Rebel Moon – The Director’s Cut Review

The following is a combined review of Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood and Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, the director’s Cuts of Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, now available to stream on Netflix.

Zack Snyder as a filmmaker is no stranger to the director’s cut, having been forced by studios to recut and then eventually re-release a number of his films over the years to restore them to his original vision. Aside from Ridley Scott, he is probably the filmmaker most associated with the topic and Rebel Moon was all but designed and marketed around said director’s cut in a truly bizarre release strategy. December of 2023 and April of 2024 saw intentionally defanged (from hard R to PG-13) and compromised edits of the two Rebel Moon films, removing roughly an hour each from both films in an attempt to make more mainstream friendly and family appropriate versions, like Netflix’s own Star Wars (an understandable expectation since these films originated as failed pitches to Lucasfilm many years ago). Having seen Snyder’s original vision for this universe, it is abundantly clear how misguided this idea was. He was never trying to make his own Star Wars, a sincere space opera, he was doing an homage to Heavy Metal, a pulp science fiction and dark fantasy comics magazine known for its graphic violence and explicit sexual imagery.

Rebel Moon follows Kora (Boutella), a former general in the Imperium who now lives a peaceful life on the farming planet of Veldt. When evil Imperium forces led by Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) threaten the colony, Kora and village leader Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) search the galaxy for fellow warriors to join in their rebellion against the Motherworld. Recruiting an assortment of characters, all bound by their past traumas and a grudge against the Motherworld, from disgraced alcoholic General Titus (Hounsou), former prince to a dead world and muscle bound Conan the Barbarian-esque Tarak (Staz Nair), smuggler pilot Kai (Charlie Hunnam), a robot armed molten blade wielding bounty hunter Nemesis (Doona Bae), the resistance forces of Darian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher) and Jimmy (Anthony Hopkins), a robot guardian to the former royal family of the universe. While Chapter One chronicles the recruitment of our band of rebels, Chapter Two is ostensibly a feature length third act battle.

Upon watching the first of Snyder’s Rebel Moon films, its world building was intriguing but it was utterly baffling how incomplete the film felt in its current form then. Scene transitions and connective tissue were seemingly removed in an effort to keep the film’s runtime down, leading to an often confused, rushed, and choppy viewing experience, further hampered by how overly edited the action scenes were to get around its R-rated violence. The good news this time around is that yes, both Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood and Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (films that have been revamped with more thematically relevant titles) feel like “complete” films with smoother pacing, allowing scenes to breathe, and much needed connective tissue to make them more coherent. Unfortunately, while the new cuts ARE a noticeable improvement, they are not enough to overcome the core structural and screenwriting issues that plagued the project from the start.

Of the two films it’s Chapter One that sees the most significant changes (and the longest runtime at nearly 3.5 hours), with a new 20 minute prologue, the addition of Jimmy’s self discovery subplot and far more backstory afforded to this world, while Chapter Two‘s major changes are mostly relegated to significantly gorier battle scenes. Snyder recently revealed in an interview that these cuts had to be trimmed from an NC-17 to an R and that should give audiences an idea of how hardcore these versions get. Of course, sex and violence do not make a film good, but there is an undeniable novelty to seeing a sci-fi epic blockbuster at this scale be so graphic and explicit. The films’ R rating help establish a far more consistent tone, something the original films suffered from when their PG-13 nature would be interrupted by implications of far darker and seedier material. The numerous explosive set pieces also fare much better, with longer takes (that do not need to cut away) and a heap of gruesome impact that make the action hit much harder. As welcome as these additions are, they cannot account for the fact that these characters still get little to no development and that the plot is still derivative with paint by numbers plotting that drag the fun worldbuilding down. More context is established with this band of characters but as with the original cut, there’s very little interactions between them until far too late as audiences don’t learn anything about them until an awkward table side chat midway through the second film where they find themselves trading their backstories in an incredibly contrived manner.

In the end, Rebel Moon is at its best when it indulges in the nitty gritty details and mythology of its universe, when it stops to just take in a cool visual or alien design, and the little tableaux of each character. It’s especially evident in these director’s cuts just how much care and attention to detail was put into the worldbuilding and lore of this universe, and to their credit, it is one worth exploring deeper, which only makes the decision to focus on such a derivative story with such thinly sketched characters all the more disappointing. The extended runtime and R rating do a lot to give this film a clearer focus and more coherent pacing, but it can’t change the fact that the least interesting aspect of Rebel Moon is still its main narrative. Ultimately, for those interested in watching Rebel Moon, these director’s cuts are the versions to seek out, but those who previously watched and disliked the original cuts, these new cuts are unlikely to move the needle in any significant way.

still courtesy of Netflix

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Alex Josevski

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