Zack Snyder, the Director People Love to Hate
One July morning, at a cavernous soundstage on Sunset Boulevard, amplified sound effects boomed so loudly that the walls trembled. On a massive projection screen, futuristic vehicles zipped across alien skies; laser blasts reduced strange architecture to rubble; knives sliced through flesh; an authoritarian army celebrated an unknown triumph. An android with the majestic voice of Anthony Hopkins asked, “Who among you is willing to die for what you believe?”
The footage had been spliced together to create a teaser trailer for Rebel Moon, a science-fiction epic directed by Zack Snyder. Snyder smiled with satisfaction, though he also had notes. “You know what would be cool?” he said to colleagues who were sitting behind an elaborate audio-mixing console. “Is there a way to have it go BOOOOOOOOM and then vroom, have this kind of shock wave?” He watched a giant spaceship drift through the cosmos. Affecting the British accent of the Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel, Snyder said proudly, “These trailers go to 11.”
Snyder likes his movies loud and unambiguous. He naturally speaks the language of the big-budget blockbuster: pugnacious, macho, in-your-face. A film critic once described him as “an adrenaline junkie forever jonesing for a fix.” In fact, he’s one reason so many blockbusters look and sound the way they do: Snyder helped establish the template for comic-book movies as they evolved from summertime popcorn fare into ubiquitous year-round spectacles.
“There’s no superhero science-fiction film coming out these days where I don’t see some influence of Zack,” Christopher Nolan, the Oppenheimer director who has worked with Snyder as a producer, told me. “When you watch a Zack Snyder film, you see and feel his love for the potential of cinema. The potential of it to be fantastical, to be heightened in its reality, but to move you and to excite you.”
Snyder first found success as a director with his 2004 remake of George A. Romero’s classic zombie movie Dawn of the Dead, and with adaptations of the graphic novels 300 (2006) and Watchmen (2009). He then spent several years at Warner Bros. bringing the DC comic-book universe to the screen. His DC movies, including Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, worshipped their spandexed protagonists like deities. They were full of gleaming surfaces, sharp edges, and operatic fight sequences.
Snyder’s fans appreciate the director’s reverence for their comic-book heroes, and of . “He does bloated masculinist spectacle: Baz Luhrmann with ankle weights.” Reed Tucker, the author of , told me that claiming to be a Snyder fan has become a “sort of political statement, almost. It’s like you’re a Trump fan or something.”
