In Defense of Zack Snyder…

This in Defense of Zack Snyder, Who Does Not Need My Defense but Is Getting It Anyway

Let me tell you about a filmmaker who has been confidently misread for twenty years by people who watched his movies with the sound on and the brain off.

His name is Zack Snyder, and the internet has opinions about him the way a beehive has opinions about someone poking it with a stick — loudly, collectively, and with a complete absence of nuance.

I would like to offer some nuance.

Let's start with Sucker Punch, because it is the one his critics most love to hold up as evidence of everything wrong with him, and they are wrong about it in a way that is almost impressively complete. The standard critique goes like this: the film is exploitative, hypersexualizes its female characters, and is basically a teenage boy's power fantasy dressed up in the language of empowerment. This critique has been repeated so many times it has calcified into received wisdom.

Here is what the film is actually doing: Sucker Punch is a trap. The villains — the orderly Blue Jones, the corrupt figures who populate Babydoll's fantasy layers — are not there to be cool. They are there to be recognized. They are the leering, entitled, ownership-minded men who appear in the real world every day, transposed into genre clothing so you can see them clearly. The hypersexualized imagery is not an endorsement; it is an indictment. Snyder has said this in interviews, repeatedly and clearly, and has been ignored repeatedly and completely, which is itself a fairly elegant demonstration of his point. The male gaze is being put on trial in that film. The fact that some viewers showed up to ogle rather than reckon with themselves is not a failure of the movie. It is the movie working exactly as designed. If you go to see this and you’re eating it up as a dissertation on why feminism is just “wrong,” that’s what Snyder wanted you to do, and it proves you are a misogynistic pig.

Snyder is not an advocate of violence against women. He is not an advocate of the mistreatment of women. He is a filmmaker who keeps making films about what happens to women — and men, and societies — when power goes unexamined, and he keeps getting criticized for depicting the thing he is criticizing, which suggests the critics are not always watching the same film I am.

Now. The DC films. Ahem.

Man of Steel is a film about an alien who grew up in Kansas trying to figure out whether humanity deserves saving, and arrives at yes, but not cheaply. The destruction of Metropolis at the end is not spectacle for its own sake — it is the cost of the answer. People died. A god-level being fought another god-level being in a city full of humans, and the film does not let you forget that. This was read as Snyder being irresponsible. I would argue it was Snyder being honest about what that fight would actually look like, in a genre that had spent decades pretending otherwise.

Batman v Superman is a mess and also a masterpiece, which sounds contradictory until you realize that those two things are not mutually exclusive. The Theatrical Cut is a mess. The Ultimate Cut is something else — a film about the corrupting nature of fear, about what happens when symbols become untethered from the values they represent, about two men who are each other's worst nightmare and the manipulator who figured out how to weaponize that. It is not a fun movie. It was not trying to be a fun movie. It was trying to be a serious movie, in a genre that is deeply ambivalent about being taken seriously, and it paid the price for that ambition in review scores and thinkpieces.

Zack Snyder's Justice League — the four-hour version that exists because enough people cared enough to demand it — is the clearest argument for his rehabilitation; he was really, really trying to make the biggest, most mythological-scale comic book film he could.. Given the resources and the runtime and the creative control, he made something that is operatic, patient, strange, and genuinely moving. It is a film that earns its ending. Whether you think it earns its runtime is a fair debate. Whether it represents the vision of a filmmaker who cares about his characters and his themes? Not really debatable, if you watch it with your full attention.

This is a genuinely interesting case study in how runtime can serve a film rather than bloat it.

The core reason it works is that the four hours aren't padded — they're what the story actually needed. The theatrical cut was famously butchered down to two hours by the studio after Snyder left following a family tragedy, with Joss Whedon completing it. That version had to compress six characters' worth of origin and motivation into a runtime that couldn't support them. Cyborg in particular was gutted — his arc went from thematic centerpiece to a handful of disconnected scenes. The Snyder Cut restores him as the emotional heart of the film, and suddenly the whole thing has a spine.

A few specific things that make the length feel earned rather than indulgent:

The chapter structure helps enormously. Snyder divides the film into titled sections, which gives the audience psychological permission to settle in. It feels more like a prestige miniseries than a movie that won't end — you always have a sense of where you are in the shape of the story.

The aspect ratio (4:3, shot for IMAX) is unusual for home viewing but gives it a distinct visual identity that signals "this is something different." It's a small thing that has a large subconscious effect on how seriously you take what you're watching.

The villain, Steppenwolf, actually has a coherent motivation in this version. He's not just a CGI threat — he's a disgraced general trying to reclaim honor. That context makes the action meaningful rather than arbitrary.

And Snyder's visual language, love it or hate it, is consistent and committed. The film has a genuine aesthetic point of view — mythological in scale, operatic in tone — which my theatrical background probably resonates with. It's essentially Wagnerian in structure: long, loud, and uncompromising about what it is. It says to you: I’m not your typical superhero drama! Hell, I’m not even sure what I am, but I REALLY REALLY mean it, goddamn it!

The honest caveat is that it still has fat that a tighter editor might have trimmed. But the emotional payoff of the Cyborg resurrection scene, which lands almost entirely because of the restored runtime, makes a strong argument that sometimes the long version is sometimes the right version.

Here is what Snyder actually is, stripped of the internet's preferred narrative: he is a maximalist. He thinks in images the way some people think in words — the slow-motion sequences, the chiaroscuro compositions, the mythological scale — and he applies that visual language to material that is almost always, underneath the surface, about power and responsibility and the cost of both. He is not subtle. Subtlety is not his instrument. But the lack of subtlety is not the same as the lack of thought, and it is past time we stopped treating them as synonymous.

You may not like his films. That's fine. There is room in the world for people who prefer their superhero movies lighter and their directors less operatically inclined. But the critique that Snyder is a purveyor of empty spectacle, that he doesn't care about women or people or meaning — that critique is wrong, and it has always been wrong, and I am tired of watching it go uncontested. So I’m here to beg to differ.

The man made a film where the villain is the male gaze and critics responded by accusing him of having one. I don’t buy that malarky. And neither should you. Dislike his films all you want; but please quit trying to frame it as “I’m concerned about this,” because what you’re really doing is called dismissal, and that’s what our society does to artists that, in their shallow-minded opinion, just have imaginations too big to be contained by ideology.