Following hostile reviews of his latest film, The Last Photograph, director Zack Snyder has defended it against accusations of fascism, misogyny and more besides. A filmmaker whose work has long polarised opinion, Zack Snyder has continued that run of form with The Last Photograph. A smaller, more low-budget piece than things like Justice League, 300 ... “Obviously, I’m not a fascist” | Zack Snyder defends his latest film, The Last Photograph
Following hostile reviews of his latest film, The Last Photograph, director Zack Snyder has defended it against accusations of fascism, misogyny and more besides.
A filmmaker whose work has long polarised opinion, Zack Snyder has continued that run of form with The Last Photograph. A smaller, more low-budget piece than things like Justice League, 300 or his gigantic Rebel Moon space fantasy series for Netflix, it’s a thriller about a DEA agent on a rescue mission in South America.
This is a Zack Snyder film, though, meaning his lower-budget indie action thriller is still filled with shots of bare male torsos, slow-motion camera moves and bursts of withering violence. Or at least that’s what we get to see in The Last Photograph's trailer, released a couple of weeks ago. (We won’t embed it here since it has a content warning; you can find it on YouTube, though.)
Snyder’s latest made its debut at the Toronto Film Festival on the 13th September, and reviews have been mixed to say the least, with critics taking to Twitter (or X) with their immediate reactions. Such words as ‘grotesque’, ‘turgid’ and ‘tedious’ feature a fair bit. The Hollywood Reporter has a round-up of some samples.
Variety caught up with Snyder the morning after the premiere, and the filmmaker had clearly read some of the responses on social media – including criticisms that The Last Photograph is misogynistic, transphobic or in some way fascistic (we haven’t seen the film, so we can’t comment).
“This morning, I woke up to my X feed, and the discourse is incredibly energized by this battle,” Snyder said. “It’s like there’s a war going on – instantly – and on one hand, I don’t want to say it’s cool, but it has to exist in some ways. I don’t know why. The amount of energy and the amount of vitriol I find really incredible. ‘I want to kill Zack Snyder.’ ‘Zack Snyder is a fascist.’ ‘Zack Snyder is a homophobe.’ ‘Zack Snyder is a bisexual.'”
Responding to those criticisms, Snyder argued that “the violence toward women and men is equal and that nobody is spared – men, women, children, everybody. The justice that’s doled out in the movie is in the same way that a hurricane doles out justice.”
The director also compared the reactions to those that emerged in the wake of his historical action fantasy 300 (2006), adapted from the Frank Miller comic book of the same name. He was, he said, labelled as a ‘fascist filmmaker’ in its aftermath.
“Obviously, I’m not a fascist,” Snyder said. “When we showed 300 at the Berlin Film Festival this exact same thing happened. There was immediate discourse around the movie, and everyone booed and walked out. It was our first time showing the movie and we were like, ‘What the fuck.'”
The Last Photograph represents something of a creative risk for Snyder. He’s made it independently with his wife Deborah serving as producer; at present, it doesn’t have a distributor.
Stuart Martin and Fra Fee, who both appeared in the Rebel Moon films, star as, respectively, the DEA agent on the hunt for his kidnapped niece and nephew, and a war photographer who struggles with addiction. A longstanding passion project for Snyder, the film was shot in 32 days, he told Variety.
It’s a fascinating interview, with Snyder discussing his departure from the DC superhero universe following a family tragedy, the re-editing of Justice League, and his ongoing plans to adapt Ayn Rand’s objectivist tome, The Fountainhead.
Will Snyder find a distributor for The Last Photograph? His name alone should theoretically mean it’ll find a home, but its grim contents appears to be putting the usual players like A24 or Neon off.
We’ll bring you more as we hear it.
