Movie director Zack Snyder has been making the rounds lately, doing interviews and showing up for a podcast with Joe Rogan to talk about—among other things—the “polarizing” reaction to his films. Rogan—a somewhat polarizing figure himself—certainly must know the feeling.
On the Joe Rogan show, Snyder said:
“I remember the last article said, ‘Zack Snyder: Love him or hate him.’ And I’m like, ‘Hate him?!’ I don’t understand. What? It’s a movie. I have no issue with you not liking the movie. That’s not the question. Who cares? The thing is, you’d hate me? I don’t understand that.”
Frankly, I think Snyder is taking this a bit too literally. Love him or hate him, in this context, means “love his movies or hate his movies” which, to me at least, seems pretty obvious. Of course, there are some very strong opinions out there, and some very fanatical fans who probably do hate Snyder, which is certainly perplexing. I, personally, have never been attacked or received any hate for anything I’ve ever written. Nobody has ever said anything cruel or awful about me over my reviews, so I really just can’t relate to this at all.
In any case, Snyder also said in an interview with Empire, that he doesn’t quite understand why Rebel Moon ended up being so polarizing.
“I don’t really have a rebuttal to the reviews,” he said. “For whatever reason, the reaction to my movie is very polarising, and it always has been. The movie, it doesn’t seem like there’s that much in it that would warrant such visceral responses.”
He goes on to discuss the Director’s Cut, R-rated version of the two-part Rebel Moon films saying that “They’re insane” and have “all the gore and the hard R-ness and the nudity and the violence” that was left out of the original releases. He notes that “It’ll be interesting to see what the [critics/reviews] say about the director’s cuts. That’s a different kettle of fish.”
Now, first of all, because I always find myself let down by Snyder movies, I went into Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child Of Fire with very, very low expectations. This helped me enjoy the movie more than I expected, because although it has many problems it also has some entertaining bits.
But really, it’s not a very good movie for one very big and very obvious reason: The script is bad. Not even mediocre. Just bad. It’s not just that it’s derivative, either, thought it borrows from just about everything it can get its grubby little space-opera mittens on, from Star Wars to Seven Samurai and beyond.
I know that I’m constantly beating this drum, but I don’t care how much money you throw at special effects or big name actors or crazy epic plots, if you have a bad script the movie is going to get bad reviews or at least be polarizing. A lot of people want more than just spectacle. They want a story that engages their brains.
People joke about Snyder’s over-use of slow-motion and they’re not wrong, he does take it too far, but the real problem is the writing. I could forgive all of Rebel Moon’s other flaws if he could have just given us better characters and a more interesting plot. The actual plot amounts to: Big Bad Empire arrives at small village and demands grain. Hero Lady goes and gets team of Hero Helpers to fight Big Bad Empire to save grain. The End.
There’s little to no interaction between these heroes. They get their scene and then drift into the background. The bad guys are cartoon, mustache-twirling villains. The movie is rarely funny, with only unintentional comic relief. There’s no real romantic hook. No sense of camaraderie. The premise—which is Seven Samurai / Magnificent Seven in space—ends up being awfully goofy when you realize it’s a team of maybe seven or eight fighters against not just a band of pirates or briggands, but a massive galactic Empire. The big showdown at the end is preposterous more than exciting.
Critics aren’t going to walk away impressed and awed by more violence and nudity. We have seen plenty of violence and nudity at this point. Adding another hour of fight scenes and some naughty bits isn’t going to make Rebel Moon a great film, just a longer one.
But hiring someone else to write the movies might. George Lucas is a great example of someone who has big ideas and who used his talents as a filmmaker and leader to delegate those big ideas to people better at executing them. Beyond being great at the “big idea” stuff, he had a knack for finding the right talent to get the job done. He brought in writers and directors for his original trilogy. Empire Strikes Back—widely considered the best Star Wars movie of all time—was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Irvin Kershner. Kasdan returned for Return Of The Jedi alongside director Richard Marquand. Both these films took what made the Lucas-written-and-directed Star Wars better, deeper and more powerful (though Lucas did do a pretty great job on that one, he had a lot of collaborators help clean up the script and make some pretty massive changes; I’ve read the comics based on the original draft and they’re so different).
The widely panned and genuinely awful prequel trilogy saw Lucas take charge of script and direction, and the results speak for themselves. There is probably a great deal of truth to the theory that his divorce from Marcia Lucas—an award-winning film editor who worked on the Star Wars trilogy, Taxi Driver and many other films—also negatively impacted his later work. The point is that Lucas was at his best when other people were taking his ideas and turning those ideas into movies. Willow was directed by Ron Howard with a script written by Bob Dolman. Steven Spielberg directed the Indiana Jones films.
Snyder would benefit greatly by finding better writers to help craft his scripts. I know that he doesn’t write alone—Rebel Moon was co-written by Snyder along with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten—but I genuinely think Snyder’s talents are more behind the camera than at the typewriter. And perhaps he needs to find collaborators that can do his stories justice—or rein in his worst impulses—because Rebel Moon is just the latest example of bad writing dragging down what otherwise might have been a genuinely fun movie, rather than such a dour, lifeless one. Same goes for Army Of The Dead.
In any case, the reason these movies are polarizing is because Snyder—for all his flaws—has very passionate fans who will defend his films to the death, and this of course leads to flame wars on the internet. Snyder does have talent as a filmmaker, and I’ve enjoyed some of his movies more than other critics have, warts and all. He has a unique style, and that’s more than you can say for a lot of directors. I just wish he could make movies with stories and characters we truly care about. Style only gets you so far. What Snyder’s films lack is substance.
