ZACK SNYDER
Building Legends

.: Victor Soho :.

WARNING: It may be obvious to people with more context of Snyder’s work, more for those who don’t, there are two versions of Justice League: a montage directed by Joss Wheedon (2017) and the four-hour one by Zack Snyder (2021). The first montage will always be referred to as Justice League, while the second version will be Zack Snyder’s Justice League, as well as its abbreviation ZSJL.

Also note that English is not my mother tongue, nor am I a professional translator. So I am sorry for any mistakes I may make.

Mythology has a bad reputation in today’s culture. Movies based on comic books, the last bastion of imaginative projection and emotional need, have so normalized the superhero ideal that the stories have become more about opportunities for conflict and violent revenge (facile political allegories born of the era’s fractious temperament) than about anything like divinity.

Superheroic Testimonies, Armond White

Zack Snyder is not an action director; his theme is epic.

Mythmaking, more than a verb, it is the discipline of the way of making legends, of choosing a character and endowing him with the characteristics that could make him a potential hero. In the same way that we differentiate the model of comedy between authors like Lusbitch or Keaton, one being dialogic and theatrical, while the other is physical and circus-like; it makes no sense to continue to encompass the genre of action as if all these films continue the same tradition. The action of Michael Bay's cinema is direct and accelerated, with little focus on the characters and no sense of space: narrative simplicity and detachment from reality in favor of sensory spectacularity. Another example: A Touch of Zen, King Hu uses action to relate to his spiritual experience or to show those possibilities -sensory and physical- that can accompany mystical exercise. Zack Snyder is not mysticism, but mythology. Snyder's mythology is neither an esoteric attempt by man to explain nature, nor the tension between the divine and the real. Snyder proposes an atheistic mythology, but above all a postmodern one: of self-consciousness as image and as icon -just look at the interview he gave in Sdyney's Supanova in 2013, claiming that, despite defending an authorial vision, he never wanted to take away from Superman the iconography that makes that superhero -the cape, the suit, or the city "Metropolis" itself should remain, despite the interests of Warner Bros-. What is the use of this mythology? None other than to reflect on it, as well as on the drives that move the heroes themselves. A mythology that thinks itself.

Snyder's first narrative production is a medium-length film for DVD about Michael Jordan. So, separate from the nature of his next projects, the basic elements of his preoccupation with idolatry and icons have room to be explored in the field of sports. Already at the beginning, Michael Jordan, on a magical field, looks at the camera. With a jump, the sportsman becomes an icon (of basketball and of a brand of shoes). A boy is not accepted in his basketball team; a comment from the teacher: "Michael Jordan was also rejected". The boy isn’t accepted in his basketball team and Michael Jordan appears to play with him. They are idols to look up to, they mark the path and shape the expectations and hopes of the rest. This production is just and advertisement about the great that was the figure of the player -although more interesting than later productions such as The Last Dance-, spending minutes and minutes in not very elaborated montages of his best plays with voice-overs of his teammates. But the simplicity of the proposal and the commercial conventions of this kind of documentaries let Snyder synthesize some of his future proposals, most of them icons or heroes that he does not create (Batman, Superman, or the main characters of Watchmen), but that are an indispensable part of popular culture. This interest in what has already been created or what is already mythical can even be appreciated in the use of soundtracks he makes: versions of great classics of popular music of the 20th century.

The world that Watchmen describes in its intro directly addresses us, but it does not do it from the links that a filmmaker with an academic sense of history could make (like Farocki, Godard, Galibert-Laîné…), but from the pop iconography. Watchmen does not conceive so much a reflection from the event, as from the visual icons that were transmitted by the mass media of those events. The story is presented at the same time as a trauma and as propaganda -as it only shows possible threats to capitalism or beneficial events for the persistence of this system-, in a tense balance between the unbearable and the spectacular that the pop media uses when dealing with these wounds. It is a superficial representation of these conflicts, because, it has less to say about the conflicts themselves as in the way they are represented. This is one of the key points of Snyder's filmography, which has always been more about how we represent and not so much about what is represented. Whether through the intro with Bob Dylan or the pop mosaic that Ozymandias observes, all representation affects the object represented. This is especially interesting as Watchmen is the most worldbuilding-centered film in his filmography. Multiple endings of the Zack Snyder's Justice League are to present the events of the next installment, but not a sign that a world exists beyond these protagonists. Watchmen has several shots dedicated to the city, to its people, it records conversations located outdoors from the street and with very open shots or with a reflection of the city present in the glass. There is always a presence of a world that exists and moves beyond the protagonists.

