminal characters, who are implicitly not part of the moral contract the rest of the characters adhere to, will in fact be morally compelled in this way.

    Of course, this pattern doesn’t fit every superhero, or every action protagonist. Aside from anything else, there’s just lots of them, and they’re used to tell all sorts of stories. Even Batman, for all that people like to fantasise about him as a power fantasy, is really just too weird a concept to be un-ironically identified with in that way. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis repeatedly choses to reintroduce himself into the sequence of events in a way which in the sequels will be transliterated into belief in his own hyper-competence, but in the original feels more like personal instability.

    Living the dream.

    Which brings us to consider again the condition of Clark Kent in Man of Steel. We see him drifting, taking several jobs. He saves the lives of men on a burning oil rig — but he also has a power trip on this petty asshole in the bar. We see that Clark feels obliged to use his abilities to do good in the world, but we see him struggle with translating that obligation into action. With great power comes great responsibility — in the abstract — but to who is this responsibility due, and how? Even in seemingly innocuous decisions like taking the job on the fisher boat, he causes one of his new colleagues to risk his life — just by existing, he is placed in situations where others feel obligations to him; there is no vacuum for him to perform idealised good deeds in.

    In this way, Man of Steel preempts this traditional introduction to the action protagonist, where we meet them on the cusp of an event that will transform them into a hero. Clark is already a hero in so much as he can be a hero; he has been a hero since he was a child and raised that bus from the river; but that doesn’t help him decide what to do right now. The issue that he questioned as a child is still entirely relevant: he knows that he ought to do that which is moral, but how to decide the most moral path? We can see in the opening sequence that he has become an ascetic, a nomad, a drifter. He has no extraneous human attachments that we see. His life is consumed entirely by these small moments of heroism and the balance of danger that comes with them.

    Existentialism has a word for the the difficulty of choice: anguish. Having to act, and so choose one of several paths which cannot be known to be the correct one beforehand. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre says:

    “When a man commits himself to anything, fully realising that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind — in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.” — Jean Paul Sartre

    And this is the dominant mode in Man of Steel, from the bus rescue through to the climax. Clark cannot escape a sense of complete and profound responsibility. He must choose. For humanity, he chooses as a man to give himself up to the Kryptonians. As a Kryptonian, he chooses to abandon his people and their one cruel shot at restoring their former glory. And he receives no shielding from the consequences of these choices. His family’s lives are placed in danger. Hundreds of people die in collapsing buildings and explosions. To save humanity, he ends Krypton with his own hands.

    This breaks more than a fantastical “no kill” rule; it leaves Clark alone in the universe of his people.

    This is a painful choice to make, even though it is the right one. And so when, as a child, Clark demands of his father — who has taught him to be good, who has taught him: great power, great responsibility: what was I meant to do? Do I owe more to the lives I saved, or the lives of my family? Lives in the present, or the lives I will save as a grown Superman? What was I meant to do, let them die? There is no good answer Pa Kent can give. The choices are not going to get easier from hereon in. Clark has to consider — maybe he should have let them drown — because, as trivial as this particular case seems in the aftermath, choices are coming for which there will be no-one who can help. This is the lesson Pa Kent dies teaching Clark: not just that doing good will involve hard choices, but that doing good will involve unfair choices and ridiculous choices and hopeless choices. Clark will have to kill Zod, ending his entire race, because Zod refuses to stop senselessly killing. That is an absurd choice, and yet, morally, it is the right thing to do.

    I think people see objectivism lurking behind these thoughts because they make heroism fundamentally un-enjoyable. Seen in clear light, it stops being a power fantasy and starts being a burden no-one could possibly want. And so, presented with situations where the easy, power fantasy fulfilling option is the selfish one, they see a movie which wants them to be selfish.

    There’s a concept in the Superman comics called the bottle city of Kandor. The idea is that the robot Brainiac shrank an entire city from Krypton before its destruction, incorporating all of its culture and people, into a bottle, and Superman later fights the robot and retrieves the bottle. Then, aghast, he repeatedly fails to return the city to its proper size without causing some kind of corresponding catastrophe on Earth. This is generally interpreted as a ‘great burden’ type deal, the one line which even Superman is not powerful enough to cross. In Man of Steel, this concept is revisited in the codex, the dead sum of Kryptonian culture with which Clark is entrusted. The codex could be used — by Zod — to restore Krypton on earth — at only the cost of all of humanity.

    A bottle city…

    The Kryptonians, before the destruction of their world, are portrayed as the beneficiaries of eugenics: the codex is used to ensure that every Kryptonian is bred exactly for his role, and no new life is permitted outside of this. In this way, the character of every Kryptonian is drawn into the codex. They are defined fully before they even exist, and so restoring Krypton is simply a case of calling them back into being.

    I think the transition from the bottle city to the codex, which is literally a skull, makes explicit the ghoulish quality of the exchange: to trade in the living for the dead, an ascendent culture for one which has already served to extinct itself. Between the codex and Zod, the villains in Man of Steel are not the foes of objectivism, but the foes of existentialism. In the codex, the idea that a people can have their worth defined prior to their choices in life, and in Zod the exemplar of a man who attributes all his successes and failures to preordained destiny.

    …and a skull.

    Zod’s account to Clark, of his inbuilt, fixed character and quality, is a fantasy. Zod claims himself as born a military leader, never deviating from that path — even as he commits the act of rebellion. He rejects that he made that choice, and he rejects that he made the choice to kill Jor-el, even though he visibly does so in anger. At the end of the film, when all hope is lost, he claims that his every action, no matter how violent, exists to serve Krypton —

    “I exist only to protect Krypton. That is the sole purpose for which I was born. And every action I take, no matter how violent or how cruel, is for the greater good of my people. And now I have no people. My soul. That is what you have taken from me.”

    — but how, then, does he justify his final actions, once Krypton (calcified in the form of the Codex) has been destroyed? Zod is choosing, even as he claims not to choose. Zod is thus the mirror counterpart to Clark, the actor in bad faith, denying his choices even as he makes them.

    “The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.” — Jean Paul Sartre

    The Kryptonians and Kryptonian society want to deny that, as individuals, they are free, and also that, as individuals, they are abandoned. Kryptonians have their behaviour determined and implicitly excused by their genetic programming. The worth of any given Kryptonian is privileged to be the worth of all Kryptonian society. In this way, from this vantage point, Krypton demands the opportunity to write another tragedy — Zod demands the opportunity to write another tragedy. And because he is attributing his desires and choices to this external source, denying that he has influence over them, he denies himself any end other than the one he receives: stripped of all that provided him meaning, he acts entirely out of spite and malice.

    Zod strikes out of anger, already defeated.

    Ayn Rand defines her philosophy, in the appendix to Atlas Shrugged, like this:

    “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” — Ayn Rand

    I dunno, your mileage may vary, but I don’t really see any of that in Man of Steel. Clark certainly doesn’t see his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life in any way, and his two father figures both sacrifice themselves for their faith in a nameless future. In one of the most famous quotes from Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre defines in contrast the existentialist creed: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards”

    And this, I think, is the essence of Man of Steel. Clark defines himself.

    To return in the last to de Beauvoir, arguing against the criticism that existentialism is a philosophy of what might be called moral relativism:

    “far from God’s absence authorising all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are unforgivable.” — Simone de Beauvoir