As with Michael Bay, I was waiting (if not patiently) for the day Zack Snyder produced something I found essential, and even when it finally happened, it took a while to stagger out. Early reviews of his two-part, Hard R-rated “Star Wars” riff “Rebel Moon” weren’t kind, but rumours of an even more explicit director’s cut kept me in suspense. I could feel my kind of film coming up to the plate ready to swing.

I was not disappointed.

Suddenly, the abject Randian vision of his superhero movies found purchase in a narrative I could get behind. Here, the superiority of a few is not cause to destroy civilization or exalt in its frailty—there must be people that need saving to justify their heroics, and the superhero has to make the Herculean choice to share his gifts with a disgusting civilization. No, the heroes of “Rebel Moon” were flawed and wretched, inspired to become freedom fighters. Like Bay’s “6 Underground” and “Ambulance,” the spectacle was focused inward, towards the harm perpetrated against individuals as a mirror of the damage experienced by an entire people.

Everyone needs solidarity; everyone needs to feel their labor is not being stolen; everyone wants to believe a brighter tomorrow is on its way. Not much gives me hope these days, but I do know I’ve watched this beautifully composed symphony of gore quite a bit in the last year.

With the unforgiving heat of a global warming summer upon us, let’s look back at a blockbuster that made its money back but somehow didn’t end up with its director, the unimpeachably singular Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, whose career was put on pause in this country. While movies are now drained of color, his cinema was alive with it. He had a healthy attitude towards plot contrivance and never let the impossible stand in his way. He once gave one of my favourite quotes ever in an interview: “And for me, having traveled a lot, I always have to find out—when you show a movie to people, they just say, “Would you buy this?”

That’s one of the reasons you have origin films—like Superman or whatever—that takes so long in the West whenever you start to originate one, because you have to set up that this guy can fly because he is from another planet, has a nemesis, you can make him grounded when you give him Kryptonite, and all that stuff. You watch a Hindi movie, and they just say, “Hey, this guy can deflect a bullet with his ring because he is Amitabh Bachchan, so next question.” Literally, it is all about what each culture takes—to take as a MacGuffin and where they want the money spent.

We could all stand a little of that cavalier style these days.