Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (The Director's Cut)

Parked at Netflix and issued by the streaming giant in ways that - having viewed both films in longer, bloodier cuts - now registers as a strange and cynical kind of self-sabotage, Zack Snyder's pass at Star Wars is both appropriately massive and acutely humourless. Unusually for a writer-director rapidly approaching his sixties (and therefore perfectly placed to have had his mind zapped back in 1977), Snyder is better tuned to the wavelengths emanating from George Lucas' prequel trilogy. To wit: the feeling that you're viewing an instalment rather than a self-contained piece; the self-seriousness of the characters; as well as a narrowing of outlook that exchanges naïve teenagers in alien spaces for human empires and garrulous in-fighting. Snyder even shouts out the plaid grandmaster with extra shots of scurrying, computer-generated rodents. These superfluous, distracting additions to scenes of Sofia Boutella navigating winding corridors are evocative of the charming visual noise Lucas insisted upon for his Special Edition re-releases back in 1997. 

When considering these Director's Cuts as a whole though, it quickly becomes obvious that these are (moment to moment) the better experiences. Overstuffed and exhaustive where the previous episodes felt clipped and oddly anaemic, Chalice of Blood, and now Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, offer up a double helping of the excesses that have become synonymous with their extended edition loving director. Paced around two battles - one fought against fields of alien wheat, the other with skinhead invaders from this galaxy's equivalent of the East India Company - Curse of Forgiveness benefits from the extra sense of danger, not to mention gore, that the new, stronger R certificate implies. Basically, the bloodless extermination of the PG-13 cut simply cannot entertain in the same way as the bodily detonations on offer here. The truncated, previously released edits carry with them no sense of shock or satisfaction; built, as they are, around confrontations that have had their sudden, stunning acts of violence snipped away. 

In Curse it's not just faceless stormtroopers who explode into satisfying clouds of weightless viscera either. Cowering civilians (perhaps even children?) have their heads blasted through with molten laser fire by advancing, bearded operators. The sequences in question crossing the pitiless carnage seen in big screen Yoshiyuki Tomino anime (Snyder being one of the few American directors who proudly namechecks influences drawn from Japanese animation) with the instinctual unease generated by the sight of private military contractors. What was previously presented as, more or less, a full-on rout now has an element of wincing, human pain threaded through it. The tweaks that have been applied to Curse then, including tiny instances of dialogue that reframe the imperial war machine in starker and therefore more logically consistent terms, help to massage some individuality into a film that is, by design, deliberately derivative. Perhaps the biggest impact of these differences though are the ways in which Curse accentuates not just the barbarism but the racism of its advancing Imperium. 

Previously, when writing about the first instalment, I insisted that Rebel Moon mishandled its re-telling of Seven Samurai by failing to translate the hierarchical structure of Japanese society in the16th century. Although Boutella's Kora can mix and engage with Djimon Hounsou's disgraced general or Bae Doona's sword master on an equal footing, that's not the important element in these relationships. What unites the warriors recruited to protect Veldt - and even the shorter cuts state this outright - is that they are, predominantly, non-white casualties of a white European coded empire that has either smeared their civilisation (for no detectable advantage) or recruited these people then used them as cannon fodder. Here, the betrayals premised on the social inferiority of non-white instruments land a little harder when the floors and the braying, invective spewing accusers are themselves fouled with recently spilled blood. Even the bone eating engines that the Imperium's ships run on are now named for Hindu Gods; towering women shackled in iridescent prisons that are only able to disobey their sneering conquerors in tiny, barely detectable ways. Where Star Wars used stuffy British thesps as a natural antithesis to its louche, American freedom-fighters, Rebel Moon broadens this conceit to focus in on actors who can trace their real-life lineage to countries that have suffered horribly under colonial aggression: Boutella is Algerian; Hounsou is Beninese; while Staz Nair spoke about his Malayali heritage when promoting Game of Thrones. Hardly a fix all for a film that is desperate to immediately undermine its hard won victory with graceless pleas for further sequels, but it's not nothing. 

Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood (The Director's Cut)

The first part of writer-director Zack Snyder's streaming serial returns, half as long again and brandishing a stricter ratings board certificate that allows for swearing, nudity and varying degrees of sexuality (including gagging submission to a mass of writhing tentacles), as well as moments in which heads are blasted into glowing, molten slag. Really, everything that was originally expected upon hearing that Snyder was plotting a course to a galaxy far, far away. Although, like its first draft, Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood does eventually flounder, the film's opening passage - already the better section of the feature - benefits further from a new prologue that portrays Ed Skrein's Admiral Noble departing from a drop ship that looks very much like White Dwarf's scratch-built Grav-Attack vehicle (made from a used stick deodorant, Zoid sprues and several plastic cough syrup spoons, back in the late 1980s), before slowly advancing on a cornered, royal family. 

Flanked by necrophilic clergy, Noble is in his element: wearing a furrowed brow when surveying the cultural detonation he is party to but, nevertheless, delighting in the powerlessness of Lim Yu-Beng's rifle-racking monarch. Apparently considered extraneous when compiling the original, holiday season-friendly 'theatrical' cuts, this twenty five minute prelude is, comfortably, more personal and emotionally excruciating than anything else that this saga has previously offered up. The central dilemma of the addition - should a son stave in his father's head to save his weeping sisters - has broader consequences within the piece too: it foreshadows the unexpected bravery of Michiel Huisman's Gunnar when faced with another no-win situation; knitting this naïve farmer into a collective of hardened warriors. Staz Nair's Tarak actually congratulates Gunnar, perhaps recalling his own powerlessness when faced with the might of the Imperium. Similarly, frequent visits to the wheat planet to see how Anthony Hopkins' robot pacifist, Jimmy, is getting on helps massage the bullet point plotting of the theatrical cut's middle section, even if these scenes basically repeat the same idea over and over again. 

The real lesson in all of this, which Chalice of Blood enthusiastically underlines, is that Snyder is often at his most purely effective when using compressed time and collage as a means of leaping, anthropological study. The director then more naturally attuned to telling tales in massive, sweeping strokes that match the grandeur of his vision. Snyder and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, have compiled a terrible path for mankind's future, one that looks to the smoking, industrialised empires of the 19th century then blows them up to function on an intergalactic scale. As with the Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence in Watchmen or 300's demented opening narration, Sofia Boutella's Kora, and Rebel Moon as a whole, are at their most engaging when this brainwashed orphan takes a moment to detail her path through the screaming, bone-shovelling machinery of conquest. A whispering Kora, confiding in a would-be lover, is given the space to talk through the complicated pride and intermingled guilt she feels about collaborating with, and succeeding within, the regime that doomed her civilisation. These embellished interludes, which now feel complete thanks to a greater scope for emotional incongruity, have a vulnerability and dimensionality to them that was previously lacking in Rebel Moon. 

Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver

Rather than a full-blooded sequel, Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver is the previously unseen, feature-length third act for its predecessor, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire. The films are two pieces of the same Games Workshop-does-Star Wars whole and, unfortunately, the hard split separating the twins invites strange, structural imbalances in the individual fragments rather than allow for the wriggle room required to stage two successive, complimentary conclusions. Experienced apart on release day(s) - rather than streamed later, when both parts can be viewed back-to-back - the disinclination to twist and reassess the pieces on the board between instalments is disappointing but understandable. Scargiver is not a sequel, in the traditional sense. Instead it is the other half of a science fiction saga focused on crawling movement and noisy portraiture. Ed Skrein's fascistic Admiral Noble is a case in point: bloodily vanquished in the previous chapter, he returns here in the exact same human body he died in, despite the glowing, biomechanical juices that had to be pumped into his chopped-up corpse to revive it. 

Writer-director-cinematographer Zack Snyder (co-writing with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten) then deliberately foregoes his own grimdark approximation of Darth Vader to anchor this finale, preferring instead to shoot and frame the emaciated, Buccal drained Admiral as sacrilegious iconography: the diseased Christ that adorns the Isenheim Altarpiece returned, unnaturally, to life. As before, the subsistence stakes that powered Seven Samurai make very little sense when the aggressive party is an advancing, galaxy-spanning empire rather than a gang of starving noblemen who have turned to banditry. Although the assailed farmers pack their crop around key buildings, daring their invaders to incinerate their prize, Noble and his bovver boys are, as it happens, more than happy to detonate the grain. Once this idea of a battle between two armies running on empty stomachs is voided, all that remains is palace intrigue (both Noble and Sofia Boutella's Kora have been lieutenants in the orbit of Fra Fee's higher power) being played out, inconclusively, at the expense of Space Scandinavians. Wheat does remain important to Snyder though, specifically as an adored, photographic subject. The director's eye - which could, in short, be described as that of a muscle obsessed Malick - luxuriates in the slow motion wave of this grass and the straining, human hardship required to harvest it. 

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Zack Snyder's latest, a holiday season blockbuster for Netflix, resuscitates an unsuccessful Star Wars pitch that the writer-director made back when Disney and Lucasfilm were looking for ways to expand their (surprisingly parochial) space saga. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire does then, at least in conceptual terms, betray a slightly deeper understanding of this disconnected predecessor. The film isn't satisfied to mindlessly wield the used-up aesthetic or revolutionary warfare of George Lucas' space opera, Snyder knows to poke around in the bones of that piece, recognising the debt to Ray Harryhausen's Dynamation monster films or Akira Kurosawa's rain-lashed chanbara. Snyder and his team are obviously fluent in the works that followed in Star Wars' wake too - the fantasy epics; the lead figure tabletop games; the science-fiction comics, like Heavy Metal or 2000 AD, that stripped the religious aspiration out of an American cultural phenomenon, replacing it with human avarice and body-shredding violence. Unfortunately this pop culture fluency is communicated by a film experiencing a severe, structural lurch. 

Although Rebel Moon's first act shows promise, teasing out the familiar tale of impoverished farmers forced to hire warriors to battle the invaders who would drive them to famine, once Sofia Boutella's ex-imperialist Kora starts putting the gang together Snyder's film begins to run aground. Seven Samurai (and to lesser degrees, The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars) built scenes around the emerging camaraderie experienced by a growing gang of misfits. The small connections that their similar backgrounds reveal or their collective responses to attempts at trickery. There was a class dimension too, one that doesn't quite scan here thanks to Kora's backstory. She may live as a farmer now but she wasn't born one; she wasn't raised as one. When interacting with the people she recruits, Kora does so as an equal rather than somebody who is scared and suspicious, who perhaps even considers themselves to be somehow socially inferior. Rebel Moon doesn't just skip over successful or misfiring fellowship though (drawing together a line-up that barely interacts), the film eventually abandons the basic, consumptive stakes outlined when a battleship landed on a wheat field. As the canvas swells to include a star system's worth of planets, seemingly instantaneous space travel (and therefore retaliation), and the genocidal glassing of a pacifist planet, the basic thread of hopelessly outgunned mercenaries repelling a technologically superior force slips away completely. 

Army of the Dead

Despite a desert-set prologue that uses knowingly overwritten dialogue to prickle memories of the Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer era of Summer blockbusters, Army of the Dead ends up looking a little further back for its structural inspiration. As with director Zack Snyder's debut feature, Dawn of the Dead, Army is the zombie parable repurposed as action cinema, a model (in both instances) heavily indebted to the works of James Cameron. Most obviously, Snyder's latest harkens back to Aliens, a hysteria-inducing masterpiece, quoted here both verbally and mechanically. Sadly, neither of these grammatical reproductions manage to exceed, or even meet, the thundering excitement minted back in 1986. 

Other, earlier, influences bubble to the surface over the course of the piece, films typified by the tension created when well-equipped (American) intruders find themselves out of their depth, in someone else's territory. John Boorman's Deliverance and Walter Hill's Southern Comfort the alpha examples in a sub-genre that works through the Stateside trauma of the Vietnam War by proposing a cultural and technological façade, then allowing them to crumble in the face of a determined, indigenous, force. Army cedes the territory of Las Vegas to Richard Cetrone's musclebound progenitor monster and the children born from his mouth and loins, offering up a primal society of undiminished body-poppers who stand apart from their dried-up, deactivated, brethren lying in state at the city's limits. As with Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, the undead are given routines and something resembling a social class. 

These zombie categories are rooted in a hereditary infection based around a pathogenic half-life that determines that those directly bitten by the source of the infection retain the ability to run and, seemingly, apply basic reason. Conversely, the cases originating from the slathering disciple creatures resolve to a shuffling mass of braindead chompers, content to pack themselves into cool, dry, places, awaiting stimuli. Just as the Dawn of the Dead remake built its threat off the back of the raging sprinters seen in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later, Snyder's latest also accounts for recent, popular, depictions of massed rot - specifically the undulating lines of regimented dead who departed from The Land of Always Winter in the later seasons of Game of Thrones. 

Computer generated assistance allows the director and his special effects departments to expand the reach of reanimation beyond appliance covered Homo sapiens to include a decayed, but still predatory, white tiger and a collapsing stead for an armoured zombie chieftain. Army of the Dead then is a pastiche, a swaying structure barrelling through sequences and set-pieces with a demented sense of abandon, anchored by Dave Bautista's broken-hearted father. Despite the film's massive length, Snyder and co-writers Shay Hatten and Joby Harold still produce a series of harsh gear shifts; grinding transitions that place expert characters in situations where it's baffling that they don't object to corporate tomfoolery sooner or stammering confessions, squeezed into scenes, that play like roughly applied garnish designed to put a harsher spin on an imminent mangling. 

For a film about a small team of mercenaries invading a walled-off city, danger is neither constant nor mounting in Army of the Dead - an early warning from Nora Arnezeder's Coyote that precipitation will reactivate mummified throngs seems to herald a thunderstorm or a reactivated sprinkler system that never actually trickles to life. Snyder, also working as his own Director of Photography, seems less concerned with this kind of diegetic minutiae, using the film as a further opportunity to perfect his deliberately imperfect approach to digital portraiture. As with the claustrophobic talking heads between Batman and Joker that brought Zack Snyder's Justice League to a close, the director shoots faces coming into and out of focus; human and animal skulls as topographical landscapes, textured with peaks and valleys, framed by distorted instances of intrusive light. 

