The Snyder Cut

[Trafalgar]

Is anyone really excited about the release of Snyder Cut of the Justice League in March? I am interested but only in the same way I am interested in bonus features on a DVD. It's cool but I am not going to go out of my way to see it.

[Tvtyrant]

Is anyone really excited about the release of Snyder Cut of the Justice League in March? I am interested but only in the same way I am interested in bonus features on a DVD. It's cool but I am not going to go out of my way to see it.

I'm pretty excited about it. I'm a fairly substantial Snyder fan and a big DC fan, so I'll almost certainly enjoy it. Will it be a good movie? Probably not.

[Trafalgar]

I'm pretty excited about it. I'm a fairly substantial Snyder fan and a big DC fan, so I'll almost certainly enjoy it. Will it be a good movie? Probably not.

I really enjoyed 300 and Watchmen, especially the directors cut of Watchmen. I like Man of Steel although it had some issues. Batman v Superman had some really good parts and some really bad parts (Jesse Eisenberg). I have friend who blames Josh Whedon for Justice League but I think it was a mess before Whedon got there.

As a director, I feel like Snyder had a really strong opening but has been repeating himself and the quality of his movies have been going down hill.

[Imbalance]

Very excited, though not nearly excited enough to entertain the thought of subscribing to HBO.

[Sapphire Guard]

I am excited to see it... but I don't have HBO Max.

I enjoyed the DCEU and think it's gone downhill since he left (Haven't seen the new wonderwoman because theatres are closed here.

On Justice League, looking at the trailers I think it's fairly clear that the process changed midstream, with the execs exploiting the death of Zack's daughter to fire him. The fact that he came back at all means that he wanted to make a different movie.

[Palanan]

Not excited. I’m not really a fan of any of the recent DC movies, and a different cut of Justice League probably wouldn’t address most of the issues that I disliked about that movie.

So unless the Snyder Cut ends up on USA at some point, not likely to see it. I loved the Justice League comics back in the day (Giffen & DeMatteis era) but the current movies just…don’t work for me.

[Dire_Flumph]

I'm curious rather than excited, but my expectations aren't terribly high. I thought the original version of Justice League was watchable, but lacking in story, character and spectacle. Since this originally came out we've had Infinity War and Endgame, which showed how to do this kind of thing right.

[Zevox]

I'm baffled that it's something that anyone wants to see, personally. His other DC movies have a terrible reputation, and the impression I have is that DC's films only started to improve when he stopped having anything to do with them (Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam), so it sounds like something that can only go badly. Obviously I don't intend to see it, though I look forward to hearing the likely stories about what a train wreck it is.

[Keltest]

I'm baffled that it's something that anyone wants to see, personally. His other DC movies have a terrible reputation, and the impression I have is that DC's films only started to improve when he stopped having anything to do with them (Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam), so it sounds like something that can only go badly. Obviously I don't intend to see it, though I look forward to hearing the likely stories about what a train wreck it is.

Ditto. I struggle to believe that it was the cuts that made JL not a good movie rather than literally anything else.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm baffled that it's something that anyone wants to see, personally. His other DC movies have a terrible reputation, and the impression I have is that DC's films only started to improve when he stopped having anything to do with them (Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam), so it sounds like something that can only go badly. Obviously I don't intend to see it, though I look forward to hearing the likely stories about what a train wreck it is.

Depends on what you like? The consensus on these boards is thor ragnarok and Star Wars: The Last Jedi were great and I didn't enjoy either of those. I also liked Batman V Superman which this board mostly disliked.

[Peelee]

Depends on what you like? The consensus on these boards is thor ragnarok and Star Wars: The Last Jedi were great and I didn't enjoy either of those. I also liked Batman V Superman which this board mostly disliked.

I have not seen any consensus either way on TLJ. Here, at least. Many enjoyed it and many didn't, but not enough either way for a consensus.

