Matthew Yglesias semi-seriously pointed out over the weekend that being housebound during a pandemic is the perfect time to watch a four-hour director’s cut of any film. Like many this weekend, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts watched “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” a.k.a. the Snyder Cut, the four-hour sequel to a decent Superman movie and a subpar Superman vs. Batman movie.

My Post colleague Sonny Bunch is not Zack Snyder’s official publicist, but he does a better job of arguing for the merits of Snyder’s talents as a filmmaker than anyone else out there. Unsurprisingly, he offers a favorable, well-worth-reading review of the Snyder Cut for the Bulwark. He also unwittingly helped me realize what vexes me about Snyder’s vision of superhero films.

Bunch argues, correctly, that the Snyder cut is a better film than the theatrical release. That version was released in 2017 and seemed to mark the death of the DC Extended Universe as a project. The DCEU, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was intended to create an interlocking narrative that tied together multiple superheroes from DC canon. Instead, four additional DCEU films have been released without much in the way of narrative momentum, and the Batman has already been recast.

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Why? The theatrical cut of “Justice League” was a mess. “Avengers” director Joss Whedon was given the directorial reins after a personal tragedy sidelined Snyder from the project. It would be safe to say that Whedon’s vision and Snyder’s vision were not compatible, and Bunch helps explain why:

This is why Whedon — whose Age of Ultron’s endless sequences about saving civilians from becoming collateral damage by tussling titans was in a very real and direct way a rebuke of the action-packed finale of Snyder’s Man of Steel, a calamitous struggle between Kryptonians Kal El and Zod (Michael Shannon) that killed thousands of innocents — was always a terrible fit for Justice League. Because Whedon cares too much about ordinary people. But the Snyderverse isn’t about ordinary people. Even when it’s about people trying to grapple with the meaning of Superman, as Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) and Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) do in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it’s not about ordinary people.

It’s about extraordinary people and the ways in which they can inspire ordinary people to greatness.

Bunch is spot-on in his assessment of Whedon, but my issue with the Snyderverse is that I don’t think that last sentence is correct at all.

Snyder’s greatest contribution to the superhero genre, by far, has been that he was the first filmmaker to show how utterly terrifying it would be to have beings as powerful as Superman residing on this planet. The fight between Superman and General Zod at the end of “Man of Steel” wreaks a lot of carnage. My favorite part of any of Snyder’s DCEU films is at the beginning of his worst one, “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Bruce Wayne, played by Ben Affleck, speeds into downtown Metropolis to try to save his employees as Kal-El and Zod are bringing down buildings. It’s a thrilling sequence where you simultaneously appreciate how gifted Bruce Wayne is compared to other humans — and yet how insignificant he is compared to the Kryptonians.

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Snyder does such an effective job of portraying Superman as omnipotent that the climactic fight between Superman and Batman in that middle film feels off. In the true Snyderverse, there would have been no fight; Superman would have broken Batman’s bones long before the kryptonite could have been deployed (this, by the way, is what makes Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” so extraordinary — his plotting and characterization made a Superman vs. Batman conflict grounded, believable, and an even match).

With Superman made so super, Batman and the other humans playing at superhero fade into the background. A key aspect of Batman’s strength as a character was always his ability to deduce plots and conspiracies — and yet he is the one who is played in “Batman v Superman.” There is a reason Batman has less to do in the Snyder Cut of “Justice League” than in the Whedon one. Batman’s finest moment in the Snyder Cut comes in a dream sequence.

My issue with the Snyderverse is that the only characters who shine in it are the godlike beings. Forget innocent bystanders — there is no ordinary person inspired to greatness in his superhero films (or if they are, they die, like Victor Stone’s father). The Snyder Cut restores Victor Stone’s character arc. He’s the exception, however. The other extraordinary humans are pretty much the same at the end of the film as they were in the beginning, a contrast to the Whedon cut.

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Given Snyder’s imprint on the DCEU films, I am legitimately happy that he got to release his version of this film. His “Justice League” fits better with the prior films. He is a visually arresting director. But I confess to liking the plasticity of the MCU more, in which the films can range in tone from comedy to conspiracy thriller to teen coming-of-age story to family squabble to Afro-futurism to post-traumatic stress. As an ordinary human, I find it easier to identify with Whedonesque pep talks for mere mortals than with gods and monsters.

Both Bunch and Snyder himself compare the DCEU with fantasy epics such as “The Lord of the Rings” more than superhero films. Which is fine! But “Return of the King” climaxes with the tribes of man uniting to defeat the Big Bad. In the Snyderverse, the tribes of man seem too puny to matter.

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