Sucker Punch (Extended Cut)

For a film filled with almost nothing but young women dressed in various examples of fetish wear, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch goes out of its way to needle viewers who expect an uninterrupted leer. Snyder's 2011 release, co-written with Steve Shibuya, tells the tale of Emily Browning's Babydoll, a waif committed to a mouldering mental institution following the death of her mother and the murder of her little sister by a salivating Stepfather. Hoping to net himself his ward's inheritance, this ogre schedules Babydoll for a lobotomy, bribing Oscar Isaac's hunched orderly to forge the necessary documents. Trapped and bereaved, Babydoll begins to disassociate from her grim surroundings, imagining herself first as a virginal prize in a burlesque brothel then as a sword-wielding hero, crashing through waves of mechanical, masculine, aggressors.

Seen here in an extended cut that runs eighteen minutes longer than the theatrical presentation, this home video re-issue restores a level of bite that the American ratings board felt strayed beyond the remit of the PG-13 certificate. One long song and dance sequence aside, the majority of these version longue additions are the opposite of titillation. Instead we have harsh, threatening moments or bitter dialogue tweaks that underline the lack of actual, real-world, power these dozing superheroines possess. The manipulative rhetoric of Isaac's Blue, elevated from creepy hospital attendant to a glittering mobster in Babydoll's delusions, strikes a nastier chord in this edit. The mealy-mouthed platitudes of an unsuccessful pimp are subbed out for statements that anchor his desire for these women in something genuinely sinister. He wants to dominate them; to hurt them and have them love him in spite of this violence. 

With days left before her frontal lobe is rendered dull, Babydoll enlists the other inmates to mount an escape, determining a list of keys that must be acquired - simple items like a kitchen knife or a lighter. These objects, lent scale by the sheer desperation felt by these women, are magnified into incredible treasures that form the basis of action interludes that break with an otherwise impoverished existence. Babydoll has something of the siren about her, able to command male attention then generate enormous, impenetrable, fictions with nothing but a listless swaying. The asylum's men are enraptured, their brains numbed, allowing Babydoll and her accomplices - Jena Malone's Rocket, Vanessa Hudgens' Blondie, Jamie Chung's Amber and Abbie Cornish's Sweet Pea - to slip away to their battlegrounds. Unencumbered by reality, Snyder is able to motor through his varied and fantastical influences, matching flying fortresses against dragons or firing schoolgirl assassins at undead, steam-powered Alleyman. Sucker Punch is a melting pot massacre; Métal hurlant by way of the copyright flouting Daicon Opening Animation shorts.  

Zack Snyder's Justice League

Upfront, Zack Snyder's Justice League offers a very clear demonstration of what the slighted director brings to this material, beyond a towering aspect ratio and a colour palette attuned to unyielding metals. In Snyder and screenwriters Chris Terrio and Will Beall's undiluted version, Batman's first meeting with Aquaman in a remote Icelandic outpost is presented as an incredible effort in of itself. Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne has surmounted cracking glaciers and a storm that grounded all manner of aircraft just be in the same room as the rightful King of Atlantis. Their meeting concluded, Jason Momoa's regal roadie strides off to be in the ocean. Bruce and an awed village follow. Joss Whedon's Justice League presented this sequence as a bickering back-and-forth that concluded with a hero shot of Momoa smashing into the water then zipping away. Punctuation, essentially. 

Here, we instead focus on Affleck's despondent expression, his glance off this would be ally as it starts to snow and a group of women begin singing the kind of mournful, lilting, prayer you'd expect to hear at a monarch's funeral. Bruce worries that his words - his warning - has fallen on deaf ears. When he remembers to look back, Arthur has gone and gentle ripples are fading on the water. Whedon's reconfiguration of Justice League was arranged to access chummy sniping and casual success; earth-shattering powers portrayed as something easy or natural for a select few. Snyder and this project's editors, David Brenner and Dody Dorn, want you to feel the effort, to sink into these moments and experience them as enormous and transformative rather than simply exciting. It's a mode of communication that is rambling, episodic and, often, portentous, but it's also frequently magical. 

Four hours long and broken up into eight distinct movements, Snyder's League occupies a space outside of whichever continuity WarnerMedia are currently hurtling forward with. Affleck's stocky take on Batman has long since been replaced - Matt Reeves and men's magazine troll (not to mention generational acting talent) Robert Pattinson wrapped shooting on The Batman less than a week ago - while the story told here seems at least partially at odds with Aquaman's first solo foray and completely incompatible with Wonder Woman's 1980s set sequel. Zack Snyder's Justice League is already a document, a relic from a recent past that, despite an Epilogue prickling with several different flavours of promise, seems unlikely to be followed up on. In a way, this is the strength of DC's disparate platter, their continuity is so obviously broken that it allows each character to be the star of their own, ever-changing, micro-continuity.

Trapped in Snyder's pocket realm, these heroes are put to the test in ways that require genuine strain, one that is consistently amplified throughout by the piece's downcast tone and an editing style that rejects hurry. Although cities are not atomised the film establishes a genuine, and consistent, sense of danger. We are not watching a film that seeks to glibly reassure its audience that good will, inherently, triumph. Every action has a consequence. So whenever Ciarán Hinds' gigantic Steppenwolf - reimagined here as prehistoric musculature, resplendent in a chainmail armour that hums with machine life - bursts into the frame, slaughter quickly follows. The invader's assault on Themyscira, already a stand out sequence in the theatrical cut, is significantly extended here - trading quick, geographical, fixes and action movie editing for an assembly that submerges us in Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen)'s fraying emotional state. 

We sit with the rage felt when a holy place is defiled; the despair as an enormous temple crumbles into the sea, ending umpteen lives. All this pain and confusion is expressed via image, space and sound rather than the crude, sex slavery invoking dialogue that Whedon brought to the table. Over and over we are forced to process the weight of these events and the effect they have on these characters. We are rarely thrown cold into an aftermath. This distended, atypical delivery works beautifully for a great deal of the film's other action sequences, especially those that felt perfunctory in their superheroics back in 2017. Gal Gadot's Diana / Wonder Woman foiling a London terror attack is elevated from a throw away scuffle to an act of Herculean expertise as Diana - in slow motion - struggles to place her bullet proof bracelets between Michael McElhatton's gun-wielding terrorist and several dozen innocent lives.  

Gadot's agog face fills the 1.33:1 frame, the first bullet traveling much faster than she can react. Through sheer will she gets her arm where it needs to be, interceding just in the nick of time. That's one bullet though. When the madman switches his rifle to fully-automatic then takes aim at a class of schoolgirls, Wonder Woman follows his line of fire, crouched and exerting; zipping inhumanly fast to put her gauntlets and, in one instance, her body between this outrage and these children. The film no longer rushes through these movements - perhaps previously unsure of how these staccato, obviously artificial, lunges would be received by an audience - we linger and examine now, cutting back and forth between the hammering gun and a dashing Diana. The effect is explosive, delirious even, precisely because the scene is unselfconsciously structured to cater to this idea of a body in the midst of a prolonged physical struggle. 