[Dire_Flumph]

I have not seen any consensus either way on TLJ. Here, at least. Many enjoyed it and many didn't, but not enough either way for a consensus.

I both enjoyed and didn't enjoy Last Jedi so I'm not surprised at that. ;)

[Peelee]

I both enjoyed and didn't enjoy Last Jedi so I'm not surprised at that. ;)

I declare you consensus!

[Trafalgar]

Is it just me or does it seem like every movie thread degenerates into a Star Wars: The Last Jedi discussion? I am surprised someone hasn't said Star Wars: The Last Jedi as a favorite Samurai/Western movie on those threads.

[Fyraltari]

Is it just me or does it seem like every movie thread degenerates into a Star Wars: The Last Jedi discussion? I am surprised someone hasn't said Star Wars: The Last Jedi as a favorite Samurai/Western movie on those threads.

Every thread here eventually degenerates into a Star Wars thread. Every Star Wars thread here eventually degenerates into a Last Jedi thread.

[Trafalgar]

Every thread here eventually degenerates into a Star Wars thread. Every Star Wars thread here eventually degenerates into a Last Jedi thread.

So The Last Jedi is the black hole of giantitip.com? We are all slowly sucked towards it no matter what we do.

[Tvtyrant]

So The Last Jedi is the black hole of giantitip.com? We are all slowly sucked towards it no matter what we do.

You can always just move along and it will go away.

Anyway, I think my point still stands. Tastes vary, a minority of people like the DC movies. They remind me of comics when I was a child, it is very nostalgic.

[Trafalgar]

You can always just move along and it will go away.

I don't know. It's like bringing up alignment in an RPG thread. Sometimes it derails everything.

Back to the original topic.

Zach Snyder is really good at action scenes. I think the reason I liked 300 and Watchmen is that he was adapting popular graphic novels into film. He made some changes but he pretty much kept the plot, dialogue, and characters the same. In both movies, you can watch it with the graphic novel open in your lap and match a scene to a page in the book.

With Man of Steel, Batman V Superman, and Justice League, he had no graphic novel to follow. In all three movies there are problems with character development, character motivation, and even character design to follow. And he or the writers made some odd choices. But in Man of Steel and Batman V Superman some of the action scenes are visually amazing.

But Justice League had all sorts of problems. And I think you can't blame Whedon for all of them. A fundamental issue for me is the relative power levels between Steppenwolf and Superman. The rest of the League feels superfluous after Superman comes back.

My prediction is that there will be some stunning new scenes but he will be unable to fix some of the fundamental issues with the story.

[Lemmy]

Well... BvS was pretty bad... One of the worst Superhero movies I've seen in the last decade. Some of its scenes weren't just boring, but downnright irritating (namely... Every scene with Lex Luthor present).
I'm glad actual fans of the movie are getting it, but I don't see how adding extra scenes will accomplish anything other than making the movie an even longer trainwreck.

[Rynjin]

Put me in the camp of "Why is anyone excited to see a 4 hour recut of a movie that sucked ass"?

People do realize that scenes are generally cut FOR A REASON, right? To prevent movies from becoming such bloated, unwieldy messes as this is almost certainly going to be.

The Irishman doesn't even hit 4 hours, and even at his best Snyder is no Scorcese. And I thought even that movie overstayed its welcome by about 20-30 minutes anyway.

[Cikomyr2]

So I am not really awaiting the Snyder cut. I find Snyder's take on the Characters to be dark, gloomy, dreary. But it totally is consistent with Snyder's skill as an artist, where his best works are those of rugged awesome individuals who have to go against the world to save it. Sometimes, that artistic sensibility works great, like when he did Watchmen.

And it's telling that Snyder outright said he did not even liked the superhero genre until he read Watchmen. What he took out of the genre was the main deconstructive work of the past 50 years on the topic, so it's hardly surprising the man wrecks the feel of superhero movie and make instead super heavy moody pieces.

Hence why I think the Snyder cut shouldn't be named "The Justice League: The Snyder Cut".

