Director Zack Snyder is a filmmaker who seems to be either loved or hated. Getting his start in music videos, he soon moved over to directing feature films, and made waves in Hollywood for his thrilling action sequences and imaginative visuals. One of the only blockbuster “auteur” Directors, every film he makes has his own unique stamp on it. 

In December of 2023, Netflix will be releasing the first of a two-part science fiction epic titled Rebel Moon Directed, produced and written by Zack Snyder. Set in a dystopian universe, it follows a woman on a planet who is forced to fight an evil empire that has come to strip the planet of all its resources. She must take up arms and gather a team of mercenaries to fight for freedom and defeat the empire. The trailer that was released promised some cool action and sets, as well as the being “Full Snyder.” 

Now if you are not familiar with his work, now is the perfect time to catch up, here are five Zack Snyder movies to watch before Rebel Moon releases.

5. Army of the Dead

Army of the Dead was Zack Snyder’s grand return to cinema after a long hiatus after tragedy struck his family. It tells the story of a group of mercenaries who are hired to break into a zombie overrun Las Vegas and rob a casino vault before the government nukes the city. Of course, things do not go as planned, and they soon discover they have been sent in for more than just gold and cash. It stars Dave Bautista, Garret Dillahunt, Ella Purnell and Tig Notaro. If you enjoy bloody action horror movies, that are filled with tension and drama, yet still have a strong focus on characters and family, Army of the Dead will be for you!

4. Watchmen

In 2009 Snyder released his adaptation of the iconic graphic novel by Alan Moore, set in an alternet 1985. Watchmen followed a disbanded team of superheroes as they investigated a murder of one of their own. Widely considered one of the most influential comics of all time, the source material was thought for many years to be unfilmable. Snyder’s version of the story starred Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Billy Crudup, and many others. It brings the comic to life in all its R-rated glory, with tons of blood, sex, and nudity, while controversial at the time of release. The film has gained a huge cult following and is included on many “Best Comicbook Films” lists.

3. Man of Steel

Man of Steel was Snyder and Christopher Nolan’s ambitious reintroduction of Superman to the world, it takes the washed-out and realistic look from The Dark Knight and mixes it with high-octane action. Its cast is very good, seeing the likes of Amy Adam’s, Kevin Costner, Henry Cavill, and Michael Shannon. It’s not the Superman everyone expected but it really helped to showcase that Clark is not only a man, but a god as well. 

2. 300

The film that put Zack Snyder on the map, 300 is the loosely told true story of the 300 Spartans who fought the Persian invasion of Greece. It stars Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, and Michael Fasbender, it’s an epic action film with insane set pieces and now iconic one-liners. The film is also well known for being one of the first to be entirely CGI besides the actors. It’s filled with cool action scenes, blood, gore, and heroic speeches. It’s a celebration of freedom from tyranny and a perfect Saturday night movie! 

1. Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Arguably Zack Snyder’s magnum opus, the director cut of 2017’s Justice League is a totally different movie than what the studio released in theatres. Bright to life by the largest fan campaign in Hollywood history its 2 hours longer, with close to a dozen new characters, the film is a glorious celebration of all things DC. It finishes the story started in Man of Steel and finally sees Clark Kent fully take on the mantel of Superman for the world, while also solidly showcasing DC Superheroes as today’s Greek Myths. Zack Snyder’s Justice League really feels like the culmination of Zack’s comic-book director career, it was also a landmark victory for artistic freedom and support for filmmakers being allowed to release their original visions. 

So, there you have it, five Zack Snyder Movies to watch before Rebel Moon hits Netflix on December 22nd. Which are you more excited to watch? Let us know in the comments before. 

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A young black boy sits alone in a theatre, staring up at a projection of black and white. His mother plays piano for effect during a horseback chase as a man in black lassos a man in white. The man in black dismounts before the gathered townsfolk and unmasks. He is U.S. Deputy Bass Reeves: the black Marshal of Oklahoma. The crowd seems ready to lynch the man in white, a second corrupt sheriff. The little boy’s voice fills the silence of the title cards, reading words he must know by heart. “There will be no mob justice today! Trust in the law!”

