The Snyder Cut: Reflections on Grief

An ambitious, once in a lifetime masterwork forever re-contextualised by its creator's losses.

The element of Zack Snyder’s work that has always meant the most to me, particularly within his superhero films, is how much connection matters to him as a filmmaker. While he does enjoy his grim colour palettes and endless aestheticism, what drives Snyder to explore these heroic figures is the intimacy that lies at their very core. Man of Steel is all about the innate vulnerability of being a god amongst mortals, the alienation and sacrifice that comes from not being like anyone else around you. It’s a story that’s built on the foundations of love and acceptance, about choosing to embrace yourself and having to face the life altering consequences of that decision. Outside of the Raimi Spider-Man films, it is my favourite superhero film because it is the one that most clearly expresses how I’ve felt across my life as an outsider, as someone marginalised due to the way my brain functions. Snyder’s depiction of Clark Kent truly accepting his powers, after all the inner torment and loss he’s been through, and finding sheer euphoria in taking flight is why I’ve always looked for in superhero films. The sense of taking your own soul back. Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice is grimmer, more esoteric and divisive. It is a work about the imagery of violence, symbols of gods mutating into representations of cruelty. Instead of being centred on the mythological tale of good versus evil or firmly establishing one of the two as unashamedly heroic, Snyder builds the first two acts entirely around individual perspective. To Batman, Superman is a terrorist, a man who knocked down the city of Metropolis due to a war that no human understands or wished to take part in. After all, he was on the ground, staring at the sky burning, watching as two beings lead to the deaths of thousands. Snyder’s decision to cut from Bruce Wayne running through the ash laden streets of Metropolis to Superman acting as a tool of American imperialism in the Middle East helps illustrate immediately the ways heroism can be mutated. The entirety of BvS is about this concept, showcasing Clark Kent’s arc as a constant struggle to not become a symbol of terror, to remain true to the ethics of his parents and his own personal moral code. Batman in contrast, is portrayed as someone who has already lost the meaning of the symbol on his chest. He is a brute, a sadistic thug who brands and beats street criminals. He is no longer an arbiter of justice, instead, he is a traumatised man with bloodlust and all the technology to satisfy it. The battle between the lost soul and the one trying desperately to cling onto it is what makes BvS such a fascinating text, particularly in a contemporary context of superhero conflicts being exclusively black and white. 

BvS has experienced much hatred and mockery for its “Martha” sequence but even if you’re not a fan of the execution, it is the encapsulation of the worldview that Snyder’s been interested in exploring over the course of his superhero films. It’s most comparable to the Jonathan Kent sequence in Man of Steel, another moment that’s incredibly divisive, a moment of true intimacy that stretches logic in order to show the intense fragility of these titans. Man of Steel’s power in that moment is showing the love of a father towards his son, showing that he’s willing to die for his boy to remain safe and showcasing that Clark’s only state of powerlessness comes from his emotions. He wants to move, he knows he can, yet he remains static when his father’s hand is raised, because he knows what it means. He knows what he has to do, even if every impulse in him screams against it. It is not a perfect scene and it’s easy to understand why it doesn’t work for many, but there are few movie moments that put shivers on the back of my spine like Costner’s final gesture to his son as he gets swept away by the storm. The Martha moment is that crowning realisation for Bruce, the incident that stabs him deeper than any shard could, something that brings himself back to the reasons why he first became Batman. For a second or two, the burden and weight of being different overwhelms both men, and all they can do is feel the intense pain before finding some honour in their grief. This leads to BvS turning into a story about redemption and martyrdom, fighting against your own vendettas or urges to embrace a darker side, and working together to do the right thing one last time. Superman’s sacrifice is yet another incident of him being asked to do the impossible to protect himself and the world he loves. He’s watched his father die, he’s been forced to kill General Zod to save a screaming family, and now he’s giving up his own future with his love Lois Lane. Yet, instead of walking away or making the easier choice, Superman just stands there. Like he did with his father, he doesn’t move and makes his sacrifice until there is nothing left but blinding light. Snyder gets much credit from BvS’ defenders for his visual abrasiveness and thematic interests, but I think what really makes both Man of Steel and BvS work is his commitment to sincerity and heartfelt emotion even as everything burns. There might not be a happy ending or the ability to save everyone, but as these people face an almost certain apocalypse, they stand together and continue to love each other, continue to embrace the people and memories that got them here. 