To finish understanding part of Snyder's DNA, it is worth referring to an anecdote that Neil Bahadur points out in his review of Man of Steel: "My dear comrade Kurt Walker once related me a story of having briefly met Zach Snyder in 2009 around the release of Watchmen, whereupon he asked him what his favorite film was. His response was along the lines of ‘When I was younger it was Andrei Rublev, now it would probably be Star Wars.’". The most prestigious iconographer in the history of Russia with the great epic of contemporary pop culture. The artist in charge of bringing the symbols of God to the world, facing the adaptation of Joseph Campbell's theories on myth to mass media society.

DRAGGED HEROES -

Zack Snyder's work understands icons as a popular way to provoke emotional tension in the masses -moving or confronted, depending on the process of identification of the subject with the icon- making it possible for a youngster to join his basketball team because he identifies with his idol. It plays with the natural impulse of wanting to be a hero, but that does not mean that they feel the same passion for themselves. Most of Snyder's heroes are dragged to be so, not by personal vocation or to seek reputation. In one of Bong Joon-Ho's great parodic moments in The Host, an American boy tries to save the day by confronting the monster. The consequences are swift, and he dies shortly after entering the fight. In Sucker Punch, the heroine refuses to use violence until a rape inclines her to do so. Leonidas defends his people, first with words, and only incites war when it offers no alternatives. Both Batman and Superman have their origins in traumatic circumstances related to their family ties, while Dr. Manhattan saw his humanity taken away from his sentimental interests. Even in a minor work such as his short film Snow Steam Iron, the origin of violence is exposed in the synopsis: " Iron is the will of the one who would dare to resist… fight… survive.". The origin of Snyder's cinema is classical, and he feels a predilection for the figures of Greco-Roman culture. Snyder's heroes could be based on a famous phrase of Seneca: "The willing, Destiny guides them. The unwilling, Destiny drags them.". Part of Snyder's legend is the condemnation of our own nature that forces us to form a specific part of society, a form of destiny from which no one can escape due to a mixture of a sense of survival and a sense of responsibility. His oeuvre establishes a tension between what we would like to be and what we would end up being, a tension that breaks when the ideal becomes reality, and we have to accept the real weight of responsibility. Another tension: the life of a hero is only good for the rest, never for those who must live it. To be a hero is an act of generous sacrifice, a feeling of obligation that goes beyond one's own benefit -I know it is linked to its inheritance from the Christian tradition, but I consider much more essential the influence of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in this perspective-. On the other hand, the feeling of being overwhelmed by these situations brings with it an entire population that follows in the footsteps of its myths.

Among the most debated topics in the circles surrounding Snyder is the extreme sexualization of his characters. This is another of the fundamental points in Snyder's cinema: the difference between sexualization and empowerment. In Snyder the gender roles are visibly marked, but he knows how to choose the elements so that both can remain as objects of sexual desire and figures of power. They are characters that balance the tension between violence and sexuality. Armond White writes, in a shameful but interesting text about Justice League: " Despite all the “Nasty Women” and adolescent boys embracing Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman as a Hillary surrogate, Gadot’s girlish pique didn’t send the erotic signals that Momoa emits, and that Snyder knows how to photograph. When Aquaman first appears in battle he lands with two feet planted on a rock and a wave of water sprays up behind him, rising like a theater curtain to a scenario of your wildest imagining. [...] Most importantly, he films actors so that their emotional lives are also expressed physically: their commitment to justice, truth and righteousness take on bodily strength." Even his most advanced companions do not reach Snyder's levels in this aspect, as can be seen in James Wan's Aquaman, where his companion Mera is barely seen as an active element of the story and serves, mainly, as Aquaman's love connection. One of the most interesting cases under these terms in Snyder's films is Sucker Punch, where the love scenes are dreamlike fragments of some cabaret dancers. The erotic expectation of the spectators of the narration is subverted by the reality observed by the spectators of the film itself; the erotic dance has been supplanted by the movie.