Outside the theatre, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 begins, and a nostalgic childhood memory becomes a nightmare. Over three hundred African American peoples are murdered in the streets by the white residents in KKK hoods, and the neighbourhood known as “Black Wall Street” burns to the ground. So begins HBO and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, the nine-hour sequel to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal 1985 graphic novel.

In this world police conceal their identity masks evoking the Crimebusters/Minutemen of old, electric cars are abundant, the internet never came to be,  Robert Redford has remained president for thirty years on a platform of reparations (Redfordations) for crimes past, and Vietnam is the 51^st state. Over everything hangs the blue, glowing shadow of the superhuman Doctor Manhattan, and the Lovecraftian horror of the alien giant psychic squid that once slaughtered New York. Watchmen is not our world, but it could be. Much has been said about the politics of Watchmen, and the stellar cast, with Regina King, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart, Yahya Abdul Mateen II, and Jovan Adepo all turning in career-defining performances. Still, there is one remarkable aspect of Watchmen that can never be addressed enough: nostalgia

The series joins other works such as Jurassic World, Disney’s Star Wars, Blade Runner 2049, Creed, and Mad Max: Fury Road in a weird family of sequels released decades later. These resurrected properties are fuelled by nostalgia for the original, repackaged and often catered to new audiences who aren’t old enough to have even experienced the original releases.

Watchmen is full of love and nostalgia for the original work. A drop of blood falls on a police badge as it once did on a smiley face, lines of dialogue are repurposed and refitted to their new environment, and Tim Blake Nelson’s “Looking Glass” pulls up his shiny reflect mask halfway up his face to munch on some nuts in an image so reminiscent of Moore and Gibbon’s Rorschach that it gives chills. But merely capturing iconography doesn’t mean an adaptation understands its source material.

Watchmen has more in mind than merely evoking the “Hey, remember this?” feeling some of its cinematic peers strive for. Though not without its flaws – the subplot with Jeremy Irons takes too long to connect to the main narrative, and Hong Chau’s “Lady Trieu” never feels quite as real as the other characters, no matter how superb a job both actors are doing – Watchmen is always striving for something more. As obsessed with joke structures as the original novel, if the first four episodes of the mini-series are set- up, introducing new settings, remixing iconography, reintroducing characters from the original, then everything comes crashing down in the first scene of the 5^th episode: “A Little Fear of Lightning.” We return to 1985 at the closing moments of the novel, standing in New Jersey with New York twinkling in the distance. People crying out Nixon’s name, fear of a nuclear holocaust that we the audience know will never come. Here is our nostalgia.

Then the world explodes, like so much glass in a hall of mirrors. A young man from Oklahoma stumbles through wreckage, screaming for help. The camera pans outwards, hundreds of corpses litter the street. We keep pulling back, and back, until we see the monstrous squid crushing New York City, a sightless eye staring up at us as everything dies. Thirty years later, we return to the present, and Looking Glass continues to sleep in a bunker, his head wrapped in material meant to protect from psychic blasts. “I’m not out of the tunnel,” he says. From here, everything snaps into place, and the two sides of the narrative become one.

In 1985, nostalgia was a perfume to choke on.  In 2019, nostalgia becomes a drug threatening overdose, containing memories of previous lives. “Taking someone else’s nostalgia can kill you,” Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake warns, as the pills slide down Angela Abar/Sister Night’s (Regina King) throat. One person’s nostalgia is another person’s trauma, and both can be passed on through the generations. “It’s like I inherited my mother’s trauma,” one character says of the squid attack from before he was born (referred to in-show as 11/2). Inherited trauma runs deep through the blood of Watchmen, carrying with it the demented twin of inherited nostalgia.

The white supremacist 7^th Calvary is nostalgic for a time before America was desegregated, a time none of them ever lived through. Angela/Sister Night carries the trauma of the Tulsa massacre even if she doesn’t understand it, passed down through generations of her family. Generations of Vietnamese remember the blue behemoth of Doctor Manhattan as the ultimate symbol of evil and death, even as America mourns the homemade god that seems to have abandoned them for other worlds. Looking Glass and a generation of Americans remain traumatised by 11/2, even while those “in the know” from the original novel remember it as the event that prevented nuclear war. And so, through all this violence, Watchmen looks outward, to its audience, and asks what we are nostalgic for, and what pain we might be masking behind that nostalgia.

