Longer, but More of the Same

As I’ve been running this site over the last few years I’ve tried to focus on certain topics. I like to deep dive series and franchises, pick certain characters and follow them through their media, and occasionally I’ll find a director and focus on them here and there as well. One of the easiest to focus on was Zack SnyderOften reviled for the bombastic and idiotic content of his films, there is no question that what Snyder's movies lack in substance they (at least try to) balance out with flash and style, making him one of Hollywood's top directors... sadly. simply because he’s had his hand in one big franchise, namely the DC Extended UniverseStarted as DC Comics' answer to the MCU, the early films in the franchise stumbled out of the gates, often mired in grim-dark storytelling and the rushed need to get this franchise started. Eventually, though, the films began to even out, becoming better as they went along. Still, this franchise has a long way to go before it's true completion for Marvel's universe., helping to define that set of characters for mainstream audiences for a time, and he’s also played around with other characters and series that were were covering in my reviews (Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen).

At times I’ve had the thought, “well, I’ve seen almost everything he’s done, I may as well finish the set.” That led me to cover some of his more recent Netflix works, such as Twilight of the Gods (which he produced and also directed two episodes) and, of course, Rebel Moon. This was meant to be his big franchise at Netflix, the concept he pitched to Disney as a Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. trilogy but, when they rejected it, he was still so in love with the idea he pitched it to Big N so they’d let him make the movies of his dreams. It did not go well.

Netflix let him make the first two films in his intended series, Part 1: The Child of Fate and Part 2: The Scargiver, with both PG-13 and unrated director’s cuts planned. But after those two films (and their director’s cuts) came out, Netflix got cold feet on the whole plan and has effectively quiet canceled the franchise. It’s on ice and no one, outside the Snyder faithful, ever expects it to come back. But because such a big deal was made about the director’s cuts for the films I felt like, at some point, I needed to cover them. I’ve watched nearly everything the director has made; I can’t just ignore part of his oeuvre. So here we are, diving back into Rebel Moon, presumably one last time, to go over both of the director’s cuts of those films, and we start with Part 1, which is christened Chalice of Blood for the director’s cut.

The thing about these director’s cuts is that they were billed as a very different viewing experience. Snyder filmed the content for the director’s cuts at the same time he filmed the main movies, intentionally making content he knew would be kept out so he could add it in later. He said it would lead to a revolutionary viewing experience, that these would change how we saw Rebel Moon and recontextualize the films. Spoiler: it doesn’t. These are the same films we saw before with a few extra scenes added in for additional (but not really necessary) backstory, alongside a whole lot of blood and nudity that wasn’t included in the main releases. But if you’ve seen the PG-13 cuts and are wondering, “do these make the films any better?” The answer is, “no”. It just makes them longer.

Since I’ve already covered the basic story in my main review, we won’t get too into the weeds here. Rebel Moon, Part 1: Chalice of Blood is the same story. A fugitive ex-imperial soldier hides out in a farming community on a planet. The empire, not knowing she’s there, comes to the farming community for grain, offering to buy it from them, and when they’re rebuffed they go full tyrant and demand all the grain in exchange for not wiping out the whole village. The ex-soldier, along with one of the farmers, then has to go out into space to find a small band of freedom fighters that will help them The Magnificent Seven their way out of this mess. The first film covers the “getting the band together” part of the story, with the second film then covering the battle between good and evil.

And, in fairness to the film, the first thirty minutes of this director’s cut is new and interesting. Instead of going to Kora, our ex-soldier and the main character for these films, living life on the farming planet we, instead, start off in a warzone, a battle being raged between the Imperium and the last remnants of a defiant planetary government. It’s a father and son battling against soldiers, improbably defying the odds to try and keep the rest of their family safe, right up until the tide turns and the family has to give up. The father sacrifices himself so his son can live, the son is taken away to become an Imperial soldier, and then the very Nazi-like commander, Atticus Noble, kills the rest of the family anyway. It’s a darker opening that better illustrates the evil of the Imperium, which at least makes us understand why people would willingly battle for their freedom against this evil empire.

With that said, it also sets a precedent that does the film no favors. Specifically it shows that the Imperium will attack any planet it wants and then not just destroy the government but, effectively reduce the planet down to cinders and ash. A good empire doesn’t level everything in its wake, it takes over planets (or, in human history, cities, regions, and countries) and then installs puppet governments they can control to help the empire grow and become more rich and powerful. The Imperium doesn’t do that, and it makes you wonder how they’re able to grow at all and become so powerful if they annihilate everyone they meet? At a certain point they’d end up using up all their resources and there’d be nothing left. This is the first of many issues of logic this film causes that it has no answer for, nor even realizes there is an issue to begin with. It never gets better from here.

