Zack Snyder’s Forgotten Michael Jordan Movie Is Still One of His Best

Zack Snyder’s first movie tells us the most about him

• go through
  
  Austin Gosling
  

• exist December 23, 2023 1:00 pm

Zack Snyder has always been fascinated by heroes.both unlikely heroes rebel moon and Army of the Undead Or his time in the DC Universe, that obsession always comes through in his work.But to understand how deeply the themes of mythical heroes run into his films, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of his career and the first film he made, a hybrid Michael Jordan documentary and novel called playground. It’s available for digital rental or purchase on Prime Video (or you can find it on YouTube).

The film tells the story of a kid who’s kicked off his high school basketball team and despondently wanders into a local playground, where he encounters the seemingly supernatural Michael Jordan. While the kid is ostensibly the film’s protagonist, it’s all about Jordan telling his own creation myth.

A mythical movie about Jordan is fitting: He’s one of the greatest sports heroes of the past 50 years. But what makes Snyder’s film so compelling is that it’s also a shot at being called upon. The film was released in 1990 and was filmed before that. This was just six years after Jordan’s illustrious NBA career and one year removed from his first of six NBA championships. Incredibly, this remains the origin story of one of the greatest and most dominant players the sport has ever seen.

Jordan explains that, you see, he was also cut from the varsity team. His greatness at UNC was even underrated, as he was passed over by two teams in the NBA draft (the Rockets made sense in selecting all-time great Hakeem Olajuwon, but the Trail Blazers never would Will live up to draft trivia) Trivia: Sam Bowie over Jordan). It’s all true, but it’s also Snyder canon.Just like his Superman origins man of Steel, a tail that is doomed to fail: not the story of a man born without talent who grinds to supernatural success, but the story of a man whose talent is innate and just needs to be recognized. The greatest player of all time, hiding on the bench of his high school team like a Kryptonian from Kansas.

Photo: Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

In this era, before Snyder could get the budget to make his own version of the hero, he decided to highlight Jordan’s clips. playground

Most of it consists of montage montages of Jordan’s superhuman athleticism, with each clip combining with the next to reveal a more complete and increasingly impressive picture of his greatness. In the highlight reel, it’s easy to see Snyder’s best action scenes taking center stage.His style and panache are already evident, and his skills will make him a 300Things like slow motion, smooth editing, and sequences repeated from different angles are all present.

With nearly 34 years of insight, and comparisons to Snyder’s entire career to date, it’s clear that the director did more than foreshadow the greatness of basketball’s all-time “GOAT.” playground. In telling the story of Michael Jordan, Snyder also created his own mythology. He seemed born with a preternatural gift for conveying great work on screen. Not humanity or humility, qualities that greatness doesn’t need in Snyder’s world, but the uncanny, superhuman talent that turns people into legends. playground It’s exactly the quasi-documentary a young Michael Jordan deserved in the year before he ascended to the throne, made by the only filmmaker capable of transforming the player into a myth before the rest of the world saw it. Despite Snyder’s career successes and failures to date, he’s never been able to team up with a subject that could rival his epic visuals like Michael Jordan – not even Superman. .

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