About 300, the debate was notoriously heated, with the evident erotic force not only of the protagonists individually, but also between them - placing the tensions between Leonidas, the Spartan king; and Xerxes, the Persian king-. Leonidas stars in different shots where he is part of being the objectified object, to the point that his buttocks and abdomen form the central point of interest of the frame and the light. The famous Leonidas has already had a reinterpretation enraptured by the Spartan physique in Jacques-Louis David's Léonidas aux Thermopyles (1814). The stiff, muscular figures, some of which offer erotic physical friction, already suggest Snyder's future sexual-war narrative. This fascination with the erotic body of the warrior will be fundamental to talk about the nature of the Spartan people as a warrior people -as can be seen in the famous scene of the soldiers' recognition-, but also in the physical differentiation with those exiled or the Persian slaves themselves -with bodies of fantasy worlds, like the trolls and other deformed creatures-. A Greek and Western empowerment that is natural to the citizens themselves, but which above all proposes a strong body politics in Snyder's hands -even if it is a reactionary and hypermasculinized politics-. Eroticization is a way of showing superiority and sex is treated as a humiliation towards the other.

Sucker Punch is one of the tensest cases. At the beginning the film seems to be the least political of Snyder, reminding me of Michael Bay's Bad Boys II; which is thematic and discursive unconcern to put to the full the formative narrative capabilities of his style; the ludic reveals his essential traits as directors. The whole structure would be typical of a video game, with clear objectives and disconnection between the different setpieces as if they were levels of an arcade -justified by the oneiric form of the film-. The video game spaces of Sucker Punch not only allow Snyder to play with inventive proposals of action, but with what are understood as basic elements of the world of video games (samurais, world wars, mechas, swords and dragons) and he mashes them up without hesitation, embracing the aesthetics of mods and the derisory proposals -at the plot level- of great video games in a sensibility similar to Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The doubt arises at the end when everything takes on Zack Snyder's own political tinge. Sucker Punch is a film about the political liberation of an exploited class at the hands of the businessman -in this case the Cabaret-, to reveal the final asylum as another way of state oppression. The protagonist does not cease to be a martyr, who calls for armed struggle and manages to free one of her companions. In this sacrifice she proposes a way of being, of being a righteous person; but also of the prophecy fulfilled by the wise man with the tragic. She fulfilled a destiny that she avoided, but in this feeling dragged she managed to save and free a companion in an act of sacrifice. The mythical and the political converge, making Sucker Punch one of the clearest cases of a basic Snyder hero.

FROM THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE OTHER TO ITS DIVINIZATION:

300 & BATMAN V SUPERMAN -

Snyder's classical foundations did not take long to appear, announcing in 2004 the adaptation project of Frank Miller's comic book of the same name, 300. Snyder's concern is directed here to an evident demonstration of the Greek models of power. Exaggerated, filtered through the lens of advertising and the new digital media; but with the basic points of its form: hierarchical and teleological. Neil Bahadur pointed out in a commentary that this seemed to be written by Plato, but its hierarchy is presocratic at all levels, being the soldier the superior and last position of society. They are models based on the Homeric epics, where the soldier is the basis of the upright man of society -the future virtuous man-. The point is that 300 is about a lost battle told as a legend. The story is not so much about the victory and strength of Leonidas' army, but about how small groups and emboldened souls can lead an entire population to defend itself.

"‘Remember us.’ As simple an order as a king can give. ‘Remember why we died.’ For he did not wish tribute, nor song, nor monuments nor poems of war and valor. His wish was simple. ‘Remember us’, he said to me. That was his hope."

Not just a hero in search of fame, but a martyr who would show the way to his people. The difference with the Persians at physical levels has a superior intention, not only to differentiate barbarians from Greeks or soldiers from enemies: the difference is between a man with faith in his principles versus anarchy. Snyder's disfigurement also attends to the oracles, which despite being an essential part of the Greek world, because they are corrupted in their soul, Snyder externalizes their aberration in the anatomy of their bodies. The Spartan exile not only has problems in his joints and malformations, but he is also a traitor.

