Zack Snyder had a vision for filming the DC Universe. The vision centered on the question of how these gods, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etc. co-exist with humans, including extraordinary humans such as Batman. The subparts to the vision included questions such as (a) what is the consequence of so much destruction of life, property, and land from the battles among the gods, and those humans using all of the latest and greatest technology attempt to destroy; (b) how do the theological and existential questions of the interaction between gods and human spill over into political, sociological, and economic issues in human societies throughout the planet; and (c) at what point are humans displaced, so that, even the good god, Superman, is an existential threat? There is another theological aspect to Snyder's vision, which was making the non-Western-monotheistic gods real again, even at the point of denigrating or belittling the Western- monotheistic religious structures. Wonder Woman did the best in setting up this sub-aspect to the vision, with the sardonic looks Diana (Wonder Woman) gave when people referenced Christianity, and the way in which Diana naively assumes everyone should believe in Zeus and the gods around him. And, in Suicide Squad, the U.S. government becomes aware that the Egyptian gods are still with us.
I also gave Snyder great props for setting Wonder Woman/Diana's entrance into the human world in the time of World War I, as it is finally becoming clear, as a consensus among political thinkers and historians, how the events a century ago in WWI have been the main springboard for the conflagrations that challenge our lives today. Nearly all of the strife in the Middle East springs from European and American interference in the region during World War I, as one may begin to understand in books, such as Scott Anderson's majestic, Lawrence in Arabia. World War I provided the first example of senseless mass slaughter through modern technology. The rise of Communism in Russia, and the endless reactions to that rise, come about through that war. As I am now reading through Victor Serge's Notebooks: 1936-1947, finally and wonderfully translated into English, I am struck by Serge's prescience in seeing how WWI ended the belief that capitalists and revolutionaries could be on the same side in any societal conflagration, and how WWI forced capitalists into turning to modern forms of feudalism, namely fascism, to maintain power.
In Snyder's first DC Universe film, Man of Steel, Snyder, with screenwriter David S. Goyer, re-told the Superman story to set up the vision. The vision was to unfold further as each film was being presented, almost like peeling back an onion. In Man of Steel, we saw how Superman feels his humanness, and is almost embarrassed by his superpowers. We saw how he hesitates to destroy anything, let alone kill other human beings--and the camera angles show us the destruction and death that results in the epic battle scenes. We, as an audience, were invited to directly wonder at the human destruction and to be scared that we are relying on the kindness of Superman to save us. The next film Snyder presented, Batman v. Superman (2016), in retrospect, was perhaps simply too much for audiences, in the way Orson Wells went beyond his audiences with Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1943). As with the studio cutting Ambersons, so that it was even more obscure to those who did not know Booth Tarkington's masterful book, the Warner Bros. suits' edits in Batman v. Superman made the anger Bruce Wayne's Batman had for Superman difficult to follow. When one views the Snyder director's cut Batman v. Superman, especially in tandem with Man of Steel, one more clearly sees Snyder's main vision in bloom (apart from the Zeus v. Western-monotheistic religions subpart). Snyder also makes the connection of both Batman and Superman having mothers named Martha, which people simply scoffed at as contrived, when one may say, what is the significance for having two iconic DC characters with moms of the same name--if not to use in a moment for a shared experience? I know I tend toward the sentimental (being a major Frank Capra fan), but I realized, seeing the director's cut, how the Martha connection hit precisely at Batman's despair of losing his parents, and the moment he realizes Superman had genuine feelings for human beings.
By the time Suicide Squad was released, which was a film designed to be an origin story for multiple mutant type characters in the DC Universe, and continued unfolding the implications of gods and humans sharing a single planet, the attacks on Snyder became unbearable for Warner Bros.' studios' suits. I have long had an irrational conspiracy theory that Marvel Studios, acting similarly to the Russians in the 2016 presidential election, sent bots and scammers to destroy Zack Snyder's vision, and that millions of superhero genre fans fell for it--just as Marvel fans fell for the Fox Studios' attacks on X-Men: III, which was a brilliant film highlighting the very gay and disability rights metaphor that makes X-Men films so compelling. In the publicity run up to Days of Future Past (2014), the publicity machinery at Fox attacked X-Men: III as a film which screwed things up by killing off so many X-Men, and that now things had to be rectified through a time warp. I argued in vain against those who bought into the propagandistic attack, and have sardonically laughed at how, despite the time warp, the last Wolverine film, which so many loved (I did, too) showed most X-Men are killed anyway. Yet, nary a peep from most X-Men fans, who joined in the derision of X-Men: III. And then, last year, Disney/Marvel Studios killed more superheroes in Avengers: Infinity Wars than Stalin killed Bolsheviks. It was Thermidor for superheroes. Yet, nobody is attacking Marvel Studios at anywhere near the level Snyder and Warners Bros. were and are attacked, which again makes me wonder if the attacks against Snyder and his vision were as coordinated as the Fox run-up to Days of Future Past, but done in a stealth manner.
