Zack Snyder has always been obsessed with heroes. And whether they are the unlikely heroes of Rebel Moon And Army of the dead or his stay in the DC Universe, that obsession always shows up in his work. But to see how deeply the themes of mythological heroes run in his films, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of his career and the first film he ever made, a docu-fiction hybrid of Michael Jordan called Playground. It is available for digital rental or purchase at Prime Video (or you can find it on YouTube).
The film follows a young boy who is cut from his high school basketball team and dejectedly wanders to a local playground, where he meets the seemingly supernatural Michael Jordan. Although the child is ostensibly the main character of the film, the whole point is that Jordan is telling his own creation myth.
A myth-making film about Jordan fits in perfectly: he is one of the greatest sports heroes of the past 50 years. But what makes Snyder's film so spectacular is that it is also a so-called shot. The film was released in 1990 and shot before that. That's just six years into Jordan's illustrious NBA career, and one year before the first of his six NBA titles. It's unlikely that this is still the kind of origin story worthy of the greatest, most dominant player the sport has ever seen.
See, Jordan explains, he too was cut from his varsity team. In fact, his greatness at the University of North Carolina was underappreciated as he was passed over by two teams in the NBA draft (the Rockets' choice of fellow all-time superstar Hakeem Olajuwon was justified, but the Trail Blazers will never settle for choosing trivia tidbit Sam Bowie about Jordan). It's all true, but it's also all classic Snyder. Like the origin of his Superman in Man of Steel, it's a predestined underdog tail: not a story of someone born without gifts and bent on supernatural success, but someone whose talent was innate and just needed to be recognized. The greatest player of all time, hidden on the bench of his high school team like a Kryptonian in Kansas.
Photo: Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
In this time before Snyder could get the budget to create his own heroic footage, he settled for highlights of Jordan. Playground consists largely of spliced-together montages of Jordan's superhuman athleticism, each clip segueing into the next to reveal a more complete and increasingly impressive picture of greatness. In the highlights, it's easy to see the original stage of Snyder's best action scenes. The style and panache are already there in abundance, as are the techniques that would make him famous 300such as slow motion, slick editing and repeating sequences from different angles all appear.
With nearly 34 years of hindsight, and Snyder's entire career to date to compare it to, it's clear that the director did more than just predict the greatness of basketball's GOAT in Playground. In telling Michael Jordan's story, Snyder also built his own myth. It seems he was born with a preternatural talent for conveying greatness on screen. Not humanity or humility, qualities that exceptional people don't need in Snyder's worlds, but the transcendent, superhuman talent that turns people into legends. Playground is exactly the quasi-documentary that a young Michael Jordan deserved the year before his ascension, and made by the only filmmaker who could turn the player into a myth before the rest of the world could see it. And despite all the successes and failures of his career to date, Snyder has never again tackled a subject capable of matching the stratospheric heights of his epic poems the way Michael Jordan could – not even Superman.