All corporate CG-driven superhero zombie movies are torture to varying degrees, but Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel‘s was a stand- out. It delivered an 80-minute action finale (Henry Cavill‘s Superman vs. Michael Shannon‘s General Zod) that may have been…no, was the most oppressively boring, prolonged and soul-numbing experience of my moviegoing life…ever. I realize that Snyder was probably trying to top a similar action finale in 2012’s The Avengers, but something really foul and acidic came alive in my system as I sat through Snyder’s version. I decided then and there that Snyder, whom I’d started to intensely dislike after seeing Sucker Punch, is some kind of despicable aesthetic force. I hated Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives more as a start-to-finish creation. I was half-okay with the first hour of Man of Steel (liked the solemn tone, thought Cavill was pretty good) but that finale…man, that finale was something evil. So let’s consider the possibility that Snyder is an actual cinematic demon. I’m not exaggerating. I think he’s as much of a spreader of a kind of disease as Michael Bay was thought to be in his own right. And I fear that Batman vs. Superman…I don’t want to think about it.