"Snyder's career actually began in controversy, with the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The original Dawn of the Dead is perhaps the greatest zombie movie ever made, a shambling attack on American consumption that shows zombies staggering around a mall, winking at the way many of us anesthetize our deeper feelings and thoughts through buying crap. It seemed an odd fit for a director whose previous credits were all commercials and music videos. And it's fair to say that Snyder's version largely eschews nuance in favor of being awesome. Instead of stumbling and shuffling, his zombies sprint. Instead of a not-so-veiled attack on consumerism, his movie would be more of a take on post-tragedy community building. It was a horror flick, sure, but without any of the psychological tension that propped up the original. Above all, it was a flat-out thrill ride. In Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, the zombies didn't have to mean anything, because they could run, headlong, after their prey. Somewhat fittingly for the diminishing returns Snyder has yielded throughout his career, the best thing he's ever directed are the first 10 minutes of Dawn of the Dead. I've embedded a portion of them below, as well as the film's terrific opening credits. Watching those two clips will give you a good sense of some of Snyder's strengths. For one thing, he's terrific at casting strong actors. (In Dawn of the Dead, that distinction belongs to Sarah Polley, as a young woman watching her world go to hell.) For another, he's a master of montage editing, where seemingly disconnected moments bump up against each other in ways that create new connections and contrasts. (Those opening credits are a tremendous example.) The clips (particularly the first one) also hint at some key elements of Snyder's aesthetic. For one thing, he uses far fewer medium shots than most directors. He likes alternating between wide shots (as when the protagonist observes the chaos devouring her neighborhood) and shots that zoom in close on his actors, to a variety of different degrees (as when we see her worried expression as she takes it all in). When Snyder does use medium shots, he uses them in weird ways. Take the short moment where our hero talks to the man across the street who's holding a gun. Both characters are filmed in mid-shot, but Snyder puts them both in the same frame exactly once (when we see the man across the street over her shoulder, as if we're standing behind her). Blink and you'd miss this shot. Most directors would give us at least a few lines of dialogue while the two shared the same frame, but not Snyder. They're never in the same frame while talking to each other. The medium shot is the cinema's version of normalcy. Certainly, there are several where something huge happens, but a lot of the time, cinema uses the medium shot to break up the "pay attention to me!" panoramas of the wide shot and the forced intimacy of the close-up. That Snyder doesn't really use them in the first place, let alone typically, gives his work a heightened feel — everything subconsciously feels bigger than it otherwise might. Indeed, you'll note that the scene from Dawn of the Dead I've described above mimics the look of another visual medium: comic books."