It absolutely went over their head because they were too stupid or lazy to connect 'Four Horsemen' to 'Gotterdammerung', as was everyone in this thread even though i explicitly said it. You apes still don't get it. The "four horsemen" reference doesn't just mean "bad things are about to happen". If that's all you see going on maybe this feels on the nose, but that's not all that's going on. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, old Christian vision of the end times composed under the Roman Empire. Think Rome. Think the light of civilisation almost going out. This explicit hint alone and a bit of perception should be enough to get you over the line but Snyder goes further. A German artisan craftsman who listens to Wagner has to open the Gotterdammerung.
Gotterdammerung. The Twilight of the Gods. Ragnarok. The death and rebirth of the world. The European epic of the cycle of life and civilisation. That is what this film is about. The Four Horsemen reference at the beginning is your early hint to direct your thoughts to a grander interpretation of the story than the direct and literal circumstances of the protagonists. The later Wagner references are your big nudge. This is what the film is about. The film is Snyder's Wagnerian vision of the end of America and the white first world.
The film opens with two opposed advanced strains of American culture that literally collide head-on, with an older simpler strain caught in the middle. Faustian man is starting to cross the final frontier, pursuit of power has pushed him to start literally leaving humanity behind. One of their pawns has fallen victim to an experiment that goes beyond the accepted level of human instrumentalisation that takes place in all militaries. Through some biomechanical engineering wizardry an American soldier has been turned into some kind of base, nigh-unstoppable killing machine, at the cost of all of his higher faculties. The (overwhelmingly white) American military portrayed in this film appear as the noble, good-intentioned and middlingly sophisticated pawns of powers incomprehensibly darker and more ambitious than they can imagine (our introduction to the military is them speculating as to what their masters could have given them to carry, their thoughts all revolve around americana lore with a tinge of darkness and awe of the power they know their side is capable of ("could be a briefcase nuke"), but they clearly believe that their side is fundamentally good, or at least they are again literally shown to be unable to imagine the inhumanity of what powerful Americans have done with their unwitting cooperation.
We have Faustian puppetmasters, we have noble, competent and capable of sacrificing boots on the ground, the third american strain present is the decadents. The careless vegas newlyweds who are too busy revelling in their successful mockery of what was once a sacrament to see what's coming right for them. This is true of both sides, the guys who still take america seriously and the ones who no longer give a shit are both blindsided by the freak event which unleashes the deranged ambitions of our civilisation's most powerful.
The freak event happens, the masters' project gets loose, and we get Snyder's visual quote of American Werewolf in London, a film about this irresistible base monster that lurks inside men breaking out and wreaking destruction. Maybe Snyder was trying to say more than "hey remember this horror film i'm making a horror film too let's make them look the same". He's giving you an early signal to tell you how we might think about the monsters in this film.
Then we get the montage of the destruction of Las Vegas. A vision of weakness, decadence and helplessness in the face of a new surging mass of pseudo-humanity. It's not even a fight, within Vegas the old order is swept aside by the new. The limited remaining spots of vitality, duty, power and courage in the old order resist, but it's not enough. The last vestiges of classical American heroism are overwhelmed. The tall, clean, intelligent and noble looking white army officer is overrun while fighting and calls down a plane to ensure his last job is done right. Too much of what's finer and more sophisticated in America has become fragile, decadent, or useless. Where we see true resistance is in the introduction-role of our main cast. We're shown their pre-apocalypse careers. Why do you think that is? Because class and social status are everything in this film. Nobody is just who they are. Everyone and everything stands for more than what's right in front of you. The greatest resistance to the fall seems to be coming from vital but unrefined portions of American society. The self-sufficient strugglers. Small business owners, labourers, we get an up-and-coming academic from an underprivileged background. These ones put up the fight, they're strong because they haven't had time to go brittle, their america is an america still growing and trying to become, they're coming into their full strength and potency. The academic literally fights with a working man's power-tool which he is shown to reflexively repurpose into a weapon when threatened. This character is the most culturally refined of the hard vegas survivors and the highest up the social scale. This moment is your clear sign that despite his education it is his hard worker's edge that saves him. American/faustian/white Civilisation has hit its zenith, or its greatest crisis, either way what is not robust will burn.
The film is about this cyclical process of striving upwards toward successively greater heights, successively greater ambitions and works, reaching great unique heights, and then a crashing return to a nadir only to start again. Look how much is going on just in the film's prologue. I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this film. And it all went over nearly everyone's heads. Not catching this doesn't make you a bad person, but it absolutely makes you a poor critic.
This is the kind of detail one can realise as an auteur. This is the kind of subtext that can easily be coded into a film which still remains entirely watchable on its surface. Only seeing the surface is fine. Only seeing the surface and disliking the surface is fine. Only seeing the surface, disliking the surface, and telling people authoritatively that the work is stupid because of this is not fine. It's a conspiracy against society's cultivation of greater taste and sensitivity. It's a crime against the soul of humanity.