This Justice League is not summery or obviously celebratory then. Tonally speaking, we're not hanging out with our superpowered pals as they quarrel and pinball between disasters. Snyder's take is closer to a war film, one with a fantastical scope that reaches into our world's distant, unrecorded, past to tell of the day when a barbaric New God touched down on Earth and battled a who's who of human myth. Zeus and the Greek pantheon fought alongside an alien Green Lantern, Atlanteans, an Amazonian cavalry, and man's armies - including bearded Hun - against the being who would be master of the universe. The attempt, although unsuccessful, left both a mark on our planet and three living machines that can be combined to trigger an instantaneous apocalypse. Steppenwolf, the demonic agent gathering these devices, exudes the anxious presence of a toady. Although indescribably powerful when compared to mere mortals, he is, at heart, a needy middle-manager hoping to curry favour with his boss by wrapping up a noted loose end. 

Thanks to Marvel's trendsetting credit teasers this ruler, Jack Kirby's Darkseid, was beaten to the cinematic punch by Jim Starlin's deliberately similar cosmic bruiser Thanos. Elevated to chief threat in his universe, Josh Brolin's take on the Mad Titan even got to headline his own film, Avengers: Infinity War as well as a feature role in its sequel, Avengers: Endgame. That intergalactic plunderer, although brusque and all-powerful, was afforded a human dimension - a daughter he loved; a bizarre pursuit he, on some level, believed to be altruistic. Comparatively, Darkseid is portrayed with the kind of awe usually reserved for religious revelation. His introduction is that of an unholy visitation, a rippling God of militarised industry first seen silhouetted like John Wayne at the close of The Searchers before Snyder and cinematographer Fabian Wagner begin appraising this menace vertically. His figure is massive and granite; a hammer about to fall. 

This nascent form - identified in pre-release press as Uxas, the identity the God wore before taking command of the Omega Effect in John Byrne's Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics - is a ravenous, youthful, behemoth in search of an outlet. The Darkseid we see later in the film, primed for a starring role in a sequel that will likely never come, is this same being matured; skewing closest to the character's taciturn portrayal in Superman: The Animated Series and the subsequent Justice League and Justice League Unlimited television series. Voiced by Michael Ironside, that interpretation is, fundamentally, Satan ruling from his Church in Hell. Actor Ray Porter imbues this computer generated tyrant with similar gravelly malice; his voice a grim-dark growl that issues from a pit then carries through halls filled with conquered, mutated, subjects. 

Darkseid's screentime may be slight, especially when weighed against a 242 minute running time but every interlude counts - we see him batter through armies, felled only by the combined efforts of a Green Lantern, a legendary king and three Olympians; we watch the almighty Steppenwolf cower in fear when his master's image exerts itself on a slab of fissile ore. Darkseid's technology, the three Mother Boxes he abandons to Earth - depicted as desiccated hags in the apocalyptic visions of Ray Fisher's Cyborg - are a profane take on the act of creation itself. This God's Genesis is a wave of destruction that picks the flesh from Kryptonian bones and sets the world ablaze. Kirby's character, wholly new to this version of the film, makes such an obvious and immediate impact that the other sequel teases embedded in this film's Epilogue - Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor and Joe Manganiello's Slade Wilson laying the foundations for The Legion of Doom and an abandoned Batman film - seem positively tiny by comparison. 

Darkseid isn't the only character to receive reappraisal. Whereas this version of the film delves much deeper with the newer members of this Justice League, Whedon's theatrical cut seemed more of a feature length attempt to resuscitate Superman as a future tentpole prospect. Scenes were added and subtracted around Snyder's ticking time bomb - an effort undermined by computer assisted reshoot footage that, often, looked confrontationally bad - until Henry Cavill was behaving with the tranquil assurance of a Christopher Reeve. Snyder's assembly is a completely different story, doggedly sticking to Batman's Knightmare visions from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as an eventual destination for the hero. The disorientated Superman who violently reacts to his resurrection doesn't instantly fade as soon as an action sequence has been ticked off here either. 

Kent's pain lingers, expressed in his choice of suit - a funeral draft of his usual costume that recalls everything from Spider-Man's Secret Wars symbiote and Jon Bogdanove's Recovery Suit to the evil Kryptonians of the Reeve films and the rogue Superman seen in the cyberpunk future of the Batman Beyond animated series. This clouded, post-death perspective allows Superman to register as something other than a pat obstacle in a genre rehash. In Snyder's cut it's clear he carries real pain at having been unnaturally returned to life. Mothers and fathers, both living and dead, flock to him, talking this superbeing out of his fog by reminding him of his emotional and physical connections to this world - Amy Adams' seemingly pregnant Lois Lane and his patient, hardscrabble mother, Diane Lane's Martha Kent. Russell Crowe's Jor-El and Kevin Costner's Jonathan Kent join the chorus, recounting the spiritual quest they imparted to him in the language of Gods and men. 

In action, this Superman is different too. His understanding of stakes and pressure rendered off-kilter by his all-powerful nature. So while his teammates battle through a tumorous, irradiated, gauntlet, Kent remains in Kansas to get his head right. This pronounced contrast between an absent, healing, hero and a squad of allies flogging their hearts out against a terrifying extra-terrestrial threat - especially when played at this kind of length - is a fight blueprint straight out of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, a hugely successful multimedia series that plays with the myth of Moses and The Exodus in a similar way to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics. Toriyama's interpretation takes a more hysterical, comedic bent with a central character whose might is so massively out of whack with his contemporaries that all of the manga's plot contrivances are about placing successive hurdles between its hero, Son Goku, and any unfolding battles. 

As if to underline this structural note, Snyder's film tweaks Wonder Woman to be Superman's violent near-equal, an accomplice who isn't content to simply batter their enemies into submission. She's basically Superman's Vegeta - the displaced alien prince who works twice as hard to keep up with the savant Goku. Diana's similar insistence that Kal-El should only be referred to by the name given to him on his home planet is just the cherry on top. When Snyder's Superman does finally engage Steppenwolf, his hovering blows are unforgiving - the same brutal strikes he aimed at the Justice League seconds after they reawakened him - reminding us that this Superman remains at least slightly abstracted and perhaps not even the exact same man we saw in Man of Steel or Dawn of Justice. Death has altered the Kryptonian, there's a sense he isn't a complete person anymore, instead he's a wraith anchored to a previous life only by his Lois. 

That it requires such a massive intervention by his loved ones to even access his previous persona (his return to the life he had only possible because of their memories) tallies with Bruce Wayne's recurring fear that the Sun God who fell from the sky could become poisoned by dark rhetoric and take up the position of general in an army of annihilation. Finally, there's Fisher's Cyborg, a superhero instantly course-corrected in the theatrical cut to resemble the comedic, braggadocios, sidekick familiar to fans of Teen Titans Go!. Cyborg isn't simply re-evaluated here, his contribution to the overall shape of this film is seismic, far bigger than scene tweaks or costume corrections. In Snyder's version of Justice League Cyborg is a significant dramatic axis, one told with the anguish of a dead child forced back to life by a guilt-ridden father, Joe Morton's Silas Stone. Cyborg's story is one of halting reconciliation, not just with the parent who repeatedly chose work over his family, but with his own self-image. 

