DAWN OF THE DEAD – zack snyder – 4.8 / 10

There are some really inventive, really interesting things going on in this film.  And there are also some incredibly stupid, incredibly annoying things in it as well.  In the latter category, there’s the fact that the people in this film appear to have never heard of zombies nor seen any zombie films.  If they had then they would've known that the bite of a zombie is contagious.  I find it very hard to believe that ten average people in modern America have no idea how to deal with zombies (a problem cleverly circumvented in the far superior Zombieland).

WATCHMEN – zack snyder – 3.9 / 10

More than twenty years after it was first published and after almost a dozen different writers and directors attempted to make it and failed, Watchmen finally arrives on the big screen. Like any film based on a popular book, there are two types of potential viewers, those who’ve read the book and those who haven’t. The former are going to be measuring the film against the movie that played in their heads as they read the book and the latter are going to measure the film based solely on what’s up on the screen. Since I’ve read the book a few times (most recently a week ago) I can’t really speak to whether or not the latter group will like this movie (though my suspicion is that they won’t because it’s just too damn silly) but I can say that fans of the graphic novel will probably feel that Snyder and Co. followed the letter of the book but completely missed its spirit.

300 - zack snyder - 5.5 / 10

For all its digital fire and brimstone and the lip service it pays to the Spartan warrior ethic and code of honorable death, it’s a damn shame that at its core 300 turns out to be so staunchly conservative and puritanical, its warrior heroes dying with cries for their wives and children on their lips. And what’s truly baffling here is that that stuff isn’t in the graphic novel upon which this film is based (neither is the ridiculous legislative maneuvering going on back in Sparta but that’s another matter I’ll get to later) and it certainly isn’t historically accurate. Now I’m no advocate of being a slave to the written source or even to history. But when changes are made recklessly and wantonly, all you get is a very conflicted message.