They should name it "The Justice Lords"

[Clertar]

Well... BvS was pretty bad...

At least he didn't do this

Spoiler

Show

I think that the Snyder cut is ultimately a lose-lose situation. If it's bad, it was not just a waste of time and money, but a further erosion of the alreaday damaged DCEU property. And it will just remind people that when DC tried to do their Avengers 2012 it was so bad and fans protested so much that they had to release a modified version to appease people.

But let's say it's actually a really good movie. Then it will be a clash with the current direction of the DCEU, which is betting hard on a very loosely interconnected Elseworlds-style approach, the total opposite of the MCU approach (there is one Batman universe in the Snyder movies, but a different one in the Joker movie, yet another one on the upcoming The Batman, and the Bargirl movie will also be disconnected from these). So if the Snyder cut is really successful it will make a mess, people will want to keep going with these characters and their world MCU style... but will instead get DCEU movies that have nothing to do with that in the following years, until Warner can course correct once again.

[Murk]

I'm interested in this from an... artistic point of view?

It won't be a movie I'll enjoy, but I'm looking forward to seeing the the whole storyline wrapped up with a consistent tone and message.
I think the most jarring aspect of the original movie was how it just didn't fit with the movies before (mostly Man of Steel, BvS), or even with itself. Snyder had quite a distinct style and way of telling the story in the other movies (and the parts of Justice League that were his), and the majority of Justice League just didn't fit.

I don't like Snyder's distinct style (having a sad, greytone Superman is probably the worst misinterpretation of the character possible), so I won't enjoy his Justice League either. But at least it will be consistent, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it's like.

[GloatingSwine]

So I am not really awaiting the Snyder cut. I find Snyder's take on the Characters to be dark, gloomy, dreary. But it totally is consistent with Snyder's skill as an artist, where his best works are those of rugged awesome individuals who have to go against the world to save it. Sometimes, that artistic sensibility works great, like when he did Watchmen.

And it's telling that Snyder outright said he did not even liked the superhero genre until he read Watchmen. What he took out of the genre was the main deconstructive work of the past 50 years on the topic, so it's hardly surprising the man wrecks the feel of superhero movie and make instead super heavy moody pieces.

Hence why I think the Snyder cut shouldn't be named "The Justice League: The Snyder Cut".

They should name it "The Justice Lords"

If your only experience of a thing is a deconstruction of it, you won't understand why the deconstruction is doing the things it does, and the most you'll get out of it is "yeah, take that, genre I don't understand!"

And that's pretty much Snyder all over. He doesn't understand things, he just sees their surface elements and assumes they are the whole of the thing. He read Watchmen and all he got out of it was "yeah, dark and violence and sex! woo!". Without picking up the moral philosophy of the work (chapter 9 is literally a dialogue between nihilism and the meaning inherent in the search for meaning, with the latter winning out) or self-criticism of the characters being represented (The sex isn't to show that these are cool people who ****, it's to show that Dan Dreiberg is a sad weirdo who can't have normal human relationships outside the context of dressing up and beating people up).

Also the violence. Watchmen is very unique in its presentation of violence in a comic. There are no motion lines. We're never seeing the act of violence in Watchmen, we're only seeing the consequence. We're seeing the hurt, not the hit.

Snyder didn't get that, because he doesn't look deeply and think. So his version of Watchmen is the exact opposite, where the acts of violence are fetishised not criticised.

[Imbalance]

I can't speak for anyone else - I just want more Darkseid.

I'd also like it that, if this cut does do well, they get to remake the steaming pile that was CW's Crisis event.

[Aedilred]

I've seen all of Snyder's films made from his debut to 2017, except for Legends of the Guardians, and the more time passes the more I think he's a hopeless hack.

Dawn of the Dead was an inferior remake.

300 was a faithful adaptation of a comic book which had a moderately interesting style and otherwise had very few merits. I can overlook the more problematic elements as being imported from the comic but if you're going to use that as an excuse you can't give it credit for any of the "good" stuff it lifted from the comic either. So it gets some points for style and that's it really.

