The Snyderian Snare: a Review of Rebel Moon

Illustration by Isaac Lewsey

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire is an oddity. As Snyder himself noted in an interview, projects like this — a film involving an “original sci-fi universe, scratch-built” — are “a difficult proposition … for the normal studios right now” and so the fact that Rebel Moon even exists, given our current media landscape, is incredibly positive. At risk of following the beats of the very review that follows that interview: I am glad another studio took a gamble on an original SF movie this year, unfortunately it is overlong and does a bunch of stuff you’ve seen before. Rebel Moon reads as a series of bolted together cliches soaked in the usual visual Snyderisms — excessive slo-mo, saturated colours, the blur of rehoused Canon dream lenses (to which I am rather partial, actually) — and yet, in spite of its derivative nature…

I found myself strangely fascinated.

It is pretty dire, but Rebel Moon is a beguiling cultural artefact — a skeleton dial disaster that parades its influences and the contexts of its production — for better or for worse — like layers of sedimentary rock.

Star Wars and its influences are inseparable from Snyder’s film. Given Rebel Moon’s origin, as a film school pitch that became a post-Disney-buyout Star Wars spin-off pitch, it picks an appropriate starting point — Akira Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai. Kurosawa was a massive influence on George Lucas and Lucas has remarked that Seven Samurai is his “favourite [Kurosawa film] of all time”. It is there, latent in the original Star Wars trilogy and, when Disney was unsure of where to turn with the franchise in the aftermath of the sequels, they turned to the cultural exchange between samurai and western movies as a key starting point for The Mandalorian. This cultural exchange is present here too, a hangover of its Star Wars-pitch era, not just in the narrative, but in its visual identity — in the architecture of Veldt’s port city of Providence, for instance, where wooden, Japanese-inspired buildings have automatic sliding saloon doors. Unlike The Mandalorian, however, which has similar architectural trappings (see S2E5) and riffs on Seven Samurai’s elements that have become tropes in their own right (see S1E4 in particular), Rebel Moon uses Seven Samurai as its primary narrative base. It essentially takes the first hour-and-ten-ish minutes of Seven Samurai (or the first forty-ish minutes of its western counterpart The Magnificent Seven) and stretches it into a two-hour-fifteen-minute space opera that becomes an abortive version of its source material. A Child of Fire establishes the threat to the village (space nazis), sees the recruitment of our seven gunslingers/samurai, and then collapses in on itself when it realises there are more than seven of them, resulting in a premature conflict with the space-nazis and the deaths of Charlie Hunnam (who might as well have introduced himself as Judas) and a Saw-Garrera-at-home who’s name I have already forgotten. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing Seven Samurai in space — even if the 1980 Roger-Corman-produced Battle Beyond the Stars did it first — but to do less than half of Seven Samurai in two hours fifteen as a part one is downright absurd.

The other key influence on Snyder’s “scratch-built” universe is Warhammer 40K. Snyder was finding his roots as a filmmaker in the grim dark future of the early 2000s and was heavily inspired by the grungy aesthetics of sci-fi publications like Heavy Metal and the edge given to American comic books by the British invasion of the 90s. Snyder has always been a champion of a SF where blood is bloodier, swords are sword-ier and sex is sexier and I therefore refuse to believe for one moment that he is a stranger to 40K. Rebel Moon presents us with an Imperium of Man, red-robed tech-priests, Ed Skrein in Commissar cosplay, two-time academy award winner AdMech-tony Hopkins, (P)lasguns and an overabundance of Latinate names including a Belisarius. It is a strand so blatantly present that Henry Cavill probably felt a psionic disturbance in the Warp.

Without commenting on the scenes practically lifted from other films (notably the nigh on shot-for-shot rip-off of the franchise-that-must-not-be-named), every aspect of Snyder’s “scratch-built” Universe seems eerily familiar, and this becomes all the stranger in the context of its distribution.

Netflix wants to engineer a Snyder Cut.

Interviews and reviews surrounding the project seem to be striking similar chords to the early discussions of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and, on the wind, there are whispers of another sword-ier, bloodier cut which seems to be — quite literally — an entirely different film.

As Snyder himself noted:

I almost think that the director’s cut of Rebel Moon is an alternative reality version. Theres almost like two — it’s not an extended cut of this movie it’s almost like a different movie… It’s almost a different universe that that movie lives in than this movie and the reason for that is we’ve gotten so, it’s such a philosophical thing to shoot a director’s cut of a movie before you finish this version.

Snyder deliberately shot two versions of the film knowing that two cuts were going to be released, which makes the current cut wildly frustrating to watch because, when equipped with this knowledge, you are constantly questioning why you are being shown this version first. If Snyder, as an auteur, is the primary selling point of Rebel Moon, it makes you wonder, when there is apparently a more Snydery version out there, why you are watching the less Snydery one. Snyder even contradicts himself in interviews, stressing that this version is “the very tame version” in comparison to the “Verhoevenesque” director’s cut. If the so-called directors cut is Zack Snyder misconstruing Verhoeven to align with his own hypermasculine SF sensibilities, then that cut is almost guaranteed to be what Snyder fans were looking for in the theatrical cut (if we can even call it that when it was made for streaming). Why then release the theatrical cut if not to try and tap into the fan-fervour that surrounds Snyder and his projects? The current version of the film is completely recontextualised if you view it as an attempt to create a bizarre straw-man film that will be out-Snydered by its presumably better (or at the very least more Snyderesque) other half.

Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire is a mesmerizingly strange thing to dissect. It is wrapped up in its influences and production contexts which instead of enriching only serve to frustrate and hinder it as an ‘original’ SF project. It is a shame that Snyder, as a cinematographer and image-maker, is undercut by Snyder as writer/director, because at points you can see that he has discovered post-Army of the Dead that that is the aspect of filmmaking he enjoys. As frustrated as I am, however, I find myself caught in the Snyderian snare, anticipating Rebel Moon’s sequels and re-cuts not with dread but rather with a feeling somewhere between cautious optimism and morbid curiosity…

Which is probably what Netflix wants.