Continuing with the question of the exile and the foreigner, one of the most brilliant ideas of his cinema is to turn Superman in Man of Steel into a story about immigration. The origin story on Krypton is the narrative of the exile, of someone who has to leave his homeland due to greater forces. Superman is an alien, with obvious anatomical differences; and yet he feels American. Raised all his life there, he understands that he is a man from Kansas -as he says-, not from elsewhere. Superman is the absolute representation of the idyllic American model, but Snyder debates on how much sense it makes in a country formed by immigrants who assassinated the true natives a sense of belonging. The end of the film and the beginning of the next one, Batman V Superman, is closely linked to the catastrophe of the Twin Towers, especially in his images with Batman. Here the twist is represented in a relationship of conflicts where Batman is the average citizen, unable to understand the situation and looking for revenge; while Superman is the one unjustly accused because of his origins. The twist so much in question with the word "Martha" is not a reconciliation because both have a mother with the same name, but in the fact that they both fight for the same thing. In that encounter, Batman understands what are the forces that motivate Superman, which are no different from his own. Batman V Superman speaks of two orphic men marked by trauma that, due to the mass media and a lack of understanding, are understood as rivals, even fighting for the same thing. Batman is a fascist, a rich millionaire with affective deficiencies; while Superman is the son of farmers, adopted, always feeling like a stranger. The possible link between both is a love letter or the understanding of two figures, at first, contradictory; at the same time a personal and intimate exploration of the national political conflicts and how personal experiences influence the political determinations. It is a "comedy of misunderstanding" filtered by action cinema and Snyder's obsession with mass media. The evolution of Batman's character is lost in the resounding staging of Justice League, but it is curious how he points to a complete turnaround of his thoughts: now he forms a group, believes in a collective and rejects the individual struggle.

Snyder does not propose an idea of the perfect human, while Superman is an alien. First, he raises the question of the citizen beyond the other, beyond the conception that the citizen is what we consider human and do it universal (Spielberg). Therefore, he proposes a model that is not ideal, inasmuch as it is corruptible, that even in the best intentions can be corrupted and go against the ideas he was praising (Lucas). Snyder's trio of DC superheroes becomes an essential point of union for the two most important directors of the blockbuster.

Snyder's politics is not as liberal as they say, much less nihilistic, depressing, or edgy. Snyder has a humanist vision of social conflicts, not only by linking them to personal and individual experiences, but as he always calls for understanding and union. In contrast with Marvel, which offers a fantasy of progressive power falling into the dynamics of capital, even when it tries to be revolutionary. It seems to me especially problematic in examples like Black Panther, which detaches the economic issue linked to race to turn its narrative into one of monarchical legacy. Snyder offers reflections on violence and the power of free ideas, but that at least contradict, hide, and unveil themselves; without hiding in small scenes and secondary scenes that are easily extractable for countries with censorship -proper of Disney's technique of the last decade-. I remember Shyamalan, as they both make films full of good heart about mutual understanding, the power of the collective and the importance of bonds in times of terror and how they are so criticized by the general public, which rejects their works without wanting to understand them.

WATCHMEN CASE: IDOLS IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING -

The most criticized case of his cinema, in a collective complicity that includes even his defenders, in the theory that Zack Snyder does not understand the original work. People do not stop repeating, with the condescension of the average fan, that Zack Snyder does not understand that Watchmen is a parody, vulgarizing the characters and evading spectacular imagery. Undoubtedly, Alan Moore's work runs through these codes, while Snyder never lets the critics, or the review deny the protagonists their heroic quality.