Cyborg's story is so thoroughly threaded into this king-sized Director's Cut that it's obvious why Fisher was protective of the role and then so bitterly disappointed when very little of it was released in 2017. Victor Stone is a multifaceted character that allows the actor to play two completely distinct personas - the confident, letter jacket wearing human half that keeps himself connected to the rest of mankind with bursts of online altruism and a mechanical aspect that Stone believes to be unnatural and damned. The latter gives Fisher the opportunity to play several different classic monsters - when he first meets Wonder Woman he's Quasimodo, hunched and evasive but taking a certain delight in his expertise; later he's Frankenstein's Monster, a resentful son committed to concealing or outright destroying his father's work. A metronome score carries us into an interior life where Stone is a God of human data, so powerful that he could end all life on Earth in an instant. 

Cyborg is a Dr Manhattan who hasn't become bored with the people around him. On the contrary, he wants to use his incalculable powers to help but sees no possibility for integration into wider society. He's hung up on the manufactured organs and arteries that maintain what's left of his shattered body. The shame he feels for this mechanism traps him, creating a wider context of internalised monstrosity that sours his outlook. It's clear that he abhors his physical identity, retreating into vast digital head spaces where he can stride around in the broad flesh and bone body he's all but lost. Cyborg's story, unlike his Watchmen counterpart, tracks towards an acceptance though - one facilitated by the precious knowledge that he isn't alone in this universe, that there are other people who share similar burdens to his own. It feels conceptually significant that it is Diana who reaches out to this metal man - in certain versions of her origin story she is an artificial construct herself, moulded from clay then imbued with life by a loving parent. 

None of this is to say that Zack Snyder's Justice League doesn't have its flaws, there are more than a couple of computer generated effects that, quite apparently, haven't received the fullest of attention. When suited up, Affleck's Batman, particularly in the tunnels fight, looks stodgy rather than brawny. And - despite an introductory accident that finds absurd, Richard Lester style humour in a moment of blind panic - Ezra Miller's Flash, when babbling in repose, often works against the film's mood in a glaring rather than playful way. There are perplexing additions too, the worst of which is a heartfelt conversation between Martha Kent and Lois Lane that tours the crater that Clark's loss has left in their lives before suddenly terminating with a needless superhero cameo that thoroughly undermines the moment. At its best though, this version of Justice League stresses stakes in a way that consistently feels just out of our heroes' control. Instead of clattering through danger, the film gives its set-pieces enough space for logistical appraisal. Threat waxes and wanes, allowing a genuine sense of wonder to take hold then flourish. Again and again we are assured that these heroes will have to break their bodies and work in the moments between seconds to accomplish the impossible. 

Tom Holkenborg - Middle Mass

Zack Snyder's Justice League - UXAS

What sights: Ray Fisher's Cyborg idly directing a swarm of missiles towards their target; Henry Cavill's Superman striding around in his black recovery suit; Joe Morton's Dr Stone, blasted to atoms like Dr Manhattan. Best of all, Darkseid as a barbarian conqueror, lumbering up with an enormous cosmic axe to cleave the HBO Max audience in two.

Justice League

It's difficult to discern any overarching thematic aims in Justice League. Although flawed in different ways, Zack Snyder's previous DC Universe films were constructed around an intent beyond simply providing a road to your standard blockbuster confrontation. Man of Steel asked what kind of Superman would modern America produce, while Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice imagined two heroes poisoned and brought low by the 24 hour news cycle. Both films were plotted using their characters as the engine. Began by Snyder and screenwriter Chris Terrio, then massaged to a conclusion by writer-director Joss Whedon, Justice League is much more routine, at best registering as a two hour effort to rehabilitate the onscreen image of Henry Cavill's alien superhero.

Despite a brief blip in which the Man of Tomorrow trashes his new side-kicks, Justice League's portrayal of Superman uses his death as a fresh break, allowing the character to return to life behaving with the tranquil assurance of Christopher Reeve. This Superman rises again thanks to Dawn of Justice's Kryptonian birthing chamber being turbo-charged by a bastardised version of Jack Kirby's Mother Box. Justice League lingers on another detail though, one that explicitly recalls Marlon Brando sacrificing his holographic life in Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. As Jason Momoa's Aquaman submerges Superman's body in the ship's puss coloured amniotic fluid, a photograph of Kevin Costner's Pa Kent finds its way into the goop, the insinuation being that this mistake is crucial to Clark's new-found stability. Both Supermen are revitalised by consuming digitised approximations of their fathers.

There are a few glimpses of Terrio and Snyder's apocalyptic torment in amongst Whedon's reflex zings, most obviously in a Bushido code Batman and Ray Fisher's depressed Cyborg. The film's mechanoid is a young man forced back to life by his scientist father, using the same invasive, all-powerful extraterrestrial technology that rebooted Superman. Cyborg's early scenes introduce a being who remembers being alive but cannot reconcile his former identity with the rootless chimera he has become. A pall hangs over Cyborg. He rattles around his father's apartment, testing his new body's spontaneous upgrades and gloomily observing the world outside. Nudges are woven throughout the film, perhaps at one point designed to underscore the character's potentially dangerous disconnect with humanity. They never go anywhere. The film is too busy racing between expensive set-pieces. The fangs have been filed out of Justice League's head.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - Ultimate Edition

The theatrical release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice didn't have scenes in the traditional sense. Information was rationed out in condensed, discordant blips that sat awkwardly in the assembly. Story didn't develop naturally, people and identities came and went as the action demanded, and no-one but Ben Affleck's Batman was allowed a distinct point-of-view. This had the cumulative effect of saddling the caped crusader with the role of the protagonist, a job that the character, as presented here, couldn't shoulder without seriously unbalancing the film.

Dawn of Justice's Batman is reactionary and paranoid, a man dealing with survivor's guilt by putting himself on a collision course with an alien who dwells in the sky. The cinema release did such a poor job of communicating the virtues of Henry Cavill's Superman that the film couldn't help but fall in line with Bruce Wayne's blinkered world view. There was no alternative. Worse still, his mission, the film's backbone, is founded on misinformation planted by Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor. Batman wasn't even the master of his own destiny.

Action films demand heroes that express individuality, it's their defining trait. They're going against the grain, betting everything they have on their ability to succeed. Action films, and the hero myths they are descended from, are a way in which human culture expresses the desire to be special, to be unique and lauded amongst your peers. By founding Batman's goal on a willingness to be manipulated so thoroughly, the filmmakers abdicated Wayne's prime positioning. They'd made him appear weak just to twist the knife. Power does not reside with this Batman. He's old and misguided, tragic even.

Lex Luthor then is crowbarred into an authority role that the film doesn't account for. Lex is a cipher, a colourful Google era recontextualisation of Superman's stock, big business bad guy. He isn't supposed to drive the film, he's an irritant. In the theatrical cut of Batman v Superman, Luthor gloating is the most powerful moment in the whole piece, it up-ends assumptions and throws everything into chaos. In this Ultimate Edition it's nothing. The weight of the revelation matters less because we already have another character bearing narrative weight - Superman.

The seismic shift in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - Ultimate Edition is that it embraces a perspective other than Batman's. The snipped, unforgiving progression of the theatrical cut framed everything through the prism of Bruce Wayne. His ideas and opinions stood unopposed. The Ultimate Edition corrects this mania by apportioning credible dramatic space to Clark Kent. We watch Kent running down inconclusive leads in the rain, we see him ringing his mother at some ungodly hour just to hear the voice of another person who loved his father.

