I finished the director's cuts last night.
I've generally enjoyed Snyder's longer versions for his other movies but these are a different matter.
His thing has always been violence and the way he films it, and that has worked for him in other films. But these... It's nearly six hours of gory headshot after headshot. And if it's not a headshot, it's someone being ripped apart by the shot in some other way. It's pointless gore and pretty much tasteless all around. And he dialed up the cruelty to make the bad guys seem more bad (as though we didn't know they were bad already). I think he watched the torture porn scene that was Neegan's intro in the Walking Dead that drove half the audience away and said "I can top that". Frankly, I found it almost insulting that he thinks this is what I wanted to see.
He does use the extra time here and there to add, you know, a bit more supporting stuff. If it's not sex or some other gore scene, it's still usually unremarkable. While a bit hokey, I did actually enjoy all the extra scenes of Jimmy's little journey of "finding himself" off on his own. But that's pretty much all I can recall that made an impression storytelling-wise.
Pretty disappointing. While not great in their own right, this is one case where I think the edited PG version of a Snyder film is actually the fairly clearly superior product.
