Some very (to say the least) encouraging news from filmdom broke yesterday: “300” director Zack Snyder will direct the new Superman film for Warner Bros., and as we already knew, “Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan will oversee the reboot as a producer. You couldn’t ask for a stronger super-hero Dream Team, which is why I couldn’t disagree more with comments like this:
Snyder is all about style over substance, and I think that’s a big reason why Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns” didn’t work, causing the studio to reboot the franchise just four years later.
Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen,” which will someday be recognized as the masterpiece it is, was twice as substantive and complicated (in the best way) as any film that came out that year. But even before that, with “300,” Snyder proved he understands and is uniquely capable of managing big, important, universal and timeless themes without hurting the overall story’s broader commercial appeal. And since this latest incarnation of the Man of Steel will be yet another reboot, Snyder is the perfect director to intelligently bring together all the necessary elements — mythology, character, action and excitement.
Some leftist critics slammed “300” as simplistic and stupid. Intentionally or not, they unfairly judged the film from a political point of view as opposed to an artistic one because they see the themes that drove “300” — those of self sacrifice, what it means to be a man, live free or die, and opposing cowardly appeasers willing to enable evil in exchange for the “stability” of slavery — as simplistic and silly. While that may be their sophisticated and impressively nuanced political opinion, artistically those are far from simplistic themes and extremely difficult to pull off without resorting to the inane, on-the-nose political speechifying that’s plagued every anti-war film since Bush Derangement Syndrome ravaged the Hollywood Hills.
Other than the terrible casting of Superman and Lois Lane, what undid “Superman Returns” was director Bryan Singer’s vision of Superman as an angsty alienated alien who seemed more interested in finding himself than fighting for truth, justice and all that stuff… “Superman Metrosexual” was all so self-consciously humorless, self-serious, dour and lacking in the heroism, spirit and romance that it completely missed the point of what made the first two Christopher Reeve films so timelessly entertaining. Oh, and it would’ve helped had Lex Luthor’s diabolical plot made a lick of sense. But if you boil it down, the problem with “Returns” is that Singer didn’t want to make a genre picture — which is what all great super-hero films really are.
As he showed with his terrific “Dawn of the Dead” remake and “300,” Snyder is the finest genre filmmaker to come out of the Double Aughts — which makes him perfectly unpretentious for this assignment. And with his two epic Batman films, Nolan proved you can portray a complicated and conflicted hero without ejecting the essential genre elements that make for great storytelling. The only thing that can hurt this film are expectations, which are now sky high, especially with the news that General Zod will be returning as Superman’s arch-villain.
But let’s not tiptoe around the elephant in the room, either. Another reason to be excited over the teaming of these two artistic giants is that they’re responsible for “300” and “The Dark Knight,” two of the rare films to come out over the last decade that we right-wingers could eagerly embrace and call our own.
As the proudly un-embarrassed owner of more than 500 Superman comics and a worshiper of Christopher Reeve’s iconic portrayal and an even bigger fan of Margo Kidder’s unforgettable Lois Lane, this is the absolute best news about a reboot anyone could ask for.
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