The Snyder Vision's Achilles' heel, to use a Greek metaphor consistent with Wonder Woman's world, appears to have been the lack of wisecrack humor within the narrative. I have defended the humorlessness because Snyder's vision is existential and theological, and therefore requires a level of concern and seriousness that humor would have undermined. However, I must admit a big part of what makes both the Disney/Marvel Studios films and Fox's X-Men series films digestible to mass audiences is the humor--even when most of the audience misses the anti-National Security State plot lines in Iron Man, miss the Holocaust, gay and disability rights issues in X-Men, and the anti-U.S. version of the Cold War in Captain America: Winter Soldier. Still, the Warner Bros. suits were cowards: They failed to allow Snyder to defend his vision, refused to allow his director's cut for Batman v. Superman to be released in theaters, so that the truncated version made Snyder's vision more difficult to follow, and, most importantly, accept. Worse, the suits refused to stand by Snyder as the attacks became legion. In short, just as the studio system undermined Welles in the 1940s, the Warner Bros.' suits undermined Snyder.
Which brings me to Aquaman (2018). The Wife and I rented the film from Amazon Prime last night, as we failed to see it in the theaters. And what I saw deeply saddened me. Apart from the fundamental plot failure one has seen in the more recent fare of superhero films, which show superhero films falling into the Star Wars trope, where advanced, technologically-based civilizations maintain feudalistic political systems, with kings, queens, princes, princesses, and the like, and where simple brute strength is the arbiter for leadership (see David Brin's brilliant take down of Star Wars, with his explanation as to why Star Trek is the correct way to see technologically based futures), Aquaman represents a retreat from what made the superhero films, starting with the first X-Men film in 1999, so extraordinary. The dialogue was so bad in Aquaman that it hurt our ability to judge Jason Mamoa's and Amber Heard's acting abilities. Mamoa grunted his lines, and, apart from his scene with the voice of Julie Andrews (!), exhibited little sympathy in the way Henry Cavil's Superman or Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman did from the start.
Aquaman's plot line continued the otherwise wonderful recent trend of having villains who recognize climate change and pollution from humans, or the white human race's continued oppression of darker skin races, as the true danger and villainy--so that one wonders how bad the villains really are compared to who are our leaders in our "real" world. However, unlike in Black Panther, where the Black Panther/king recognizes his now-vanquished American raised black, radical cousin was correct about white oppression of blacks, and other non-white skinned people, one gets no sense Arthur aka Aquaman is understanding how badly humans have behaved toward the oceans, which are 70% of the Earth's surface. The jokes about his being dumb, and the way he himself believes he is little more than a big and strong dope, make it difficult to imagine Arthur recognizing the implications of human self-destruction.* The dialogue in Aquaman strains to be funny, and is at least amusing--but the humor was, in the main, less clever or witty than Iron Man, Deadpool and Ant Man have been. One can almost hear the Warner Bros.' suits screaming during the filming, "We want it funny!" Finally, when we reflect on all the destruction of ancient statues, the property and land, and the murder of innocents throughout Aquaman--and how it is presented as mere "collateral damage," something to be easily dismissed or ignored, we see the destruction of Snyder's vision, which was to compel us to look at that destruction and killing. There is one moment in a violent scene, where Arthur/Aquaman tells a Sicilian woman "sorry" at the destruction of her home, and where he attempts to round up people into a church to save them from incoming Atlantian attackers. However, even that is designed to make us avoid the overall mayhem these superhuman are inflicting. There is also nothing asking the viewer to consider being afraid of Aquaman's power the way Man of Steel invited us to realize how Superman and Zod are both threats to human authority on Earth.
At the end of Aquaman, what is most destroyed is Zack Snyder's vision. The film filled me with sadness mixed with rage for the major cultural failure which Warner Bros.' suits have wrought. I therefore say again what I have said since the time of Batman v. Superman: In twenty or thirty years, assuming humanity's presence on our planet is not in dire throes, film historians will begin to see the brilliance and beauty of Snyder's vision. They will appreciate what Snyder was trying to accomplish, and there will be a final judgment against the Ivy League educated suits who showed they were not only cowards, but arrogant in their lack of literary and philosophical reading and understanding. Snyder should never have been left nearly alone to withstand the attacks on him and the films he had co-written and directed. And it is a shame we will never be able to see the fruition of Snyder's vision.
*I also found it less than amusing that Black Panther's deeply pained and traumatized black cousin was killed, while the creepy white half-brother gets to live in Aquaman, but that is less the point in this moment. And the literally black skinned pirate character was awkward, to say the least. I mean, really, The Black Pirate?