That’s what the Snyder Cut of Justice League does best. It channels the inherent tragedy of superheroism into a staggeringly emotional tribute to all those we’ve lost, making one of the best films about surviving grief in recent memory. We all know the story of this film’s turbulent production, the bastardised original cut and the years of controversial campaigning it took to get a finished version of Snyder’s own vision released. Something that’s well known but often goes overlooked in discussions about the situation is why Zack Snyder stopped fighting the studio interference and allowed Joss Whedon to take over. His daughter, Autumn, committed suicide during the production of the film and after that, there was no energy left to fight corporate executives or abusive producers. Losing a loved one is the worst feeling in the universe, losing one to suicide hurts more than is humanly conceivable and no one who hasn’t lost a child of their own can even imagine the pain that Zack and his wife Deborah have been through in the years since Autumn’s death. It’s not something that most of us will ever understand, something that no one should ever have to. Nothing else matters when you’re grieving except whoever you’ve got left and the memories of the person you’ve lost. Years later, given the opportunity to properly assemble his footage and do some re-shoots to piece together his final version of his baby, there is an innate melancholy to the entire production. So much of the film is centred on grief, the loss of a life partner, the loss of a mother, the loss of a son. There is no main character in the film who isn’t grieving someone, with the death of Superman particularly looming over Batman, Lois Lane and his mother Martha Kent. For the others, The Flash has lost his mother to violence and his father to a wrongly convicted life sentence. Cyborg has lost his mother to a car crash and struggles to cling onto his absent father. Wonder Woman has lost her love Steve Trevor due to his sacrifice in her solo film. Aquaman has never met his mother and has closed himself off to everyone else in the world. Batman has lost his parents and now the man who re-taught him what it meant to be a hero. These characters all find each other, not just to fight the antagonists and save the world, but to connect through their own grief and find a conduit that can bring some light back to the planet. 

While so much of this was planned out and shot before the death of his daughter, there is something haunting and deeply emotional about the prospect of Snyder coming back to these concepts and shots following his own unfixable loss. In many ways, the Snyder Cut is more similar to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree than it is any other superhero film. They are both works created by artists who’ve lost a child, with the majority of the writing coming before the deaths of their children, and who have come back to assemble the pieces of the final product together. These projects contain words and images that seem too driven by loss and grief to have been produced before Cave and Snyder’s losses, they are forever re-contextualised by the monumental tragedies they’ve been through. It’s almost too blunt that Snyder actually implements a song from Skeleton Tree in the film’s opening 20 minutes, soundtracking Distant Sky over a wordless sequence of Lois Lane grieving. There are little gestures and grace notes throughout the 4 hour runtime that properly delve into the grief on display, with one of the most notable being Lois clinging onto the cape of her dead love, holding it close to her like it’s attached to her flesh. The way that Snyder has used structural editing to make the most out of the grieving images intact in the original cut is ingenious, with moments such as The Flash’s interaction with his father in prison that felt incomplete in the Whedon version containing such substantive emotional weight here. Similarly, he’s dramatically improved everything involving the death of Superman, giving some more crucial time to Lois and Martha Kent who have an incredibly poignant scene together. There’s a thread of Lois Lane being unable to go back to work following the passing of the person she loved the most, and it’s hard not to feel the weight of those words and the importance of Lois being able to pick herself up to try and live again. It’s impossible not to see this as Snyder being able to throw himself back into his work, to be able to keep creating and living even without his daughter being there to see it. The whole film is dedicated to Autumn and it feels like that dedication is built into its very DNA.

The main beneficiary of the extended running time and structural integrity is Cyborg, who gets further depth to his tragic backstory, losing his mother and his idea of a future, while being left with nothing but an endless database of knowledge and a fractured relationship with his father. Ray Fisher’s performance is the heart and soul of the movie. He captures the experimentation and surreality that comes from being given all the data in the known universe, yet manages to ensure that the key emotion of the character’s arc remains. It would have been easy to play it completely robotic but seeing the constant presence of Victor Stone in Fisher’s performance ensures him as the emotional core of Snyder’s version. Watching him smash the recording device of his father because he just can’t bear to listen to his apologies or scream for his father when he’s threatened by the antagonists are incredibly poignant moments to witness. One of the best little moments in the film is watching Cyborg react to a mother with a lack of funds in her bank account and using his new abilities to give her all the money she needs, cracking his first smile of the film as he sees her react with incredulousness. The decision to show other people on the streets of Gotham react with fear and suspicion when seeing his face following this moment of kindness helps amplify the confusion and shame that Cyborg feels throughout the film, the knowledge that his existence will often be taken with a hint of disgust. Similarly to Superman in Man of Steel learning to embrace his difference, Cyborg goes through a version of that journey here, making the choice to choose life on these terms instead of fading into a replication of what came before. It’s a very beautiful film about disability in this sense as while it is obviously a work of immense fantasy, it shows Cyborg’s journey as not about trying to become his old physical self again, but to embrace what his body looks like now and push forward for the rest of his life with it. Every disabled person, whether mentally or physically, has thought of themselves as broken at least once, myself included. We all need to hear that we aren’t, that we’re beautiful as we are and take power in our unique bodies and minds. Snyder’s depiction of Cyborg is the rare time when physical disability is portrayed as an overwhelming strength, where he affirms himself as not broken, as someone spectacular on his own terms. It is one of the most positive depictions of a disabled protagonist in modern Hollywood. There are moments that take place inside the physical magnitude of his consciousness, the most notable following a spellbinding running sequence from The Flash, and they contain some of the most poignant work of Snyder’s career. As he sees the images of his past and the potential of a world without feeling, he has to make the choice to live, to embrace his new flesh and fight for those he has left in this world. It is the very ethos of Snyder’s production, grasping onto your trauma and losses and making the choice every day to survive. Sometimes it’s harder to live than die, we have to fight to realise why it’s worth staying. 

