10 Biggest Mistakes Zack Snyder Has Made In His Movies (So Far)

7. Tales Of The Black Freighter - Watchmen (Director's Cut)

Zack Snyder's career is full of these: creative decisions that sound cool on paper, but fall apart when thought about for more then a couple moments. Tales of the Black Freighter only appears in the Director's Cut of Watchmen, and perhaps it was Snyder's decision to remove it from the theatrical version after all, but we may never know. What we do know is that this is a substantial sequence he had animated for the film, and it just doesn't work for a number of thematic and tonal reasons. Tales of the Black Freighter has a concrete purpose in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' masterpiece of a graphic novel - to show what comic books are like in their fictionalised version of the 80s where superheroes are the subject of great social controversy. It was a relatively minor part of the book that served well to flush out the world and tone of this bleakly cynical vision of Cold War America. In a movie of said graphic novel, it just doesn't translate thematically - the meta-commentary on comic books just doesn't work because of how the Tales of the Black Freighter is no longer a comic within a comic. Playing out as an animated segment in a live action movie only serves to highlight this tale's pointlessness. Even in a film as stylistically grandiose as Watchmen, this digression into animated pirate mythos is quite distracting aesthetically, and takes time and focus away from the already quite complicated main story. As an adaptation choice, this highlights one of Zack Snyder's major problems as a director: he chooses to put things in his movies purely because they are "cool", without thinking them through on a story level.