Theatrical Superman plays solely into his omnipotent powers - he was everywhere he needed to be, armed with an opinion. He wasn't a person, he was an obstacle. Ultimate Superman we discover isn't really Superman at all, he's a different expression of Clark Kent. Ultimate's biggest addition is the clarification that the Kent persona isn't just a disguise or a hobby for this stranded God (think Hellenic, rather than just Judeo-Christian), it's the true expression of the man. He wants to be good, to make his Dad proud. He also cares about journalism as something beyond access and the opportunity to hang out with his girlfriend.

This new context works two-fold, it reveals Clark Kent's character and clarifies the abject horror of the news media he navigates. Clark is presented as a man out of time, a reporter chasing a genuine scoop in era of cut-and-paste copy. He's also a Superman coping with a 24 hour news cycle that is happy to skew spiteful when it finds itself starving for content. Toxic talking heads were all over the big screen release, but it's the contrast that Kent's scenes now provide that makes plain their presence beyond a glib The Dark Knight Returns callback.

In Zack Snyder's longer cut Superman is pitted relentlessly against apathy and outright bigotry. Mankind is portrayed as teetering on the edge of damnation, a people motivated by small, petty emotions that appeal to their inherent hate. Personal prejudice rules; facts and data a distant consideration. In this milieu, Affleck's Batman is finally allowed to assume the position he was always designed for - he's the antagonist, the ultimate, mechanised expression of reactionary political posturing. Removed from the responsibilities of the leading man, it's fun to watch a Batman so damaged that he's happy to move on convenient truths and outright lies. Simply, he's scared.

Although the theatrical cut's laser focus on Batman hobbled the film, you can understand the intention - Affleck and Jeremy Irons both give magnetic performances, not to mention The Dark Knight's proven, recent, track record on film - but it's Superman's story that has a satisfying, evolving arc. We discover the person behind the divine image. Comparatively, Batman is stationary, simmering in his juices. The cinema release masked David S Goyer and Chris Terrio's rehabilitation of a character that, in Man of Steel, registered as acutely selfish. This Ultimate Edition leaves us in no doubt that Clark Kent is this being's core identity. He wants to hold down a job and spend his life loving and looking after Amy Adams' Lois Lane.

The Superman persona then is something truly distinct, and perhaps even unwanted. It's a role that Kent assumes not out of joy or even necessity, but out of guilt. He knows he can help. The confrontation with Batman isn't motivated by the hypocritical urge to tidy away the human vigilante, the greater detail here points to a Superman that is alarmed by a man who doesn't even try to understand the consequences of his actions. In that respect, Batman becomes a personification of all this film's oozing, capricious humanity. Bruce Wayne is oblivious and indulgent, filled with certainty and acting without any thought or consideration for what Superman brings to the world.

When Lex cajoles Superman into confronting Batman, the Man of Steel is being given the opportunity to pummel an avatar for a society that wilfully misunderstands and rejects him. Clark has been given every reason in the world to cut loose and obliterate this fallen Batman, his decision not to is critical. In this moment we understand the two distinct headspaces that have tracked naturally to this crisis point. Goyer and Terrio have worked hard to place these two American icons in a situation that demands they try to murder each other. Thanks to the Ultimate Edition's additions though, the context has changed completely.

Batman v Superman is no longer a pro wrestling dream match, it's a misanthropic suicide pact between two broken idols, disgusted by the world that surrounds them (see also - Optimus Prime in Transformers: Age of Extinction). This viewing, when Batman intones "You were never a God, you were never even a man." he might as well be talking to himself. He knows he's gone too far, he's working against his mission, betraying his vow to Gotham and his dead parents to appease his bruised ego. By apportioning equal time and motivation to Superman we get a fresh perspective on a Batman desperate to be swept up and saved.

The film now naturally acquires the despairing emotional sweep that the theatrical edition merely assumed. The much derided Martha moment plays less like a grinding gear change and more like a moment of divine inspiration striking at the core of Bruce. We've just watched Superman pull his punches. He didn't burn Batman down or twist his head off, Clark instead fought to halt. These actions clearly demonstrate Superman's capacity for selflessness and decency, any lingering doubts about Man of Steel's man-child are erased. We absolutely do not want to see this Superman killed by a Batman so lost that he has convinced himself that pulling the sun out of the sky is the right thing to do.

The deletion of Superman's path to this fight robbed Batman v Superman of its sense of tragedy. Martha Kent's rescue is not only the film's emotional climax now, it's the moment a bitter enemy redeems himself, finding purpose working alongside an altruistic superhuman whose last thoughts were of his mother. The chivalrous, Arthurian imagery present in the superfluous CG crescendo that closes the film has been given purchase in something other than an Excalibur poster outside the Wayne family's death cinema. They're the model for future films - Knights without countries finding common cause fighting for the ideals of a God that died for his adopted planet. Batman's promised Justice League seems less like an economic imperative and more like a logical progression from the moment an alien made Bruce Wayne feel small then ashamed.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice proposes confrontation. Given the title you might expect an extended, ideological clash between a God that has fallen to Earth and a man who has transformed himself into a monster. The tension between the two is crystal clear. One combatant has spent decades honing his mind and body, burning down every connection and relationship that didn't track into his all-consuming mission. The other is all-powerful simply because of a yellow battery that hangs above him.

Frank Miller, Lynn Varley and Klaus Janson's The Dark Knight Returns should be the key text here. It's alluded to incessantly. Panels are reproduced, lines from the comic and its sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again are quoted verbatim, but it's all lip-service. Screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S Goyer ignore either comics' nihilistic principles, arriving at a scenario about two corporate properties that have stumbled into each other's realms leaden with excuses. Neither Batman nor Superman is allowed to be truly insane, their passions are incessantly explained and organised until there is no room for a real conceptual leap.

This obsessive micro-management unbalances any sense of dramatic drive and weakens both characters. They aren't allowed to conceive their own motors, both of the superheroes are explicitly being manipulated. Ben Affleck's seething Batman does at least play with the aesthetics of damage, he looms silently like the Alien and sears his mark into sex criminals. We're given a taste of Frank Miller and Darren Aronofsky's abandoned Batman: Year One film project - a psychotic Bruce Wayne completely lost in his misery, lashing out - before everybody gets cold feet and we're treated to successive instances of the fantastical reaching out to Batman, condoning his holy crusade against the sky.

It's too much. Zack Snyder's film is choked with this kind of exposition, the same points reiterated over and over until we're all assured that everybody is acting in a way that will do no permanent harm to the brand. Dawn of Justice is a roadshow length hand wave, it reeks of compromise. It's clear Snyder wants to wring maximum violence out of his toys, the director using an Avengers moment to hurl DC's Trinity into their very own apocalypse. Snyder is reaching for sturm und drang - Batman armed with M60 machine-guns, exterminating lawbreakers - but ends up with something that isn't even as venomous as either Tim Burton's Batman or Batman Returns.

Dawn of Justice mishandles its own central conceit to such a degree that all the accumulated animosity is instantly washed away once the two sad little boys learn their mothers share common ground. It's like they were never even at odds. The film can't wait to race away from the truly wonderful idea of a puny human sealing himself inside a metal coffin to collide with a bullet proof deity just so it can segue into another impersonal animatic featuring a pug-faced troll.

