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David Mumpower: As Edwin states, the Dawn of the Dead re-make is a triumph. I clearly like it more than he does and in fact consider it to be one of the best films of the 2000s. 300 is a movie that doesn't work quite as well for me as it does for some people.

I think that we could have an excellent film criticism discussion paralleling it with Sucker Punch in that the two movies are quite a bit alike. 300 has a better core due to the fact that it's an adaptation from a better writer. Both films primarily focus on mise-en-scène while offering only a loose tether of story. 300 is a B+ while Sucker Punch is a more involved discussion. We'll be posting more about it later this week. For now, I'll simply state that I think it's an average film I will watch a lot due to how visually engaging it is. This will not be the popular opinion, but the honest evaluation is that Snyder did not miss by much here. Still, it did miss in an unforgivably bad way.

The one similarity Sucker Punch has to Snyder's first foray into animation, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole, is that the villain is there just to be a villain. Not enough thought is given to the enemy, which is a violation of what I call Hans Gruber's Law. If the villain isn't threatening, I will never be fully engaged by the hero(ine). Ga'Hoole is a mediocre movie (I'd give it a C-) that never finds its path. Conversely, Watchmen delivers a mystery regarding the identity of the enemy and even after that is done, the general public believes it to be another character altogether. I recognize that Watchmen is a divisive title that many BOP readers do not enjoy, but I am squarely in the camp that believes it is a masterpiece. I had it in my top ten for the year and consider it to be an A+ movie that I keep in heavy replay in my movie rotation. A key component of my frustration with Sucker Punch is that it is such a step back from Watchmen. That film had style and substance; his first live action bomb has even more style but no substance whatsoever.

Summarizing, I think that Snyder has made two exceptional features with Watchmen and Dawn of the Dead, a pointless animated owl movie, and a pair of sexually aggressive popcorn flicks that fill a niche but aren't quite what I was looking for.

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