Zack Snyder unpacks the religious imagery of Batman V Superman in new live commentary

By Sam Barsanti | March 31, 2020 | 1:22am

Aux Features Film

Zack Snyder unpacks the religious imagery of Batman V Superman in new live commentary

Screenshot: Batman V Superman

However you feel about Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice—the middle chapter of what ended up being director Zack Snyder’s trilogy of DC superhero movies—one thing we should all be able to agree on is that it’s not a particularly subtle film. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie on its own, as it does make a fair amount of sense to take a larger-than-life character like Superman and treat him with god-like reverence, but some of it is so on-the-nose that it actually makes the scene of Neo giving his life at the end of The Matrix Revolutions and getting carried away like Christ on the cross seem clever. Still, if you feel like some of the decisions that went into making Batman V Superman need to be explained or justified, Snyder took some time out of his own self-isolating to do a full live director’s commentary of the movie on Vero and YouTube over the weekend, going deep on big ideas like the world of today being a lot different from the world of 1938 when Superman was created, and how Wayne Tower collapsing was supposed to be visually reminiscent of 9/11, which… yeah, duh.

That being said, it’s interesting to hear him get so in-depth on his process throughout the film, and this makes it abundantly clear that he really tried to put some thought into how he wanted to portray these very well-known characters in his own way. The Hollywood Reporter broke out the most interesting bits, like how Batman using a spear to try and kill Superman was a reference to the spear that was used to stab Jesus (again, yeah), how the “Martha” scene is more about their shared humanity than their mothers’ shared names, and how the “Knightmare” scene was actually supposed to be a flash-forward to a world where Lois has died and Superman turns evil after The Flash breaks the future with his Cosmic Treadmill.