#snydercut: #marvel's vindication

1) Is this 4 hour movie supposed to convince us that the DCEU wasn't rushed? That it wasn't a crass and cynical attempt to cash in on the ancillary market benefits of the superhero genre as patiently crafted and honed through the unlikely and immensely risky efforts of Marvel Studios and their cache of B-C tier superheroes, made mainstream through a ten year dedication to the creation of some really well produced motion pictures?  Are we supposed to pat HBO Max or Warner or Zack Snyder on the back now?   If you need a 4 hour movie to make it all come together then maybe what you actually needed was at least two more 2 hour movies before your narrative could properly make a Justice League movie.  Just saying...

2) To all the people saying that #snydercut is some kind of vindication of the integrity of the artistic process (sidebar: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA), I guess i have two simple questions.  The first - if Zack Snyder was forced to take the 7 hours of film he had and make a 2 hour movie, would that movie be significantly better than the Joss-tice League?  And the second, if Joss Whedon had the freedom to take those same 7 hours and make a 4 hour movie, would that movie be significantly worse than Zack Snyder's Justice League?  I don't think anyone in the world can convince me that the answer to either of those questions isn't no.

3) Why are people fighting over Zack Snyder's artistic vision when DC/Warner are going to drop it at the very first opportunity to reboot it all and make the money all over again?  It's not like the Snyderverse was in the running to still be chugging along 10 years from now like the MCU.  He made a Justice League movie before Flash and Cyborg (to say nothing of Lantern or Martian Manhunter or Hawkgirl) were even committed to film.  It was always going to be, at most, something to squeeze dry.  It was going to run its course, make some money, and then Warner would try something new and different...the way they have with literally everything else.  Christopher Nolan made perhaps the greatest film with any of these characters, The Dark Knight.  Did Warner use that artistic and commercial success and spin-off a universe of characters from that world?  Did they slowly and methodically do the work of taking Nolan's grounded, hyperrealistic vision and weave increasingly fantastical elements until they had something that was both gritty and bombastic?  Did they interweave the fate of Gotham with some international intrigue that led Bruce to Lex Luthor in Metropolis bringing him into an uneasy alliance with the Man of Steel?  No, they dropped it and everything in it, every character, every story beat, every detail.  Cleared the slate to fill the board with something...better?  Comparing the MCU to the DCEU is literally the same as comparing the Disney animation library with...everyone else.  Disney has been doing it non-stop since 1937.  Everyone else is just a tourist visiting a place that Disney lives.  

The MCU builds on concrete; the DCEU builds on sand.  

4) How can people wonder why the MCU has so much good will?  Quick: Over-under on how many actors will play Superman on screen again before I die?  Over-under on how many actors besides Robert Downey Jr will play Tony Stark on screen before I die?  Can you imagine Marvel rebooting Iron Man?  Captain America?  The idea is ludicrous.  Marvel has put in the work and has the faith that they can make an Ant-Man movie sell tickets.  But Warner doesn't believe that they can make a Captain Atom movie that will sell.  To quote Thanos, the Warner/DC executives see the world as it is instead of what it could be.  And because they don't have that faith, they don't put in the work and because they don't put in the work, their faith will never be rewarded. So get ready to see Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman rebooted for the Nth time before you'll ever see a Black Canary movie, which incidently in a perfect world, would be a million times more bankable of an idea than a Black Widow movie.  But Disney is going to make money off of Black Widow that Warner will never make off of Black Canary because 1) they got a great actress in Scarlett Johansson to play the part and 2) they were ballsy enough to put the character in like 6 movies more than Black Canary will probably ever be in.

The MCU is an avalanche gaining momentum downhill.  The DCEU is a snowball melting in the sun.

5)  The first appointment TV series of my life was Batman The Animated Series.  The second was X-Men The Animated Series.  If you missed a new episode, you basically didn't exist in school until you saw it.  You were on the outside while everyone else was talking about it.  