Watchmen, at the time, felt like a decent stab at a comic-book movie. But that was 2009 and the landscape was very different. Comic book movies were more miss than hit and one that wasn't appalling was a pleasant surprise. In retrospect, we can see that the corner was turned in 2008 with Iron Man and The Dark Knight but at the time that wasn't yet a trend. So at the time, it looked flawed, but decent enough. Ten years on, after all that Marvel have done, it looks a lot worse.

But most of all, I think this is the best example of Snyder's ability to make a film which is superficially a very faithful adaptation while also completely missing the point. The lavishly slo-mo superhuman fight scenes are gratifying to the lizard brain but on analysis only serve to underscore the extent to which the film is wide of the mark the comic book had drawn.

Man of Steel, Dawn of Justice and Justice League all have similar issues which are well-known and I won't dwell on them.

But the film that made up my mind was Sucker Punch. That's the film where Snyder has had most creative freedom; more than any of his other films it's his baby. And what he gives us is a (rather derivative) style over a substance that manages to be so gratuitously unpleasant it's hard to know whether to be more offended by the content or by the way it's sidelined in favour of pure fantasy action sequences, one of those movies that manages to have very little plot while at the same time still being difficult to follow, and worst of all, really quite boring.

It's the work of someone who is at best creatively bankrupt. At worst, it suggests that his creative impulses are rooted in something rather unhealthy and I don't really want to see any more of it.

His response to the criticism isn't encouraging either. The claim that critics disliked it principally because of the female protagonist suggests a blithe ignorance of the very real problems that people were raising with the film, including most prominently that the film was a gratuitously exploitative adolescent male fantasy: the idea that the criticism is rooted in misogyny requires a degree of doublethink or self-delusion really quite remarkable.


The idea therefore that there's a "Snyder cut" of, really, any of his other movies that will somehow redeem them seems vanishingly unlikely. Or to put it another way, as someone alluded to in the thread above, the problems with a film that a Snyder cut is likely to fix aren't the problems that need fixing.

[LaZodiac]

It says a lot that in a list of all his movies, ignoring the one yo didn't see, Sucker Punch wasn't listed. Really tells you all that needs to be said about that one.

EDIT: Or I missed it because I'm tired. Oops.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Aedilred
I can overlook the more problematic elements as being imported from the comic….

Which elements do you mean?

I’ve only seen snippets of the movie, which were such grotesque distortions of the actual history that I had no interest in watching more. Is that what you’re referring to, or something else?

[Kitten Champion]

I watched Snyder's Watchmen well before I had any real awareness of Alan Moore's comics or the wider context in which Watchmen was penned both in terms of the sociopolitical/cultural time period it was written and within the history of its medium.

After reading Watchmen and critical analysis thereof, as well as arguments for how Snyder's changes were inimical to the spirit of the work, the big question that comes to my mind was -- were it not an adaptation of a widely popular work people loved and respected, would this movie stand on its own merits? Personally, I think it would largely be forgotten. Outside of being in the peculiar oeuvre of Zack Snyder, I guess.

Being a deconstruction of comics from over twenty years before is pretty muddled when you're doing it in the late 00's and in an entirely different medium. Especially as comics themselves did that ad nauseam to the point that having narratives which weren't hugely depressing or on-the-nose political statements were refreshing.

Then there's Moore's deeper themes and concepts, which are written around in the movie. This exemplified most by Snyder's depiction of Rorschach, who's cool violence dude with the neat costume that gets to say the one-liners rather than an emotionally crippled violent psychopath with unhinged sociopolitical views.

Which then creates the broader issue, you're basing this on a work which broadly desires to alienate you from its characters for the purpose of you the reader questioning the motivation of someone who'd do this kind of vigilante violence and the kind of society this approach to justice could lead to. With the movie though, it just feels like Snyder is chomping at the bit to bring edge-lord morally suspect Punisher-esque characters to life with fast-paced visceral action scenes.

