'Justice League': How Zack Snyder Gives Superman His Due

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[This story contains spoilers for Zack Snyder’s Justice League.]

When Superman died at the end of 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it’s an event that redefines the world in which the movies take place — meaning that, by the time he returns in Justice League, it’s an even bigger moment. As Zack Snyder’s Justice League expands upon that moment to meet the director’s original vision, it’s worth wondering what the new version of the movie means for the Superman story as a whole.

When Superman died in 1992, in the final part of “Doomsday!”, it was a big deal; Superman No. 75 was the top-selling comic of the year, selling over six million copies, many of them a deluxe edition that came sealed in a plastic bag and accompanied by a special poster and a commemorative armband featuring a “tasteful” version of the Superman “S” logo made out of dripping blood. It was the ‘90s; things were different then.

It was also just the beginning of the story — “Doomsday!” was the opening salvo in a trilogy of stories that continued with “Funeral for a Friend,” and ended in the epic, six-month-long “Reign of the Supermen” saga, in which Superman returned from the dead… eventually. It didn’t happen immediately, which was part of the point; “Reign” played with expectations before it ultimately fulfilled them, challenging fans to find their own interpretation of Superman along the way via four pretenders to the title.

While Justice League is far from an adaptation of “Reign of the Supermen” in either of its incarnations — sadly, audiences will have to wait for an unspecified time for the opportunity to see the Eradicator or Cyborg Superman onscreen — the Snyder Cut has some interesting echoes of the comic book resurrection of the hero that speaks to the curious fidelity that Zack Snyder’s DC projects have to their source material.

For example, Justice League makes a point of ensuring that Superman comes back… wrong. This plays out differently from the comic book storyline, but feels very much as if it’s melding two different elements of the source — that the cinematic Superman is more of a threat than expected in the immediate wake of his rebirth perhaps owes something to the bait and switch at the heart of “Reign,” where the most likely candidate of the four pretenders to the Super-throne turns out to be the villain, all along. When he does actually return from the dead, Superman is weaker than ever, and far from the Man of Steel fans had come to expect.

The Snyder Cut’s Superman at least looks like he did in the comics, in costuming terms if nothing else — no Super-mullet for us, unfortunately — which, again, feels entirely in line with what audiences have come to expect from Snyder’s DC movies. They fixate on specific surface details and play with thematic elements of the material they draw on, but in other respects, stray wildly from (and, occasionally, outright contradict) the comics they’re based on; think of Man of Steel’s father-centric focus, which paralleled the influence on the character from then DC CCO Geoff Johns, but also the climactic murder of Zod, which felt so at odds with most interpretations of Superman that many fans are still upset about it eight years later.

Even those breaks from tradition prove to be important in the grander scheme of things; even the upset fans matter, because the conversations further define the shape of the Superman myth outside of the strict history as presented in the comic book canon of the moment. Is Superman a killer? (Of course not, but perhaps there’s a story as to why not that includes Zod’s murder — that was comic canon for awhile as well, after all.)

Yet, surely Snyder’s version of fidelity is preferable to what happened in the theatrical cut of the movie, in which Superman’s resurrection is essentially reduced to a Macguffin that feels as if it’s a video game level that needs to be unlocked before play can continue; Superman flies off to another part of the movie after the scene, allowing the main narrative to go on without him and leaving the viewer wondering what the point was for the next half hour or so.

By creating a death and resurrection narrative in Batman v Superman and his version of Justice League, Snyder has arguably cemented the 1990s comic storyline as an integral part of the Superman mythos, ensuring that the character dying at the hands of a wordless monster called Doomsday and coming back a changed man — and one more appreciated by the world at large, for that matter — is as much a part of the Superman story as being rocketed from the planet Krypton as a baby, or wearing a big red cape and coming from Kansas.

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