Did Video Games Create Zack Snyder?

You probably know Dark Zack Snyder as the first man in recorded history to perfectly separate comic book to film adaptations from fun. His mastery of point-missage was so high that his dour and actively anti-heroic "superhero" takes made him the favorite movie guy of misanthropes online. Never one to make sense, Snyder then seemingly used the good vibrations emanating from the global pandemic to finish off Justice League, and it turned out … surprisingly fun and mostly awesome, even. Hell, Zack Snyder's Justice League turned out so well, in fact, that its quality comes in second only to the moment when Snyder called out his bigoted fans, giving birth to Redeemed Zack Snyder.

But before those Snyders, there was the original. It feels like ages ago, but for the better part of a decade, Zack Snyder was known mostly for shooting movies entirely in bullet-time. We could call this iteration Slow-Mo Snyder, but we think there's a more accurate designation: Gamer Snyder.

In the past, Snyder has taken inspiration from superhero games to make his superhero films and has even gone as far as to say he'd like to make a video game-movie shared universe. 

And we're going deeper. We believe Zack Snyder may have straight-up taken his signature filmmaking trait from gaming. Zack Snyder's slo-mo, originally popularized in 300, still looks great, but it only looks original if you've skipped the cutscenes from the original God of War, a game also featuring Hot Spartans that came out just-enough-time-to-make-a-film before the release of 300.

While 300 is an adaptation of a graphic novel, you'll find tons of visual similarities between the film and God of War.

Some shots are suspiciously similar. 

Some others are a little less, uh, on the nose. 

And the best part is that it's not just the cut scenes. If you pay close attention, you'll notice that it's also a gameplay thing. God of War stops on purpose for a millisecond whenever you hit an enemy -- probably creating controlled framerate drops to prevent unintentional framerate drops -- and ends up creating a really cool slow-down effect. There's even this move that goes into slo-mo just because it's cool as hell.

And no, we're not bashing Snyder at all. In fact, we actually want the guy to direct the God of War film.

Top Image: Warner Bros.