For all the production struggles and the dastardly nature of the original cut, the seams are almost perfectly stitched together by Snyder and editor David Brenner. It flows remarkably well and has very good pacing, introducing all the central characters over the course of the first two hours, slowly incorporating them into the heat of the action. You do feel like you have an understanding of each member of the Justice League which wasn’t at all present in the theatrical cut. Like previously mentioned, one of the biggest strengths of the Snyder Cut is the way it’s improved the character of The Flash, particularly with the relationship with his father. With the full vision of Snyder being present here, it’s clear that so much of the film and his DC output to date is centred on the struggles of losing a father. In Man of Steel, the presences of both of Clark’s deceased fathers are omnipresent, always following him around even though he’s no longer able to feel their embrace or have them properly see his development as Superman. Here, there is Cyborg’s turbulent and eventually seismically poignant relationship with his father and the dynamic between Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen and his father played by Billy Crudup. Crudup has long since been one of the greatest actors of his generation, with Snyder directing him to a masterful performance in the 2009 adaptation of Watchmen, and with the proper time, he gives another beautiful turn here. His dynamic with Miller is often the lightest and most optimistic content in the film, even though it’s inherently built on injustice and tragic absence. The way Crudup conveys the desperation for his son’s future, to the extent that he briefly believes cutting him out of his life is the way to go, is devastating and showcases the true extent of the love for his boy. Similarly, in moments of jubilant celebration between them, it’s rare to see a father character in fiction convey such sheer pride and happiness on the behalf of their child. The way Crudup’s voice breaks and his smile radiates is one of the most pleasant sights in recent contemporary cinema and offers a major alleviation after all the sadness found in the cut. Thankfully, all of Whedon’s footage of The Flash has been eradicated from Snyder’s cut and the misogynist jokes have been replaced with a more calming, endearing comic relief character. The greatest strength of The Flash’s inclusion is the visual effects involved in his running, particularly in the film’s final stages, they look great and convey such significant emotion power as time mutates around his accelerating body. When mixed with the escalating scale and bombastic visuals of the closing fight sequences, it provides a satisfying guttural feeling whenever the sparks radiate around his spirit. Instead of being an irritating blight like he was in the original cut, The Flash is more in line with the Wally West version of the character in the early 2000s Justice League animated show, the jokester of the group who uses humour to cope with overwhelming trauma. It’s heartwarming to see and provides some hope for the eventual solo film for the character, if it ever actually gets made. 

The last major thing I want to discuss here is the way that Snyder handles the return of Superman. As mentioned, many of the film’s best moments are centred on the women he’s left behind, particularly Lois. It’s key that she’s present in the moment of his rebirth. She’s only there because she’s found the strength to leave her house and try to go back to work, and gets to witness the resurgence of the man she thought could only exist in memories and photographs now. The face of Amy Adams in this scene is reminiscent of one of my favourite performances in film history, Karen Allen’s sensational opening scene in Starman when she first sees the alien with the face of her husband. There’s shock, incredulousness and a brief moment of unbelievable euphoria before any other logic or revelations kick in. While the Snyder Cut is not on the same level as my second favourite film of all time, it shows the basis of Snyder’s sentimentality, there is so much attention given to the sheer emotion of being given a second chance with a loved one you thought was gone forever. The sequence leading up to this moment of transcendent connection between Lois and Clark was the only truly mesmerising part of the original cut and it’s dramatically improved here, with additional footage helping broaden the scale of the set-piece and the emotional weight of the return. Superman not realising who he is following his revival from death and lashing out is a great idea that really works as the conclusion to the second act. The action is excellent, with some of the best visual effects work in the film, and it clearly showcases both the unique traits of each Justice League member and the significant strength of Superman perfectly. Snyder’s attentive building of each character in combat makes each of the 5 opposing Superman feel genuinely unstoppable together, which makes Superman’s destruction of them feel even more impactful. It conveys the sheer power of the version of himself that doesn’t keep his emotions and powers in check, the unlimited danger that can come from a god with no compassion. It’s another example of Snyder’s unabashed sentimentality when the rampage of Superman is stopped by recognising the face of his love, with the memories and clarity of his existence seemingly returning in a flash, and is unlikely to work for any of the major skeptics of his emotional approach. For the converted, it’ll put tears in your eyes like it did mine. 

