There's a good story buried in RB P2, just like there is actually a good story buried in RB P1.
Snyder, IMHO, doesn't need to be a good writer, though that would certainly help, but it would do immeasurable good for his films if he was simply a more economical one. He could have made this same movie with mostly the same plot, and reduced the core to about four characters, and it would have made the entire process so much more functional.
Brian Scalabrine is a retired NBA player, and he said something pretty interesting once, considering he was considered a marginally talented end of the bench player for the league for his entire career -
"I'm way closer to LeBron than you are to me...."
The point being, despite lots of fans seeing Scalabrine as someone who sucked as professional basketball, he was, back then, still in the top 1000 of people in the entire world at the sport. So if there's any consolation to
@Alatar and
@T8OO , then the likely truth is Zack Snyder is only several feet away from someone like Stanley Kubrick than the average movie goer is to Snyder himself. These are, no doubt, incredibly hard jobs to do and fill. Lots of pressure, lots of money at stake, and most people couldn't handle running productions as Snyder has for so long. It's more than being a director, and sometimes writer, you are effectively also in management.
So, my take is, the base criticism of Snyder here is he can tell the same story, for the most part, but can he do it in a more efficient way? In a more fundamental way. In a way more economical way.
I've always been told that an effective filmmaker is someone who is judged by what they've had to give up from the things they really loved simply because those things did not serve the greater overall story. I don't blame Snyder, from a creative standpoint, that he does not want to "burn his baby at the altar". But that's part of the job.
What also goes unsaid is that part of Snyder's "success" is what he does off camera in the overall social / political / power / leverage dynamic around him. In this regard, again if
@Alatar and
@T8OO want to hear something good about Snyder, it's evident that Zack is actually good at that part of it. Something people liked about Simon Cowell with American Idol is sometimes he would say things that people thought and were not comfortable saying because they'd get attacked for it. Sometimes there would be a good singer but they were too heavy or too "unattractive" or didn't have that great sad backstory, and Simon would simply say, "Hey, you did great, but this is about as far as you'll probably go here" American Idol didn't always take the best singer, they took the most marketable person who had at least a minimum baseline for singing at a certain level. Jeff Probst has said this often about Survivor. That the real "game" when you deal with All Star seasons or such, is the relationship building and negotiation that happens off camera over a period of years.
That's probably part of the overall tragedy here. Lots of people invested time, sweat, blood and passion into RB1 and 2, not just Snyder. And if it had some minor to moderate changes, it could have been far more functional. I'm not even assessing "good vs bad" here, just more functional in it's overall storytelling.
Zack Snyder is closer to Kubrick than I am to Snyder. I don't have a problem saying that. But it's apparent Snyder wants to get closer to Kubrick by crawling over broken glass first. I don't have a problem saying that as well. Here's hoping Snyder has a dark night of soul in his career before his entire slate of future opportunities runs out on him. He has made things I have enjoyed before. There's clearly a lot of talent there. But talent is like a hot blonde cheerleader or a sports prospect with a killer jump shot in their youth. You only get a limited window of time to maximize all those opportunities.