Before the show ever aired, there was an outcry from fans at the fact that the 7^th Calvary hate group would be wearing Rorschach masks, tying them to the fan favourite character of the comic. Some were outraged by that connection. But behind Rorschach’s mask in the book was a character drenched in misogyny, bigotry, and violence. Behind our nostalgia for the Watchmen comic, was a critique of the superhero genre, and American patriotism. 

In Watchmen, there was never a simpler time. The past and our nostalgia for it are a trap, preventing us from moving forward, making change, or healing. Even Doctor Manhattan, with power over space and time, is trapped, a being of inaction as nostalgic for the past as the future he can perceive with equal clarity.

“People who wear masks are driven by trauma. They’re obsessed with justice because of some injustice they’ve suffered, ergo masks. To hide the pain,” Agent Blake declares, tired from a lifetime of costumed adventurers and the world they inhabit.

Over nine hours, Watchmen takes our nostalgia, our yearning for sequels and catharsis and adventure and, peeling back the mask, we become that little boy in a theatre looking up at the screen depicting a black law keeper born in the time when American slavery was real, the show asks us: what do we really see?

Cast: Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jeremy Irons, Jean Smart, Yahya Abdul Mateen II, Jovan Adepo, Andrew Howard, Tom Mission, Louis Gossett Jr, Dylan Schombing, Hong Chau, and Sara Vickers

Executive producers: Damon Lindelof, Tom Spezialy. Nicole Kassell, Stephen Williams, Joseph E. Ibert

Premiered: October 20^th, 2019-December 15^th (HBO)

Ben Berman Ghan is a Jewish-Settler, writer, editor, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory. He has served as fiction editor of The Spectatorial, associate editor of The Goose, the Hart House Review, prose editor of Terse Journal, and poetry editor of The White Wall Review. He’s the author of many short stories, essays, and a few poems, and is completing his MA in English literature at Ryerson University’s Literature of Modernity program. His novel What We See in the Smoke was published in 2019 with Crowsnest Books. You can find him at @inkstainedwreck and inkstainedwreck.ca

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When the series was in the early stages of production, Lindelof took to Instagram about what viewers might expect of the series. “We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.”

Lindelof continued on to explain where this version of Watchmen would be situated. “Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.”

“I’ve been resistant to the comic book prequels and sequels, but what Damon’s doing is not that at all, it’s very far away from that,” Dave Gibbons, who co-created the series, said last year. “While it’s very reverential and true to the source material (by which I mean the Watchmen graphic novel that Moore and I did), it’s not retreading the same ground, it’s not a reinterpretation of it. It approaches it in a completely unexpected way.”

The series will star Regina King (Seven Seconds) as Angela Abraham, Don Johnson (Miami Vice) as Chief Judd Crawford, Tim Blake Nelson (Fantastic Four) as Looking Glass, Louis Gossett Jr. (An Officer and A Gentleman) as Old Man, Adelaide Clemens (Rectify) as Pirate Jenny, Andrew Howard (The Outpost) as Red Scare, Jean Smart (24)as Agent Blake, and Jeremy Irons (The Borgias) as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias.

Watchmen premieres October 20th on HBO with 10 episodes.

Will you be watching Watchmen? Tell us in the comments below!

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Read on to discover what shows are coming your way and tell us in the comments below what you’re looking forward to!

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Watchmen is based on the graphic novel co-created and illustrated by Dave Gibbons and published by DC. The new series comes Damon Lindelof and it’s set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws, this drama series embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name while attempting to break new ground of its own.

When the series was in the early stages of production, Lindelof took to Instagram about what viewers might expect of the series. “We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted.”

Lindelof continued on to explain where this version of Watchmen would be situated. “Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica.”

“I’ve been resistant to the comic book prequels and sequels, but what Damon’s doing is not that at all, it’s very far away from that,” Dave Gibbons, who co-created the series, said last year. “While it’s very reverential and true to the source material (by which I mean the Watchmen graphic novel that Moore and I did), it’s not retreading the same ground, it’s not a reinterpretation of it. It approaches it in a completely unexpected way.”