Alan Moore's work seems to me cynical in its approach to the genre. He takes away from the heroes their epic characteristics to show the falseness of a narrative that, later, he will say that it is typical of "white supremacists", while he labels the superheroes as a children's pastime -worried that adults also enjoy these codes-. Alan Moore's Watchmen is still a work that reveals the prejudices of the masses, that cannot be separated from the entertainment and that, in addition, condemns it for being so. It shows the obvious: that superheroes are the infantile dreams and idealizations of power of a mass in search of icons. As Mark Fisher explains in his analysis of V for Vendetta: "I already find Moore's efforts to reassure himself and his readers about his own erudition irritating before - every time you're on the verge of succumbing to the fictional world, it's as if Moore called your brother and said, 'We're too good for this, aren't we'". In a sense of our thinking -in a real world, not in a fictional one-, the fascination for a man in a latex suit who protects the world is ridiculous, but acceptable in the realms of fiction. A story of ghosts, any kind of mythology or the origins proposed by the religion can be taken as a joke if they try to be applied to reality; that is why Moore's work is deceitful, because it places itself above and takes advantage of the genre, seeing it from the outside, as if it were an intruder or something external. Jacques Tourneur has a very interesting short film, The Rainbow Pass (1937), where he exposes the difficulty of different cultures to understand different codes. For the westerners, the Chinese plays that are represented in the film are ridiculous and lack the epic that they have for the natives. On the other hand, the spectacle they are selling to the people of the zone is the highest art form they can have. Alan Moore's Watchmen is an obvious twist, based on real arguments irrelevant to these stories. In Zack Snyder's mythmaking there is no time for mockery because he trusts and believes in the stories he tells. They do not understand that the parody or the reflection on the legend must be linked to a ridicule of his characters, but it tensions more the exposition between the plausible and the fictional. It is introspective and decadent, without the need to make anyone pathetic.

Umberto Eco reflects, in his homonymous work, on the apocalyptic and the integrated. Using Dwight McDonald's terms, he understands that the apocalyptic is the one who rejects the mass culture, with pessimistic attitudes about its aesthetic or political utilities, while the integrated ones are in favor of it and play with its codes. Alan Moore is all the clichés of the apocalyptic: complacent, nostalgic, with not taste for ridicule, not very reflective... He is not an interesting figure in these terms, because his facade of adolescent outsider hides nothing but prejudices. Zack Snyder shines as a more unique, critical and integrated being reflective in his own field and adding small and fundamental variations in each film. Eco speaks of midculture to reflect a part of the artistic world that collects old techniques and sells them as new in an attempt to separate itself from mass culture, which he sees as something lesser from which he wants to escape. This group of artists never have the experimental force of the highculture, nor the theoretical value of the latter; so they are situated in a comfortable middle ground with respect to the more radical and the more integrated. Alan Moore's work falls in the lower part of this group.

I find it difficult to defend Moore's work with Snyder's; one is comfortable with its own conclusions, while the other is ambivalent and contradictory. What for many is a lack of discourse, for me is a clear bet of Snyder's cinema for the epic demystification, something that resembles him much more to the second works of John Ford than the original material.

Moore becomes a bit of a Dr Manhattan, which is one of Snyder's most interesting characters, precisely because he lacks what they always emphasize: a strong relationship between ethics and action. Dr Manhattan is omnipotent on a physical level but lacks any kind of intelligence on an emotional and cultural level. He first demonstrates emotions but is incapable of understanding and expressing them. The flight to Mars is a desperate decision to never feel again, since everything that escapes the physical becomes uncontrollable for him. The lack of ethics, even of a spiritual vision of existence, leads him to fascism and imperialism since he does not value his actions as much as he executes them as a computer. "You have never seen human life from the perspective of life" said Dr Manhattan, but he is referring to a material life, more concretely a physical one. He is the one who does not see life from the cultural and social point of view, for reducing an object (the human race) to its components (the atoms, the cells) he cannot do more than a very concrete analysis of the situations -basically, he can only see life from what Graham Harman called undermining-. Dr Manhattan, therefore, is omnipotent on a physical plane (he can modify matter to his liking), but he is even more limited than the average human being in all other matters (he cannot make his partner not be angry with him, no matter how much he might want to). Moore is so cynical that he can only see the atoms and the superficial sense of absurdity of all these narratives, but he does not seem to face the cultural implications of what he pretends to represent.

APPENDIX 2021

What Warner Bros does to a mf

I wrote most of this analysis in 2019, so most of these opinions were expanded with the release of two more films: Zack Snyder's Justice League and Army of the Dead. Both are essential to understand the process of the creation of legends of which the original article spoke, since, apparently, the new version of Justice League marks the end of a stage; while Army of the Dead marks the beginning of a new one. This is not only mark by the production level of his works, as his next projects are working on smaller budgets and not linked to huge franchises. In ZSJL we expose the main ideas that Snyder has been building his career, while in Army of the Dead he presents important alterations to his model.