DC has the braintrust to do what Marvel did.  But somewhere there is a disconnect between the creative side, the adaptation side and the bottom line people.  Marvel has put together a bunch of visionary directors; DC settles for one visionary director and chooses, of all people, Zack Snyder.  And that's not to say that Zack Snyder isn't one of a kind.  He is.  But what is the movie that someone would point to to say that Zack Snyder should be personally responsible for 7 hours of filmaking in the DCEU alone?  What has Zack Snyder done to earn a 4 hour movie?  I wouldn't personally sit for 4 hours through a Spielberg movie.  Maybe Hitchcock, maybe Kubrick...But Zack Snyder?

Between CA: Winter Soldier, CA: Civil War and the momentous task of ending the 10 year MCU run to this point, the Russo brothers had obviously earned as much runtime as they needed to make the final Avengers movie.  And they wisely broke their narrative into two parts.  Infinity War and Endgame could have been one 5 hour movie.  But, umm, they have some sense in their heads???  They had every excuse to make Endgame some uber-long epic a la the Return of the King extended cut.  Their movie was exactly ONE HOUR shorter than Zack Snyder's 'masterpiece'.  So one film maker makes a good Superman film, and a mess of a crossover film and gets 4 hours for his next film.  The others make two absolutely kick-ass movies and then decide to break up their swan-song into two parts and they barely crack the 3 hour mark.  How does any of this add up?

Too unjustified, too unearned.  Too convoluted, too audacious for too little setup.  Imagine putting a vision of the future and a time travelling visitor from the future in the same scene.  Zack Snyder actually put his Knightmare foreshadowing right next to the Flashpoint omen in a movie introducing Ben Affleck as Batman.  But was there a Flash movie at that point in the narrative for any of that to make any semblance of sense?  No - they just expected you to stick around for there to be some eventual payoff.  Was that a safe assumption?  Was that a reasonable assumption?  Or, was the movie with the Knightmare scene as a plot element actually being made at the same time as BVS so that you could at least say - "well the movie where this happens is going to be released one way or another"?  Since the odds are pretty much against that Knightmare storyline ever coming to pass, the answer is a resounding no.  So it wasn't a safe or reasonable assumption that there would be a payoff to that scene AND putting that scene in the movie materially decreased the chances that the movie it was in would be good enough to make that storyline a reality.   If, for whatever reason, people are watching BVS 50 years from now, they'll just be like, 'why is this in the movie?"

Contrast this with Nick Fury's appearance at the end of Iron Man.  In an after-credits scene.  If Avengers happens, great.  If it doesn't and the entire MCU falls apart, it was in an after-credits scene.  The movie it was in is affected in no way whatsoever.  

6) There has to be standards.  These things aren't all created equally.  100 years from now, when people have 10 decades worth of more stuff to watch, people will still be watching Batman the Animated Series.   Will they still be watching The Batman with Robert Pattinson when there will almost definitely be 10-15 other motion picture reboots of Batman between now and then to choose from?  The movie hasn't even been released yet but I'm pretty sure the answer is no.  It will be like one of the 40 or so Zorro movies that have been made - none of them saying anything all that different, so if you were going to sit down and watch any of them, you'd likely only look at the highest rated one and the most recent one.  All the others are just cannon fodder: soulless cash grabs to exploit a property license for the sole purpose of lining a studio's pocketbooks.

We fanboys get wrapped up in Marvel vs DC and all the rest of the nonsense.  But we need to take a step back and look at these properties from a more broad lens.  Someone wrote the story of Hercules and you have to bet that someone wrote the story of someone just like Hercules.  Why do we know Hercules but not that other guy?  It is because for something to last it has to meet certain expectations.  And we who love these stories and characters have to expect and demand enduring iterations of these characters, that speak to comic books lovers but also have a place in the overall storytelling heritage of this species.  Stories that build on each other.  Films with certain timeless qualities with some dimension compelling enough to be captivating to someone seeing it at age 5 or age 50.   And a pretty easy way to tell is: will people 100 years from now still watch this?  If the answer is no, we shouldn't be fighting over it, defending it or trying to save it.  We should just be demanding for something that people will be bothering to watch a century from now.

I'm pretty sure people will be watching the MCU a century from now the same way we still watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 83 years later.  But if someone thinks people will be watching the Snyder Cut a hundred years from now and can say that with a straight face, I'd love to have whatever that person is smoking.