The series will star Regina King as Angela Abraham, Don Johnson as Chief Judd Crawford, Tim Blake Nelson as Looking Glass, Lous Gossett Jr. as Old Man, Adelaide Clemens as Pirate Jenny, Andrew Howard as Red Scare, Jean Smart as Agent Blake, and Jeremy Irons as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias.

Watchmen will premiere on HBO in October.

What do you think of the trailer? Tell us in the comments below!

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“Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?” Translated from Latin, it means “Who watches the watchers?” It is also the quintessential tagline for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ masterpiece, Watchmen. This is where people start getting really excited and talk about Zack Snyder and the 2009 film by the same name. While many people know that Watchmen was originally a comic book, very few realise how big it actually was. Since it’s 1986 release, the graphic novel has been recognised as a coming-of-age story for the comic genre. Having won an Eisner Award and a Hugo Award, clearly this is an important piece of literature. So how does the much-awarded graphic novel stand up to modern film making? Is it possible to compare the two? Did Zack Snyder create one of the most polarising films of the decade? Let’s find out!

The Graphic Novel

I should probably preface this section by saying that I was a fan of the film before I found the novel. When I heard recently that HBO had acquired the rights to produce a TV show, I was really excited. I did some research and found out that the show would a completely different story to the 2009 film. So, I thought I had better start reading some back issues and get a better grasp on the world. It was in that moment that I realised I hadn’t read the original. Within the hour, I had the 2014 edition of the novel in my hand and was reading Rorshach’s disgusting monologue about how sick and broken the world is.

This leads me to my first point. Being able to put a novel down, take a break, and come back to it is one of the strengths of the medium. Because there is no limit on time, a novel has the ability to convey as little or as much detail as needed. While I churned through some chapters, others really slowed me down. By the time I finished the book, the peaks and troughs in action had more or less hit a nice average. The reason it took me longer in some parts was because of the intense characterisations. Everyone had their own arc. Each character went on their own voyage of discovery and we as the reader was allowed to tag along. We got to witness the slow decay of Jon Osterman into the dehumanised Dr. Manhattan. We got to peak behind the curtain of The Comedian’s mask and feel his sadness. We got to relive the traumatic upbringing of Laurie as her mother forces the mantle of Silk Spectre onto her.

What really hammers home the psychological profiling of these characters are the insights you find between chapters. I’m not sure if it’s true for all printed versions, but the one that I purchased had excerpts from newspaper articles, confidential medical reports, personal letters, and even an essay written to The American Ornithological Society. It is through these documents that we are able to glean more nuanced information about these bizarre costumed crusaders.

This is what you expect when you read a novel that’s been adapted to film. What I didn’t expect though, was the amount of colour on the pages. Huge amounts of red, blue and green dominated backgrounds with highlights of yellow and purple that almost assault your eyes.

This is where we need to congratulate and spread the name of John Higgins. He was the colourist for the novel and has enhanced what is an already striking visual. He adeptly uses these colours together in unusual ways to create shadow and create the illusion of light diffusion. In doing this he is able to match the mood of each pane to the characters state of mind. Many directors do this with TV and movies but they can have as much control as someone who gets to colour the page the way they want.

Finally, the novel has impeccable metaphors. While most of the emotional characterisation is portrayed through the actual panel colours, there is a lot of detail in the background that helps to tell the stories. There are these great segments that feature a news vendor who talks to passing people about the state of the world in order to sell his papers. Meanwhile there is a kid who sits next to him everyday and reads a comic called Tales of The Black Freighter. While the vendor is talking quite often in the same pane, there is a snippet of dialogue that reflects the fears and anxieties of the citizens who live in these trying times. Initially I thought that the pirate comic sounded cool and thought I’d buy a copy for myself. After researching, I found that Tales of The Black Freighter was written exclusively for the Watchmen novel. Moore and Gibbons really created a full feeling world with their attention to detail. Not only does it add credibility to their universe, but also provides an extra layer of depth.

Ultimately the Watchmen Novel is a deeply written labour of love, intricately produced by everyone involved in the project. It is a stunning read not for the faint of heart. If you go into it expecting some surface level eye candy, you’ll be disappointed. It is dense and heavily thematic and deserves to be read with your full attention. Even if you don’t like comics, I would recommend that you read this book. I thought it would be a fun, pulpy kind of read, but found myself thinking about my place in the world after I put it down each night.