Zack Snyder's Justice League begins with Superman's scream after having sacrificed himself in the previous installment. In the last seconds of life, the shockwave of Superman's screams reaches all parts of the world, not to warn of the danger, but to recruit in the fight for justice. What in other films would be a cry for help or a warning; ZSJL presents the point of union of the rest of the heroes. The saga itself strives to create a link between the character of Superman and the story of Jesus Christ, which led many to interpret this act as a "he died for our sins" with his subsequent resurrection. In my opinion, his development as a character is not so much linked to that, as to that of a figure of revolution that leads a series of followers and people motivated by him to transmit his teachings and change their lifestyle to one more similar to what that person would want. For me the difference between one and the other model is that the first one creates a very precise feeling of guilt in the followers, while the second one exposes the hero as an ethical model that the rest follow. Only Batman feels indebted and, in part, guilty for Superman's death; the rest of the characters feel motivated by his story. This is the key point of the saga where Superman disappears and becomes an icon and myth. What in the first installment was the "S" of hope becomes a symbol of it without having to participate actively. What most marks this point is the character of Batman himself, whose two clearest characteristics, his individualism, and his lack of trust in others, disappear to give way to antonyms. Snyder is definitely not a left-wing director, but it is fascinating how in many occasions he defends the need of the collective for social changes and struggles against injustice. Even in Marvel's less supposedly conservative films such as Black Panther, Shang-Chi or Captain Marvel, it is the unique individual, sacrificed by effort, of ancestral lineage -in one case a monarch- who saves the world. Batman becomes a broken hero, who is incapable of overcoming the situation alone and has no choice but to ask for help -maybe due to the clear masculinization of all superheroes, but it is very rare to find a character who accepts that he cannot do it alone and needs external help without feeling it as a humiliation-.

One aspect that has been widely commented on since its release, with a direct relation to the way in which Snyder's work creates mythologies and heroes, is the decision to shoot this new version of Justice League with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio -a squarer and more elongated look than that of conventional cinema screens-. It seems a decision against the generalized intuition that the more elongated the more sense of epic -as in David Lean's films, the famous Cinerama of How the West Was Won or Abel Gance's Polyvision of Napoleon-, but I believe that this vision of epic from that horizontality has historically roots closer to the marketing that the authors used to use than an aesthetic imposition as obvious as most people want to make it look. In fact, in an era with a freer vision of ratio than in previous years, we can see how works very similar to the sense of sublime and adventure as those previously mentioned, even if they are passed through an arty filter, like Kelly Reichardt's First Cow or Lisandro Alonso's Jauja end up returning to this square format - even though I, as a film student, told a couple of professors in the midst of some conservative older gentlemen, that the right ratio to shoot epics was the longest possible -. In the case of Snyder, the choice for me is linked to a characteristic of his cinema that I already mentioned as an exception in Watchmen, a general absence of the world that surrounds the character with a very particular fixation on the human body. That is a reason that can place his cinema almost at the antipodes of the classic western, with a use that varies between the national, the metaphorical or the psychological in the landscape. Snyder's cinema is an epic of the body, something that can be seen even in the comparison with Wheedon's 2017 film. An example, when the Amazons escape from the temple in the first sequence they star in, they begin to kick down the door by giving big blows with sledgehammers to the logs that were blocking the doors. While Wheeden cuts the moment of impact between the mace and the body, Snyder builds the shot from the actual lifting of the mace and shoots in slow motion. Wheedon is only interested in the act and the consequences, but Snyder's cinema is concerned with the body and the efforts he must make to carry out his actions -I recommend watching the video analyzing the special effects of the two versions of Corridor Crew to see the comparison-. All these sequences in a square ratio with the importance of the muscles tensing, of the lifting of heavy objects or of great races brings Snyder back to one of the most quoted comparisons he had with the star of 300, the filming of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympics.

