Zack Snyder has always been obsessed with heroes. And whether they are the unlikely heroes Rebel Moon And Army of the Dead or his stay in the DC Universe, this obsession always comes through in his work. But to see how deeply embedded the themes of mythological heroes are in his films, you have to go back to the beginning of his career and the first film he ever made, a Michael Jordan docu-fiction hybrid playground. It can be rented or purchased digitally Prime Video (or you can find it on YouTube).
The film is about a young boy who is cut from his high school basketball team and, dejected, wanders to a local playground where he meets a seemingly supernatural Michael Jordan. While the boy is ostensibly the film’s main character, it’s all set up for Jordan to tell his own creation myth.
A myth-making film about Jordan is a given: he is one of the greatest sports heroes of the last 50 years. But what makes Snyder’s film so spectacular is that it’s also a called shot. The film was released in 1990 and was filmed before that. That’s just six years into Jordan’s illustrious NBA career and one year shy of the first of his six NBA titles. It’s unlikely, but it’s still the kind of origin story worthy of the greatest, most dominant player the sport has ever seen.
You see, Jordan explains, he too was cut from his varsity team. His greatness at the University of North Carolina was even underestimated as he was passed over by two teams in the NBA draft (the Rockets’ selection of fellow perennial superstar Hakeem Olajuwon was justified, but the Trail Blazers will never settle for small things). to select). Tidbits Sam Bowie about Jordan). It’s all true, but it’s also all classic Snyder. Like the origins of his Superman in man of Steel, it’s a fated underdog: not a story of someone born without gifts and destined for supernatural success, but of someone whose talent was innate and just needed to be recognized. The greatest player of all time, hiding on the bench of his high school team like a Kryptonian in Kansas.
During this time, before Snyder had the budget to make heroic pictures himself, he made do with highlight clips of Jordan. playground consists mostly of edited together montages of Jordan’s superhuman athleticism, each clip segueing into the next to reveal a fuller and increasingly impressive picture of greatness. It’s easy to see the primal phase of Snyder’s best action scenes in the highlights. The style and elegance are already there in abundance, as are the techniques that would make him famous 300
With nearly 34 years of hindsight and Snyder’s entire career to date as comparison, it’s clear that the director did more than just predict the greatness of basketball’s GOAT playground. By telling the story of Michael Jordan, Snyder also built his own myth. He was apparently born with a preternatural talent for conveying greatness on screen. Not humanity or humility, qualities that the extraordinary doesn’t need in Snyder’s worlds, but the transcendent, superhuman talent that makes people legends. playground is exactly the quasi-documentary that a young Michael Jordan deserved in the year before his rise to fame, and it was made by the only filmmaker who could turn the player into a myth before the rest of the world could see him. And for all the successes and failures of his career to date, Snyder has never again managed to work with a subject capable of reaching the stratospheric heights of his epic poem visualizations quite like Michael Jordan – not even Superman.