Hey, it’s fine if some people don’t care for that. But I think it’s executed extremely well. And I’m undeterred to detail (exhaustively!) why.
I would say that Snyder doing deconstruction in general is also simply aggravating to many because 1) they don’t at all get what he’s doing, and 2) they don’t want deconstruction. Rather, they want their heroes and myths to remain on pedestals. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the comment that Zack Snyder “doesn’t get Superman and Batman.”
But I concur that there is something about his storytelling style, his execution, that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That’s a perfectly fair complaint.
And I think Snyder has a bit of a disconnect going on with this. Something maybe he’s still working out within himself. On the one hand, he has stated that wants the films to be polarizing and controversial because he believes it’s healthy for people to inspect the issues that he’s raising with the deconstruction. Fair enough. But on the other hand, there’s something nearly masochistic to it for him, lol. He pokes the bear so much that he now regularly gets mauled. It has made him into artistic hero for those that appreciate what he does, and pariah to those that can’t stand it.
When Snyder is having the strongest emotional and psychological impact on the viewer, I don’t see that coming through standard, straightforward linear exposition. He’s using a combination of things that push the envelope for how to open the psyche up to the mythic experience. One is obviously his cinematography. He uses painterly archetypal visual imagery. Snyder formally studied painting and is an avowed Jungian/Campbellian. So visual images serve as symbolism to represent aspects of human experience of myth. This is not speculative on my part—that’s from him. For example BvS is chockfull of it, he’s identified over 100 visual Easter eggs that he intentionally planted in the film.
And I think the other things he does is to show things contextually without clearly explaining it through dialogue and diegetically. Diegesis in film means that there is a distinction between what the viewer sees on the screen, and what takes place in the greater world of that story outside of what the viewer is shown. The film can’t show everything, obviously. There are things at play outside in the world of the film that are “off screen.”
And this is rather like real life. Even to the point that our conscious relationship to our own unconscious is to a fair degree represented by this aspect of storytelling in cinema. It also mirrors the fact that real life itself does not conveniently explain or make clear everything that is going on outside of anyone’s consciously aware experience. It’s up to the individual human brain to gather data, assess, make connections between things, understand context, connect dots, make inferences and speculations, do reality testing, and so forth.
People typically… unconsciously, self-protectively, and instinctively… seek to be comforted, soothed, and reassured by familiar aesthetics and conventions of storytelling that uphold various cherished beliefs, and myths. Myths ritualize a problem for the social community that is actually not resolvable, but creates an illusion that it can be.