The most mythologized figure, in spite of everything, of Zack Snyder's Justice League is, precisely, Zack Snyder himself, who thousands of movie fans tried to turn into a hero who fought against the increasingly less flexible industry impositions and the monopoly that Disney itself is creating. As much as I may be happy about the vindication of his work as a filmmaker, I feel that this was not so, that he only celebrated the success of the new film, not vindicating the work prior to his entry into the world of DC. Zack Snyder brought a new work to the month of ZSJL, but it was so neglected that it doesn't seem from this year, but from the last decade.

I don't want to consider Army of the Dead as something I don't believe in. It is a work at the beginning of a new stage and, like most of these proposals, it carries with it the ambiguous feelings of works with a special weakness to try new things. They tend to be works that are more interesting to talk about than to see, works that are more interesting to discuss in retrospectives of a filmography that is rarely mentioned outside these circles.

Apart from changes in Snyder's career that are not included in this article, such as him taking the role of director of photography, his return to comedy or the change of budget from 300 million dollars (ZSJL) to 70-90 million dollars in a couple of months; there is a radical change in the type of heroes he chooses and whom he decides to mythologize. Now I talk about the particular relationship that Snyder has with the zombies in the film. The Zombie Queen is the only one who receives a tribute after his death, being the end of the main characters fast and aggressive, without time to mourn or any kind of pause. It is also Zeus, the leader of the zombies, who receives the most repeated and feared name, who has a series of very particular iconographies -the helmet, the cape, the zombie horse and the zombie tiger- that differentiate him, not only from the rest of the zombies, but from any other character -since the protagonists all have a military costume with very little charisma-. Thinking about another similar representation in Snyder's filmography, we would have to go to the post-credit scene of the apocalypse of ZSJL with Joker, which is shot after the filming of Army of the Dead. It could be said that the representation of Rorschach also collects elements of horror cinema and this middle ground between epic and sinister. In any case, comparing the appearance of the Joker with that of the Queen it seems that the points of similarity are clear, with the backlit illumination and the form of threat so direct that has the group of protagonists.

I don't want to consider Snyder a left-wing filmmaker either, but in the same way that Man of Steel did with the construction of the immigrant figure, Army of the Dead presents similar ideas by directly linking the zombies with native Americans who, as they already said, are good and heroic. It is more a western than a heist film, in which a group of people invade and rob the people who live in that territory. While arguing that the heroic aspect resides more in Bautista and his daughter, we are still talking about a worker in the hotel industry and a volunteer to help the refugees. It reminds me of Carpenter's Ghost of Mars -this is the most Carpenter's legacy film of all Snyder's filmography, a reference that is interesting to continue exploring in the future-, as both are symbolically and thematically westerns taken to the realm of fantasy and science fiction, with a very clear revision of the history of America as a process of colonization and extermination. The heroes, once again, did not fight to practice, but are forced to do so by greater circumstances that they would prefer to avoid. The group of protagonists always had the option of refusing the robbery, but the zombies never had any other option than to defend themselves.

Even treating Bautista and Purnell as heroes, a version that I am willing to admit, it would be the first time that these heroes are weaker in an evident way than with what they are facing. Neither Superman, nor Leonidas, nor Watchmen or the women of Sucker Punch at any time showed that weakness, that radical inability to overcome the situation in which they both find themselves. In this case, especially in Purnell's character, what would be clear is that Snyder's heroes are never defined by a superpower, but by a strong ethical model and a symbol of hope. In this case, a young girl who presents herself as a volunteer to help the refugees and incapable of giving up her values for anything in the world, to the point that it is better to see the end of the world than the loss of her ethics. Something that persists throughout Snyder's filmography.

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Articles cited and recommended bibliography:

Sexiest Movie Character of the Year, Armond White, 2017

https://www.out.com/armond-white/2017/11/17/sexiest-movie-character-year

Batman v Superman Returns Soul to Superheroes, Armond White, 2016

https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/batman-v-superman-culture-war-gets-mythic/

Superheroic Testimonies, Armond White, 2017

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/12/superheroic-testimonies

Neil Bahadur on Man of Steel, 2016

https://nbahadur.tumblr.com/post/148589032854/my-dear-comrade-kurt-walker-once-related-me-a

Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!, Raphael Sassaki (translation), 2019

https://alanmooreworld.blogspot.com/2019/11/moore-on-jerusalem-eternalism-anarchy.html