FANTASTIC FOUR Director Josh Trank Gives Blunt Review Of His Own Film, Backs Peyton Reed For Marvel Reboot

@Jeight8 - I don't know that I can say Snyder is iconic. But he's definitely better than he gets credit for these days. I agree his vision for the DCEU was way off the mark. And I know it covered multiple films, but at the end of the day it was still one vision. One project. Aside from his work on the DCEU I rather like Snyder's films. He's just not versatile. Let's look:

Dawn of the Dead
300
Watchmen

These are all fantastic films of his that widely liked by fans. 300 was very close to the source material and it paid off. Watchmen was always known as the "unfilmable" story. Yet Snyder knocked it out of the park and really only left out scenes that weren't directly important for the story, like the psychiatrist in the prison and his acr with his wife. The two lesbian girls. The guys working at the newspaper. None of that was important to the story. He changed the ending from a fake squid monster exploding in the city to make it look like Dr. Manhattan did it, which made WAY more sense than the comic because everyone was already super-untrusting of Doc Manhattan. So it made more sense to do that to try and unite the world than use some fake interdimensional monster that may not ever appear again.

Dawn of the Dead was a new spin on a classic, but it stuck very closely to what made the original so iconic.

Sucker Punch
DCEU

Both of these were failures. Why? Because the pattern with Snyder is that he does incredible work adapting closed, one off stories with a clear beginning and end. He does poorly with adapting his own original work or giant universes or characters that have had continuity building for 70+ years.

So that lack of versatility alone I think keeps him from being considered iconic. But he's made some damn good movies and its irritating seeing people forget that.

@Necropolitan - Well stated.

I've always thought that Sucker Punch was Snyder's best film. Not because it's any good (spoiler: it isn't), but because it represents everything he has to offer as a filmmaker and storyteller. Which is to say, not much, and what is there is ugly, confused, overwrought, and self-indulgent to an extreme degree. FWIW, I don't think he succeeds even with adaptations or remakes. DotD was entertaining in and of itself (and I attribute that to Gunn's script more than anything else), but much like Watchmen it completely misses the mark of what the original was all about in the first place. That's fine if your newer, hipper incarnation actually has something else to say, but Snyder's just doesn't. He's the king of making movies that aren't actually about anything, while believing with all his heart that they're profound meditations on the human condition. I'll never understand how the guy continues to get work.