Zack Snyder's film wants so very badly to be the vulgar, all-consuming nightmare at the end of the superhero trend, the third Miracleman trade plucked apart and reassembled alongside stray pages from Walter Simonson's contribution to Batman Black and White; Frank Miller in tow, punching up the dialogue. Unfortunately, it's stuck being the launch platform for all of Warner Bros' future summers. Dawn of Justice then is an uneven product perched upon shaky architecture that thinks it can wash itself in a hundred million dollars worth of pulverised concrete and come up smelling important.

MY HAND AT YOUR THROAT

Dead sporting of Zack Snyder to go to all the trouble of shooting a disappointing Superman film just so he can put Ben Affleck's Batman over. Henry Cavill's supercilious Superman is exactly the kind of prick you can build a Rocky IV narrative around. The real hero is the human who spends months deep underground, angrily dragging around a wet tractor tire so he can bulk up enough to go punch out God.

LET US PRAY

"I don't think this stuff happens in a Mylar-snug vacuum. I think that it's when this kind of material works, it's drawn from the sources around you but it's turned into metaphor. 

I'm waiting for the pop-cultural metaphor for 9/11. I haven't seen a sign of it yet. But just like Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a response to Communism, and film noir itself was a response, essentially, to Pearl Harbor and the Second World War, there will be something that surfaces. It might be a Western. It won't, specifically, resemble what happened."

-- Frank Miller speaking to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal in January 2003.

There's a case to be made that the Marvel cycle currently tearing down the box-office is exactly what Miller is describing - a pop-culture reflex that clearly delineates good and evil. The Avengers, made up of an ex-GI, an arms dealer, and a couple of rehabilitated assassins on super-secret service retainer, are the good guys. Thanos and the army of vaguely Egyptian jackal-men he gifts Loki are the bad guys. As with Star Wars and Vietnam, the culture heals itself by dreaming up realms untainted by implication.

That's not to say the Marvel material isn't evolving. Captain America: The Winter Soldier talked about the potential for duplicity when you have an organisation that puts itself above the governments of Earth. Avengers: Age of Ultron might even demonise Tony Stark's relentless push towards total automation. Those ideas are trace elements though. In comparison, this trailer for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice reads like vandalism.

Although casting rumours point towards an overstuffed mess, this trailer is refreshingly simple. A mechanised Batman has made it his business to tear Superman out of the sky. Colour provided by talking heads that reference The Church of Superman that rose out of Metropolis' ashes in The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This underwhelming, underperforming Man of Steel is explicitly framed as a God. Ben Affleck's Bootstraps Batman means to teach him some humility. A different kind of simplicity, aggressive and nihilistic, but at least it's cinematic. Warner Bros and DC are blowing their wad, racing through Frank Miller's deathlessly antagonistic work to firmly establish an alternative to Marvel's conveyor belt of three-star entertainment.

Is it a Birdy?

 Zack Snyder talking about the anime series that informed Man of Steel.

"I've seen a few episodes of Dragon Ball. I know it's a major work of anime, and that it has suitably huge-scale battles depicted beautifully. (However) there's another anime I've forgotten the name of, where loads of city buildings gets destroyed. I know there are loads of such scenes in anime, but this one in particular is possibly like Man of Steel. I'm sure it's a TV series. In the US it's called Birdy the Mighty. The city battles scenes in it are so good, they have a huge impact. Also, because in Man of Steel the fighting is mostly one-on-one hand-to-hand stuff, rather than in, say, The Avengers where they're fighting a huge force, the movie's much more like the fantastic style of anime than other movies."

 Article extract and video via NeoGaf.

Man of Steel

As a character conceived during the Great Depression you would think it notable, perhaps even timely, to reconsider Superman during a double-dip recession. The Golden Age mint of the character was a social equaliser, his early strips focused on kitchen sink scenarios in which the hero featured as an avatar for justice and basic human decency. In contrast Man of Steel presents Superman as a couch surfing millennial, an unactualised ditherer who uses his abilities in passive aggressive explosions.

David S Goyer attempts to recontextualise Superman as a lonely drifter scared to use his powers openly. This kind of indecision works for a character like Wolverine, a tainted hero with powers based on damage and people shredding violence. You can understand why Wolverine shuns situations that get his blood up. Transpose Superman into these scenarios though and he just plays as weak. The most powerful thing on the planet should not have a confidence issue, he doesn't need to refuse the call. It's disingenuous.

Human sympathy aligns with Superman when his problems are more broadly existential - his alien otherness, or his ability to match the ideals his fathers gift him. Keep him under a bridge while the man he loves most in the world is swept away and you make him seem cowardly. Include that event in a story where he never carries that pain forward into regret and you undermine your character and thesis. Man of Steel is not a carefully considered alternative take on the mythology of Superman, it's pop contrariness with zero follow through. Superman tweaked in ways antithetical to his appeal to track with a studio's idea of their target demographic. 

After the thoroughly shitty Green Lantern, it's disappointing to see Warner Bros once again overlook the key thematic appeal of their most popular movie superhero. Being Batman is Bruce Wayne's drive. His indecision is wrapped up in the execution and his longevity rather than the initial leap. His agenda is unshakably to fight crime. In Batman Begins, Wayne travelled the globe to hone and temper his resolve. Man of Steel makes Clark's journey a surface level identity crisis, resolved through expositions dumps and lifeless talking heads written like essay bullet points.

The uselessness of this Clark Kent is especially apparent when compared to a character like Faora, General Zod's right-hand woman. Unlike Kal-El, and even a Zod prone to face creasing tantrums, Faora is centred and comfortable. She has instantly adapted to her new environment, able to channel her Kryptonian martial arts into a super fighting style heavily indebted to Dragon Ball Z. She's exactly the kind of ideological opposite this film needs. She can control her powers, but doesn't want to. Her movements are precise and directed where Kal and Zod are flailing. She's the strong, silent answer to Kal's repression. Why then did the filmmakers return to Zod when they could have built the film around the fascistic allure of a beautiful Kryptonian equal who behaves like an Israeli commando? As a hook it beats the barely explored eugenics tension set up during this film's (admittedly fantastic) Heavy Metal Krypton prologue.

The real tragedy of Man of Steel is that, like Prometheus, the film is stuffed full of interesting design work made rootless by an indifferent script. The Krypton sequence is Moebius' Arzach escaping from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan Gimenez's Metabarons. Zod and his men are outfitted with Giger muscle suits that look like they've been carved out of prehistoric bones. Each action sequence has a distinct identity and genre through-line. The first act, featuring a slugger Jor-El, is basically the action heavy first episode of Bruce Timm's Superman: The Animated Series by way of Dune. A small town throw-down is blocked like an Akira Toriyama fight comic, and the Metropolis toppling finale has visual flourishes mined from Akira, Miracleman, and the animated adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns. Man of Steel's action moments are steeped in these kind of clashing, discordant influences - a comic artist's reference shelf nabbed at random then hammered together around the hollow, infuriating, tale of two losers putting lumps on each other.