Diane Lane’s performances in Snyder’s DC films are continuously underrated, even by fans of the trilogy. Her work in Man of Steel, particularly in the opening meltdown with her son and the first sequence following Jonathan’s death is arguably the best acting in Snyder’s best film. She’s not in much of the Snyder Cut but she once again brings her trademark gravitas and emotional honesty to the role of Martha Kent. Her exchange with Lois is beautifully vulnerable and articulates the weight of living with grief so succinctly, but her best moments are the non verbal sequences throughout the film. She conveys the joys and sadness inherent to motherhood perfectly across her appearances and in Snyder’s cut, she lingers beside her husband and son’s graves, staring silently at the stones which are all she has left of the men she’s loved. I think about her crying in Man of Steel, struck with fear that her son will be taken away from her permanently constantly, especially since her worst anxiety was realised. Similarly to Adams’ incredible facial expressions when seeing her man alive, Lane’s reaction to seeing her son in the cornfields that he grew up in is like she’s seeing a ghost. Unlike the others, there is nothing static in her reaction, no initial shock causing her body to stop functioning. She leaps forward towards her son, not knowing if he’s a clone, a spirit, a dream or the real thing, and surrenders herself in the image of the person she loves most in the universe. For a second, all logic, all conventional thought leaves the body and all that’s left is the overwhelming force of love that dictates our way of existence. When the initial embrace is over, she realises that it is her son, that he’s been given a second chance at life itself, that like Christ from the Cross, he’s able to step forward into the future. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if things are real, if they’re just blurred dreams and subconscious imagery, sometimes just seeing the face of your lost love one final time is enough to get you through the day. 

There are things I’ve not gone into, such as the villain or the truly hypnotic epilogue, and there will come a time where I’ll delve into every aspect of what means something to me about it as the film latches onto me over years. It’s not as horrifyingly experimental as BvS or as thematically focused as Man of Steel, for better or for worse, it feels like an expression of all the final ideas for the universe that he’s unlikely to be able to return to. It is both the beginning and ending, an inherently incomplete final cut that exists as almost a phantom of the lost works that could have come after. The Snyder Cut is defined by death, interference, struggle, tragedy and passion. It’s finally being released in the middle of a global pandemic, when the current blockbuster scene looks bleaker and more doomed than ever. It’s likely that it would have divided audiences further if it had made it to theatres and even if everything had happened perfectly, we likely never would have seen the subsequent instalments of Snyder’s vision for this franchise. Yet, that’s something beautiful about it. It is inherently finite, a work built on borrowed time, a vision for a future that will never come, a work about grieving that provides moments of hope which is impossible for mere mortals. It feels fitting that it took so much time and tragedy to get it out into the world, as it feels almost too human and honest to fit into the current media landscape. There won’t ever be a studio project like the Snyder Cut again, a work that reclaims studio bastardisation and creates one final swansong for a mad auteur’s deeply sincere exploration of the iconography that means so much to so many people. The ending of Man of Steel is built around the image of a young Clark wearing a cape as the wind blows and his parents stare on, centred on the past and what is possible for the future. The ending of BvS is built around the tragedy of the present, of Bruce and Diana Prince struck by thudding contemporary grief as they struggle to figure out how to move forward. Justice League is built around a future we might never see, an ending based on a predetermined idea of what the future could be and what can be done to change it. We’ll never see what comes next, the gracenotes of elegance and catharsis will remain microscopic symbols of what could have been, but we are so lucky to have gotten to witness any of it, to get that one final vision of an auteur finding the humanity beneath the symbols before the tide washes it all away. It’s something I’ve been waiting for 4 years and that lived up to all the hopes and expectations I had from it. It made me feel like a kid again, escaping my anxieties and confusions through the distinct presence of superheroes. I hope that this final cut gets to shape the childhoods of so many kids, that they get to feel like I used to, grasping onto their costumes as a symbol of hope as the sun sets. Mostly, I hope that finishing the film brought Zack and Deborah some peace, that it helped them with their grieving, that it represents their daughter and their love for her in every way they hoped it would. That’s all any of us can hope for.