I love Snyder as a film director and he seems like he's a super cool guy in real life, he has a great eye and I love how tactile his films are and how he knows how to make things look grand. I hate his DC movies. The dude doesn't get Batman, Superman, or most of the other DC heroes and his take on it caused the whole franchise to derail for almost a decade. His take felt more suited as the Justice Lords more than anything and to put that version as the forefront of your mainline universe rather than say maybe an alternate take on the material (I'd love to see a gloomy Superman and murderin' Batman but let those stories have a point!) just feels like it was primed to alienate the fanbase one way or another. And it's not even my opinion either, Synder has openly admit not being a fan of these heroes until Watchmen and TDKR and he really gravitates to the more "adult" sides of the genre which sometimes fans confuse the "adult" as "mature".
Gunn on the other hand, has openly admitted being a fan of Bruce Timm's DCAU just like Matt Reeves has and that's a GOOD thing as there is a crap load of stuff they could take from those shows as inspiration for their new DCU. With this announcement he's clearly trying to take things slow, heck as a Batman fanatic I'd say sit him out for awhile as I really would like to see Pattionson's version come to a close before we get overexposed with more Batman. Heck, I'd love to see Synder returning for say, an animated JL movie with his old cast back, and maybe go as dark as he wants too without restrictions-- maybe he can finally make that scene where Batman gets ***** in prison too.*
*An old Zack Snyder interview perfectly captures why the new Batman movie is such a disaster.
I do think Snyder sometimes mistakes edge for good storytelling - for me his killing Jimmy Olsen as a "joke" says a lot about his storytelling instincts and reveals he has a rather different perspective on things that probably doesn't mesh with a lot of people.
I still think he has great ideas and is a great filmaker with an actual vision - but I think for something like the DCEU he was the wrong man to be solely in charge of the main continuity, I think he would have made a great partner with another filmaker (ironically Gunn perhaps) in creating a balanced DCEU vision, one with Snyder's grand vision, but also the more human, relatable and likeable aspects of someone like Gunn's film vision.
I never think its a good idea to give someone with a strong directorial vision and palette complete control over such a varied property as the DC characters.
That is why I blame WB for BVS and the "failure" of the Snyderverse and not Snyder himself, the corporate suits wanted to be as different from Marvel as possible and chose to put a man with an antithetical auteur vision to the corportate safety of the MCU in charge, then they panicked when they realized that in trying to be as different from Marvel as possible they
were in fact different, and therefore not the universal audience pleasing money machine they hoped to emulate.
This was always WB's fault and in my view they are making the same mistakes all over again with Gunn and his film slate proves it, it is riddled with "Gunn-isms" that will impact the reception to this new DCU film slate and the execs will panic when it isn't smooth sailing.
Nothing ever changes.
My take from interviews I've watched is that like so many of us who grew up with superheroes as children, he did innocently love the characters as a kid. But by adulthood the project of deconstruction that Alan Moore and Frank Miller articulated with Watchmen and TDKR in 1986 resonated with him. But note that he says that when he was conceiving of Man of Steel he wanted to deconstruct Superman--and by extension all superheroes, i.e., superhero mythology--but at the end of the process still "make it okay to love this" meaning superhero mythology. Note that in Watchmen Snyder gives the superheroes a definite "cool" factor that is not present in Moore's comic run. Moore wanted to show superhero mythology as ultimately pathetic. Snyder reaches a different conclusion than Moore did. Moore thinks it's pathetic that adults escape into childish fantasies about superheroes when there are so many real problems in the world that are ignored. Snyder looks at the superheroes through the lens of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, with superheroes existing as archetypes, etc., and sees them as vessels for psychological projections of both good and bad. Anyway, if I can find the interview where he talks about "I want it to be okay to still love this... to love Superman..." after being deconstructed, I'll post it.
I agree, this is certainly what Snyder hoped to do - he was attempting to reconstruct the idea of the superhero, to answer the question of "who needs truth, justice and a better tomorrow?" and "why do heroes matter?". Unfortunately a reconstructionist vision first needs you to deconstruct the idea you wish to build back up, and while this makes for an interesting story when seen as a whole, as far as the general audience were concerned this was the main continuity of their heroes - they wanted to see these characters in their prime, as the heroes and paragons of their imagination, rather than as archetypes to be analyzed and deconstructed - they didn't know Snyder's intentions to build them back up and the execs didn't have the patience to wait for it following the reception they got.
Snyder's vision would have been great for an elseworlds style story or even many years down the line for a story like Kingdom Come which deals with these themes - but doing a reconstructionist take straight out the bat for the first ever DC universe projects was a foolishly bold and ambitious project that fundamentally misunderstood what audiences wanted and what the cultural climate was geared for.
