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Every Zack Snyder Movie, Ranked
From the Justice League and zombies to Spartans and Rebel Moon (along with plenty of director's cuts, of course), there's much to get into with this director.
LOVE HIM OR hate him, Zack Snyder is one of the hottest Hollywood filmmakers of his generation. A pop-art provocateur whose decade-long reign over the DC Extended Universe earned him fierce detractors and ardent disciples in equal measure, Snyder has become synonymous with both a maximalist approach to visual storytelling, his aesthetic of excess enshrining heroes in striking slow-motion tableaux that evoke comic-book splash panels scaled up to suit the studio blockbuster, and with a solemnity of tone that impresses on audiences the seriousness—and sincerity—of his artistic vision.
Long before he became a polarizing fixture of superhero cinema, Snyder broke through in the horror genre, on the considerable strengths of his feature film debut, a 2004 remake of George Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. It was there, ramping up the original’s action while keeping its social-political subtext largely intact, that Snyder first proved himself to be a skilled orchestrator of hyperkinetic action, before his 2006 graphic-novel adaptation 300 delivered on that promise with its procession of decapitations, dismemberments, and other such orgiastically violent antics.
From there, Watchmen saw Snyder double down on his reverence for pop-culture mythology, approaching his 2009 take on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ influential comic-book series as an exhaustively faithful adaptation, using the source comic as a storyboard (as he had on 300) and turning what had felt impossibly sprawling on the page into a visceral screen spectacle. To look back on Snyder’s career, Watchmen—in its ambition, gravity, and deconstructive approach to the idea of the costumed superhero—so directly presages his relationship with DC Comics and Warner Bros. that the two films he made before 2013’s Man of Steel—the animated fantasy saga Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010) and steampunk fantasia Sucker Punch (2011)—can’t help but register in hindsight as strange, albeit spectacular curios.
Plenty of ink has been spilled debating the relative merits of Snyder’s years overseeing the DCEU, during which time he cast the last son of Krypton as a weapon of mass destruction in Man of Steel, brought Superman into conflict with another morally conflicted crime-fighter in 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and completed his cycle, five years later, with Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-hour opus that gave its heroes and story more mythic dimension than the disjointed theatrical cut, released in 2017 without Snyder’s involvement. (He’d stepped away after principal photography due to a family tragedy, only for fans to later begin a successful campaign for WB to release his director’s cut.)
Snyder’s post-DC career has been spent at Netflix, where he seems to be enjoying a level of creative freedom and budget flexibility that’s in scarce supply at most major film studios these days; Army of the Dead, his zombie heist epic, unleashed undead carnage on the Las Vegas strip, while his two-part space opera Rebel Moon—the latter half of which, titled The Scargiver, is now streaming on Netflix—marks one of Snyder’s most ambitious projects to date, essentially offering the filmmaker, who’d initially pitched it as a Star Wars film to Lucasfilm, the opportunity to play in a galaxy far, far away vast enough to bear out his visions of interstellar grandeur.
What’s next for Snyder? Plenty’s been teased—from Planet of the Dead, a scaled-up sequel to his zombie epic, to an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which Netflix doesn’t want to make—but fans can first expect him to finish out Rebel Moon with R-rated versions of the films that could arrive on Netflix as early as August.
Until then, let’s undertake what fittingly feels like at once a Pyrrhic and Herculean effort: ranking all 10 of Zack Snyder’s films to date (and, yes, we’re looking at the director’s cuts, since we took the time to watch them, and because no commission is worth revisiting the Whedon cut).
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