I still think BvS is the most underrated piece of pop art I’ve seen in a decade – it’s certainly far more challenging, singular, and visually astonishing than any of the Marvel movies.

I think what turned audiences off is that Snyder is interested in dramatizing the very iconography of these stories and characters, the way they function for us like Achilles and Hercules did for the Greeks and Romans. I don’t think this approach worked as well in WATCHMEN because the Comedian and Rorschach are not Batman and Superman – they’re comments on Batman and Superman. But in BvS, Snyder tries to get to the very heart of what our epic heroes mean to us. He filters our murky sociopolitical moment and the essential American culture war of the secular vs the religious through a pop art clash of the titans.

The Day of the Dead scene might be the most incredible moment I’ve seen in a superhero movie that wasn’t directed by Christopher Nolan; Snyder is the first filmmaker to make Superman truly awesome, again in the Greek or Biblical sense of the word, where he's sort of terrifying. Batfleck is the most "Batman" Batman maybe ever put on screen. Everyone flipped out that he (somewhat inadvertently) kills people, but this is an after the fall Frank Miller vigilante Batman who doesn't care anymore. More to the point, this is Snyder making distinct narrative choices to tell a single, distinct story. That’s why the universe-building impositions stick out so awkwardly. Snyder may have been tasked with launching the DCEU, but instead he made a movie so big and so bold that it renders most other superhero movies insignificant – including the very franchises it was meant to inspire.