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

3. Literal Adaptation - 300

It is quite easy to look at 300 as Zack Snyder's masterpiece - a film that knows how dumb it is, but completely owns up to its cheesy testosterone-charged bloodlust with brutal glee. That is, until you have a long conversation with someone who read the comic it was based on. Because if it looked at its source material more critically, it might have been a much more self-aware movie than the one that ended up on screen. Sure, this movie was ridiculously over-stylized due to Snyder ripping the aesthetic right off the pages (something that works in the movie's favor for he vast majority of its running time) but in the comic, the style itself had a purpose. Xerxes and the people of ancient Persia were not gods or demons, and Frank Miller, writer of the Graphic Novel, was perfectly aware of that. All the over-the-top ridiculousness in the comic was taken from the point of view of Delios, a guy who makes a perfect unreliable narrator - of course he would glorify the spartans as musclebound supermen fighting against ultimate evil! Snyder seems aware of this point, referring to Delios as "a guy who knows how not to wreck a good story with truth." But he doesn't execute the style of the film in a way that makes this point clear - at no point do we see Delios' bit of the storyline any less glorified, or get a hint that he is anything more than a guy telling a true story of Persian demons and Spartan pride.