We then, of course, go to Kora because we have to get into the main story of the movie. And this is where the next issue with the film comes up: it is very blunt with its story and dialogue. This director’s cut was supposed to have all kinds of new footage added in, things that would flesh out the story, and you would hope that wouldn’t just be for sequences outside the main flow, like the new intro. The PG-13 cut is also very blunt, relying on characters stating their history, their feelings, what they’re doing, right at the screen in the worst case of telling instead of showing I’d ever seen. My thought was, “hey, maybe they had to cut the good stuff out and add in dialogue instead to cover what was cut, but no, all the same awful dialogue and overexplaining is still here. This wasn’t some way to patch over the missing parts of a PG-13 cut; these were the intended sequences all along.

And weirdly despite the extra hour given, and a lot of time spent on new sequences (like the intro), characters and their stories are still rushed and uneven. Kora, for example, is little more than a cypher, a bland and empty character that has seen a lot, she says, but none of it seems to actually change her at all. She starts the film a dull and empty person and she ends it a dull and empty person, no matter what she experiences or what she tells us about her past (and she’ll tell it to us, a lot, over the course of several movie-pausing monologues).

Kora isn’t the only bland character, though. All of them are. Her companion on the adventure is Gunnar, the farmer, and he’s there to give us, I guess, a grounded, human perspective on the events. That would be the case except Gunnar never does anything. He’s really there so that, at the last possible moment he can help Kora, once, in the big climax and seem like a hero, but the rest of the time he stands around in the background looking pensive. And even here he’s still a better character than the rest of the band we put together.

Tarak is introduced to us as a slave on a desert planet, working away to pay off a debt that is never detailed to us beyond, “yep, he owes a dude a lot of money.” He’s seen forging a weapon, but his forging skills never come up again, and he’s also shown to be something of a beast master, which is relevant in the scene where he earns his freedom by taming a gryphon-like creature. But don’t worry, his beast master skills will also never come up again, nor will he do anything else valuable in this film after being introduced.

Then we meet the master swordswoman Nemesis. She is introduced fighting a spider-woman creature in the depths of a mining planet all to protect a child that the spider-creature stole. She’s told about the mission to protect the farming planet not by Kora or Gunnar, the two people recruiting warriors, but Kai, the swarthy pilot Kora and Gunnar naively hired after declaring in a tavern, “hey, anyone know the rebel army leaders?” (which is a problem all on its own). Like Kora and Gunnar, Nemesis doesn’t think it’s weird that this sketchy pilot details the entire plot to her, and says, “sure, but first I gotta kill this spider-queen.” Why is she doing this instead of Tarak, someone that might be useful in a battle against an animal hybrid? No clue, don’t think about it. And, of course, the battle with the spider-woman is never mentioned again once it’s over, and nothing is gained or learned from it at all. It’s just there to make Nemesis look cool for five minutes before she, too, ends up doing nothing for the rest of the film.

Then we get to General Titus, a master tactician that Kora says they need to win the battle against the Imperium. He, along with finding the leaders of the resistance, the Bloodaxes, is the main goal of this quest. But he just stands around, says some big words and then, like everyone else, does nothing of real value here. Besides, he’s just one washed up warrior without an army to lead. What exactly is he supposed to do? Of course, don’t think about that, because the film doesn’t either.

Finally we get to the Bloodaxes, who Kora and Gunnar hope will lend them an army they can use to fight the Imperium. Credit where it’s due again, the Bloodaxes are cool. You get the feeling there’s a big story behind them and that there’s this long history that would be really interesting to explore. That’s not on screen, of course. Instead the brother says some noble words and takes a few men with him while the sister grabs the rest of their armada and flies off. Then the brother dies, along with most of his men, so that was an entirely wasted bit of time the film never makes up for. I really hope you’re getting the theme here.

Finally, let’s talk about Kai. I think Snyder really wanted him to be a Han Solo-style character. He wanted us to think of him as a swarthy pilot with a heart of gold, someone that will learn the power of honor and duty and will come to join the crew in their rebellion. I get that vibe because that’s literally what Kai says, five minutes before he then betrays everyone and tries to sell them out to the Imperium. That’s the full extent of his character development, which doesn’t work because we’re not invested in him as a character at all at this point and, of course, if there’s going to be a big double-cross, which we expect, he’s the obvious character to do it. His eventual betrayal should come as a shock but, instead, it feels like an anti-climax.