A must read for everyone; Fans of comics, or otherwise. It redefined the genre. 9/10

The Zack Snyder Film

So, for whatever reason, over the course of my adult life, I have sat down to watch the 2009 film five or six times. I have only finished the film twice. The number one reason for this is that it is long. The theatrical cut is 162 minutes, the directors cut is 186 minutes, and the “Ultimate” cut is a whopping 215 minutes! That is time that most humans just don’t have to spend all at once. It was an ambitious project for Zack Snyder to undertake. The reason it ended up being so long is because of the amazing complexity of the source material. There is little you can cut out without making the story suffer. But he did it and made it work pretty well I might add. Of course, this is my opinion of the film and other opinions vary wildly from person to person. Many people consider this adaptation a travesty and a waste of celluloid. Others have hailed it as the superhero movie we have all been waiting for. How on earth can a film polarise its audience so completely?

I think the first thing that we need to discuss is the amazing intro sequence:

This montage by itself is one of my favourite things about the film. Over the space of four minutes, it establishes the setting of the story and catches us up on the alternate history of this universe. While all of this backstory is rationed out through the chapters of the novel, here they are bundled together for convenient digestion. The use of Bob Dylan also ties the story into the right timeframe, adding to the strong sense of time and place. The rest of the soundtrack is pretty hit and miss, though. While Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Nat King Cole, and Leonard Cohen create memorable within the story, Watchmen would have benefited from only using this kind of music. When the orchestra provided the backing track for most big fights, it lacked that comic book zip. Roundabout by Yes or maybe Supertramp could’ve added something. The standard movie music fell flat and left my mind to drift when it did play.

I came to a similar conclusion with some of the acting. Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach was brilliant. He was far and away one of the shining lights of the production. Haley’s interpretation of Rorschach was very close to the comic version. It was so eerily close, I thought that he had jumped straight out of the pages and onto the screen. Many people took issue with his growling voice, but I quite liked it. It helped hammer home his anti-humanist views, trying to be as inhuman as possible. Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian were also impressive. Crudup brought his own take on Dr. Manhattan’s disinterest in humanity. While the comic version was almost struggling with a superiority complex, Crudup played his Manhattan closer to someone who lacked empathy. He simply didn’t understand how people behaved anymore and that made him a bit more personable in a way. In contrast to this, Morgan’s Comedian was raw, emotional and prone to mood swings at the drop of a hat. On the other side of this coin are the performances of Matthew Goode and Malin Akerman who played Ozymandias and Laurie Jupiter respectively. Ozymandias was a bland super villain. He had none of the self-righteousness of your classic villain. This feeds into him not having enough depth as character and this in turn is because much of his characterisation in the novel, never made the final cut. As result, he was just another asshole trying to end the world. Similarly, Akerman didn’t get a huge chance to exhibit growth as Laurie. Her interactions with Jon (Dr. Manhattan) felt stiff. They lacked the chemistry together that was required to be truly absorbing.

Finally, Zack Snyder seems to have taken some notes from Christopher Nolan about the set. Much like the Batman films that were a huge success the year before, many of the sets in Watchmen were very dark. If they weren’t physically dark, they were often washed out and made to look grey. I’m sure this is a comment on how dark the themes of the story are, but one location blends into the next when it’s this dark. Surely these larger than life characters deserve some colourful landscapes to run around in? Like the when the orchestra took over from the soundtrack, my brain switched off and stopped paying attention to the backgrounds after a while.

I’m much more forgiving of this film than most people it would seem. There were parts that failed to keep my attention and some of the music bored me. Considering how long the movie is, there were enough bright sparks to keep me watching until the end. Jackie Haley should be recognised for his role in the film if he hasn’t been already. Some more licensed music could help to cut through the darkness of the film.

If you like hero movies, give it a look. If not, I wouldn’t recommend it to you. 7/10

With HBO announcing a TV series set in the same universe in 2019, there’s lots to discuss. Especially because Jeremy Irons is an official cast member. That’s for another article though. At any rate, whether you’re an old school comic fan, or a new age cinema buff, we all have to admit that Watchmen has left its mark in the industry.

Do you like the Watchmen? Are you looking forward to the new series? Tell us in the comments below!

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