Uppercut Launcher into Mid-Air Axe-Handle

Zack Snyder has been assigned the Superman reboot, David S. Goyer's script is reportedly a complete mess, and Darren Aronofsky is rumoured to have been shunned thanks to his desire to take his time, and do a good job. An unkind commentator might note that the whole exercise reeks of a last minute attempt by Warners to get a project rolling before the families of creators Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster are lawfully allowed to recover damages incurred pursuing ownership of Superman. I'm sure it's just coincidence that a condition of a 2009 court ruling by judge Stephen G Larson indicates that Warners have to be in the process of making a new Superman film by 2011 to deny the families this right. But, you know, new Superman movie! Woooo!

Internet vapour indicates this installment will be yet another origin mish-mash, with Kal-El puzzling through the notion of actually even bothering to be Superman at all. That's right folks! This big blue boyscout is an enfeebled toad who'd rather hide his excellence for an easy life. We can all relate to that, am I right? Villain talk has run the gamut from Luthor (again) to Brainiac, before finally settling on Zod. There's a vague tease that Zod could be the galvanising factor in this Superman not being a massive overwhelming coward. Hopefully Zod is placed as an ill-tempered abilities mirror, grown weary at our planet's total weakness - it's the middle chapter of Superman II no current version satisfyingly accounts for.

Regardless of how dreadful this new movie will, or won't be, let's hope they at least get the super-fighting correct. Embedded for your viewing pleasure is a short clip of Justice League Unlimited's finale Destroyer. This Joaquim Dos Santos directed excerpt illustrates both a Superman who is not a quivering wreck in the face of titanic might, as well as how to block Gods battling on Earth. That's right folks! You simply copy the motion moves of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball Z.

Trench Cat

Hand over untold millions of dollars to Christopher Nolan to make an intensely personal dream project and you get an action moving rumination on collaboration and the process of movie making. Conversely, rope in Zack Snyder and he'll serve up burlesque brawlers in Burton drag twatting at Great War zombies and towering Brazil samurai in the virtual world of Mamoru Oshii's Avalon. Either approach is fine. No complaints here.

Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut

A compromised pirate themed draft of that bloodied, iconic smiley; key art that proudly and inaccurately boasts 'The Complete Story'; a four disc added-value Blu-Ray box set heaving with various re-edits and flash glide stagings of the original Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons text. It must be the holiday season. Compiled from various antiquated straight-to-market shelf fillers, the juice in this US only set is yet another version of Zack Snyder's feature. This newly compiled 215 minute print of Watchmen finds further time to digress, widening its sphere of interests to include street level news vendor chatter, and a drifting meta-text.

The animated Tales of the Black Freighter movie has been woven into the feature, mostly in isolation. We aren't treated to Gerard Butler voicing bleak, situationally specific introspections over pre-Giuliani New York. Instead the segments are chaptered into the feature on downtime, usually jumping off from a trip to the newsstand. Bleed-in is minimal, the only non-diegetic intrusion comes from an agitated Silk Spectre II, apparently urging the circling Freighter to wind down a little quicker to allow her a character moment. This brief dialogue intrusion highlights something of a tonal mismatch. The inclusion of this animated Freighter adds another less intended layer of deconstruction. Butler rabidly racing through largely undoctored Moore text is an excitement way out of most of live action cast's range. Disappointing then, but not completely without merit.

While for much of the duration the Freighter segments only obliquely contrast the main movie narrative - they tend instead to operate on a pitch black comedic agenda - a place is found for the pitiless conclusion. Inserted immediately prior to Ozymandias' big reveal, the fate of the mariner neatly undercuts any test audience tinkering in the main feature. In this context, the Black Freighter interludes are explicitly and retroactively positioned as Adrian Veidt's unconscious noodling on his mission, granting the character a head-space he is denied elsewhere. Freighter drains Veidt's 'victory' of even the barest sense of triumph, giving the film's conclusion some much needed mutation. The discovery of Rorschach's diary at the right-wing rag headquarters now plays less like a gag, and more like it did in the original comic: a tiny cog springing to life in a deliberate, unknowable machine. The use here of Freighter falls short of Moore and Gibbons' weaving multi-lead commentary, but it does patch a nagging hole in Snyder's interpretation. As ultimate a cut as we're likely to get.

Watchmen: Director's Cut

Zack Snyder's long trumpeted Watchmen: Director's Cut finally arrives. There's little indication if this is Snyder's preferred edit, or a just a cash-in that has been rolled out to keep the property fresh. It doesn't help that there's another longer edit on the horizon either. That said, away from inflated, possessive expectation, Snyder's film fares a little better. Director's Cuts always threaten a transformative quality. An incomplete thesis made whole by the addition of discarded, mutant material. Great examples include the identity crisis dreamscape introduced to Blade Runner, or the maternal angst added to Aliens. Both a digression too far for cinema screening. Unfortunately, the term is massively devalued now, bandied about for every other teen-baiting head wringer desperate to court extra sell-through sales on home video. Knowing that Watchmen's alien invasion ending wasn't even filmed does take the shine off proceedings - despite early reports indicating that Cloverfield monster man Neville Page was on the case. In that sense the film will always be 'imperfect'.

The earliest additions to this Watchmen are witless, violent inflections that stall flow and further paint these street avengers as X-types. Nuance does, eventually, begin to creep in though. Rorschach's fevered narration is finally allowed to digress into the bigoted, a crucial character trait that coasted on the big screen. Laurie's memories of a father prickle earlier too, while Nite Owl II loses it with a (relative) innocent. Best of all is Hollis Mason's bow-out, a straining Queensbury box against otaku thugs intercut with brief recollections of the enemies he vanquished in his heyday. Unfortunately, Snyder can't help cuing up Pietro Mascagni's Intermezzo, from the opera Cavalleria rusticana, famous for scoring Scorsese's Raging Bull. I'm still not sure if these music choices are designed to stress archetypes, or a desire to position Watchmen: The Movie as a work built out of the scraps of an auteur-focused Hollywood that likely wouldn't have existed in this timeline. No Vietnam loss means no introspective 1970s. Either way, it's still rather flawed in execution. Recognisable music attributed to an incongruous image creates a hurdle. Are we supposed to be patting ourselves on the back for recognising the reference? Or chuckling at the co-opt? Regardless, isn't that breaking scene?

Most disappointing of all is the continued lack of an origin story, or sequence, for Matthew Goode's Ozymandias. On a second viewing, Watchmen's fragmented narrative displays a talent for exactly the immersive digression that Moore's text thrived on. A big screen portrayal of Veidt's journey into intellectual hubris would have made for a thrilling counterpoint to Osterman's filmed brushes with infinity. In both versions of the film currently available, Veidt is far too functionary. A rootless sort who haunts the film's fringes, displaying an obvious air of menace that somewhat blows the impending twist. Maybe the Black Freighter bleed-in will bolster this angle? The tale informing the predicament Veidt finds himself in? Regardless, Snyder's Watchmen has become easier to admire on subsequent rolls. There's less inclination to call foul on the many deletions and alterations. In particular, the exaggerated hyper-violence becomes recognisable as a counter-point to contemporary super-fiction films. It's a shade rougher, mirroring the position that the original comic took. Snyder's film is a faithful but graceless adaptation of material specifically designed to be anti-translation. It hasn't been beaten and tweaked to resemble a knives n' knickers blockbuster, thankfully. Despite many vulgar choices, Snyder's Watchmen is still a rambling digression on thrill-seeking thugs, and the people who watch them.