I’m also not certain why the Imperium needed Kai for any of this. Yes, he does sell out Kora, Gunnar, and the Bloodaxe brother to the Imperium, which maybe Atticus couldn’t do on his own. But every other hero they collect – Tarak, Nemesis, and General Titus – are all just sitting around on their respective planets, and they all readily agree to go with the first person that comes their way. Are you seriously telling me none of them could be captured before Kai came along and did it handily? That makes no sense whatsoever.

The only character that feels developed at all in the entire film is Atticus Noble. In part that’s because he gets almost as much screen time as all the freedom fighters combined, and also because he’s played with delicious charisma by Ed Skrien. And this indicates two things to me about how this film should have worked. It needed less characters so that it could focus more on the important ones fully, like how it has all this time to develop Atticus as the heavy. But, also, it needed to get better actors because Skrien is absolutely fantastic here and no one else in any of the lead roles has nearly the same level of charisma on display. Whether they were phoning it in, or just couldn’t invest in their underwritten characters, the acting for the heroes is bad while our one villain is fantastic.

Which, naturally, means the film has to have Kora go out of her way to try and kill him. This isn’t because she has some blood feud with him, although she acts like she does. They’ve literally just met for the first time at the climax of the movie, and haven’t shared any history, or even screen time, before this. But when the last battle happens, she’s a woman on a mission, bee-lining for him (without even worrying about anyone else in her band) like he’s the guy that killed her family, kicked her puppy, and purposefully scratched up her favorite My Chemical Romance CD. Like everything else in the film, this happens because it looks cool and not because it makes any logical sense at all.

Trust me, I have so many more notes I took about this film that I could fill pages and pages of material. Stuff like why does the princess have magical powers? She’s the only one that exhibits them, and there’s no explanation for why or how, nor do these kinds of powers factor at all into the plot of this film. Or how about the fact thatKora has so much backstory about her time in the military and protecting the royal family, very little of which has any impact on the story here. And then there’s a band of priests that follow Atticus around and collect the teeth of his victims to make into a piece of art. Why? What is that even for? On and on flaws crop up and I simply couldn’t ignore them because the flaws are all of the movie.

In short (I know, too late), having watched all of this first Rebel Moon director’s cut, all I can say is that the film is certainly longer, but it is not, in any way, better. Zack Snyder had a lot of extra scenes he filmed, things that I think he felt were important for his movie, but none of it really amounts to necessary add-ons that could, in any way, save this film. It adds length, yes, but Rebel Moon, as filmed, is nearly unwatchable no matter which cut of the film you decide to struggle through.

Not that I think Rebel Moon, as a concept, is bad. I think there are good ideas here, in this morass of mediocrity, which could lead to good films. If the story were organized differently, and we started at a different point in the time line, maybe when the royal family were alive before the Imperium fully took over, then we could see the downfall of a glorious civilization, the fall of our brave heroine, and how she eventually finds her way to a place where she can rebuild herself and make a home. That could then lead to a story sort of like what we got here, except one that was better written, and that could then spin out into other tales that would be interesting and worth exploring.

I think there are so many ideas here, so many characters that Snyder wanted to include and so many pieces of lore that he felt were important, that he shoved everything in and didn’t give any of it room to breathe. This first film alone could have been two or three easily, or an entire season of a Rebel Moon anthology series, all just to get us settled into the world and ready for what came next. But as one movie that has to do it all, it just doesn’t work.

Watching Rebel Moon, Part 1: Chalice of Blood I was struck by the same thought I’ve had a few times before about Zack Snyder and his works: the man is a director, not a storyteller. He has a solid eye for direction, with a desire to do big, sweeping shots with lots of slow motion, and in the right context that can be cool. Many sequences in Rebel Moon are cool, but they sit in an airless void, not connecting to the material around them. WHen he’s the main driving voice for a story, like he was here, he gets too deep in the weeds and seems to think everything, no matter how stupid or mundane, is important. The only thing not important? The characters. They suck, and because of that you hate everything around them.

There’s no way to save this first film of Rebel Moon. I’ve now watched two versions of it and I can confirm that both are awful. I’ll still sit through the director’s cut of the second film, but even now I can understand why Netflix is so willing to put this series on ice and never discuss it again. It’s not that I think the world of Rebel Moon is inherently bad, just that Snyder’s vision for it is terrible. And with the deal he had on the books, he’d be the one to make any further works in the universe. Better, then, for Netflix to throw it all away rather than put bad money after good on an investment with Snyder that clearly wasn’t going to pay off. Like everyone else they could see that Snyder’s Rebel Moon was unsalvageable. Better just to let it die.

But hey, we have a second of these to go. I’ll be back, at some point, after I struggle through that film and we can discuss all the ways (presumably) that director’s cut will suck, too. I’ll go in with an open mind, but this first director’s cut doesn’t leave me with much hope at all.