So what is there? I don't know. Some nice images and moments lifted from the comics, but lacking in the gravitas to make them feel particularly meaningful.

I like the opening credits. Those are cool.

Which elements do you mean?

I’ve only seen snippets of the movie, which were such grotesque distortions of the actual history that I had no interest in watching more. Is that what you’re referring to, or something else?

The simplistic adulation of Spartan society and harsh - and somewhat literal - demonization of the Persians is pretty huge and obvious in 300, and kind of nauseating if you think about it beyond "cool violent people doing cool violence". Especially within the context of Frank Miller's broader work.

[Willie the Duck]

The Irishman doesn't even hit 4 hours, and even at his best Snyder is no Scorcese. And I thought even that movie overstayed its welcome by about 20-30 minutes anyway.

Forget Scorsese, I think that even at his best Snyder is no Snyder (the person people were hoping he'd be when he first hit the scene).

And that's pretty much Snyder all over. He doesn't understand things, he just sees their surface elements and assumes they are the whole of the thing.
...
Snyder didn't get that, because he doesn't look deeply and think. So his version of Watchmen is the exact opposite, where the acts of violence are fetishised not criticised.

I don't want to assume that. In part (1) because every discussion I run into about his work ends up having no few of his fans trying to explain to others that if they do not like his work, it is because they 'don't get it,' which is thoroughly not true and the assumption is annoying, so I want to extend the same deference to Snyder himself. Also in part (2) because he'd have had to do literally zero research before starting the Watchman movie to have not gotten the parts that he didn't cover. I think he darn well knew what the original was, and simply didn't care. Not unlike Paul Verhoeven taking the title and some character names from Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and making an almost unrelated movie (no comment on quality of either, just that they are very different), I think Snyder grabbed the basic skeleton of Watchman -- something he probably really did like growing up, before realizing that it was basically a thumb in the eye of everything he believed in (at least if wanting to make a Atlas Shrugged/Fountainhead movie is actual indication that he's a die-hard objectivist) -- and decided to make something completely different with the bones. As it stands, the Watchman movie is a valid, if not particularly impressive, exploration of us as a culture of cults of personality and media manipulation. The scene with Veidt standing and watching the banks of television monitors showcasing how his power over the public makes him as influential as a nigh-omnipotent naked blue nuclear space god as a powerful message, just really unimpressive compared to the subtlety of Moore's original.

His response to the criticism isn't encouraging either. The claim that critics disliked it principally because of the female protagonist suggests a blithe ignorance of the very real problems that people were raising with the film, including most prominently that the film was a gratuitously exploitative adolescent male fantasy: the idea that the criticism is rooted in misogyny requires a degree of doublethink or self-delusion really quite remarkable.

This is the one where the 'you clearly just don't get it' accusations flew the most, which is the most insane. It's not clear how someone would think that others missed the paper-thin veneer of proto-female empowerment messaging dolloped onto the movie. At the same time, it's hard to imagine someone not getting how it completely fails to land amidst the gratuitously... just the gratuitousness of everything onscreen. So it's not that we (who weren't impressed with the movie) didn't get it, we got it fine, we just thought it failed (hard). There's also a 'twist' near the end of the film that sort of changes who the supposed protagonist of the film is that... changes nothing about the messaging, meaning, or ideas (not) explored therein.

Anyways, the Snyder cut -- I am all for it. Regardless of whether Snyder's vision is actually any good, the original had Joss's fingerprints all over it. If this give Snyder's fans the closure they want-...; If this lets Snyder tell the story he wanted to tell-... more power to 'em. Honestly, I am so burned out on superhero movies right now that the best superhero movie ever made would have an uphill battle to really grab me. OTOH, that leaves me in a perfect position to judge whether this version will be better than the theatrical release -- all it has to do is be a c+ to that one's c.