Movie Review – Rebel Moon: Director’s Cut
Principal Cast : Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Michiel Huisman, Ed Skrein, Bae Doona, Ray Fisher, Charlie Hunnam, Anthony Hopkins, Staz Nair, Fra Fee, Cleopatra Coleman, Stuart Martin, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Alfonso Herrera, Cary Elwes, Elise Duffy, Jena Malone, Sky Kang, Charlotte Maggi, Corey Stoll, Stella Grace Fitzgerald, Greg Kriek, Brandon Auret, Ray Porter, Dominic Burgess, Tony Amendola, Dere Mears.
Synopsis: When a colony on the edge of the galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius, they dispatch a young woman with a mysterious past to seek out warriors from neighbouring planets to help them take a stand.
********
Split into two parts, the first clocking in at a bothersome 3 hours and 20 minutes, and the second touching down just shy of three hours, Zack Snyder’s “bloodier, gorier and more graphic” reassembling of his unfortunately dismal Rebel Moon project once again proves that he is incapable of making a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Rebel Moon: Director’s Cut is essentially more of the same, with terrible plotting and scripting mitigated somewhat by the aforementioned additional gore, nudity and graphic themes, a tone Snyder cut his teeth with on 300 but has since overplayed in almost every project he brings his dynamic cinematic eye to. Described in some quarters as A Bug’s Life in space, Rebel Moon’s riff on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is only more obvious with this smoother shallow-focused, character-driven space epic than the whippersnipped editorial hodgepodge of the film’s original two–part PG-13 release earlier on Netflix, and although expanding a lot of the backstory and expensive-looking setpieces with “never before seen footage” might give the entire thing a bit of a bump, the overriding sense of inadequacy pervades this ripe, stylish stinker even still.
The basic plot of Rebel Moon hasn’t changed – a former King’s Guard, Kora (Sofia Boutella) has bee adopted by villagers on a rural planet of Veldt, hiding out after the murder of the King, Queen and Princess Issa, where the cruel Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) extorts a season’s worth of grain from them to assist in putting down galaxy-wide rebellions in the face of genocide. Kora is sent out to recruit a handful of solders and mercenaries to help the village fight back against the Motherworld army, set to arrive back on Veldt in several months. What the Director’s Cut expands on is more of Kora’s backstory and emotional journey, as well as several other subplots around sidebar characters (particularly the young kid Aris – played by Sky Kang) that further add to the tapestry of cruelty unleashed by the Motherworld’s armies generally, and Ed Skrein’s brutal Atticus Noble in particular. There’s a lot of new material within Rebel Moon that bookends each film, several lengthy scenes and plenty of additional nudity alongside the CG-augmented gore and graphic deaths Snyder has injected into this film for no other function than to look “awesome”, and your mileage may vary.
The problems I had with the earlier editions of Rebel Moon persist: the story is generic, the characters awfully cliched, and the dialogue some of the worst in a Zack Snyder film in ages. The franchise’s most intriguing character, a dynamic robotic character voiced by Anthony Hopkins, is once again reduced to being a background player and clumsily utilised, emblematic of the director’s schizophrenic desire to turn this project into the next Star Wars without finding the thing that made Star Wars great: heart. Rebel Moon’s a well produced, handsomely mounted sci-fi opus that, had it contained some manner of humour or wry irony, or tried to inject a sense of fun within the complex world-building and vast green-screen settings: instead, it’s a soulless, generic piece of nondescript storytelling wrapped in a glittering, albeit poorly shall0w-focused tableau, that makes for constricted, opaque viewing. Other than a couple of uncomfortably protracted sex scenes between Boutella and two of her leading men in each film, and Snyder’s proclivity for protracted battle sequences with omnipresent slo-mo being stretched even further beyond tolerable limits, Rebel Moon’s edgier versions don’t really offer anything new on an intellectual level, resulting in a longer sense of cinematic bloat that’s equally disappointing as much as it is a vaster curiosity. Admittedly, some of Snyder’s new set-pieces are superb to look at – the man is a master visualist, there’s no denying it – and getting to watch Boutella romp away with Michiel Huisman in the throes of passion is certainly not something I skipped through, but when the second part’s climactic battle between an armada of Motherworld ships and twelve farmers hiding in a shed lasts for nearly ninety minutes of uninterrupted carnage you know the balance is off somewhere. Snyder’s trying to make Saving Private Ryan but ends up giving us a shitty Pearl Harbour in space.
For me, it’s yet another missed opportunity to make something great, but having seen the cut-down versions of this project it became obvious that no matter how much additional computer generated blood splatter, nudity and sex, or Ed Skrein beating the shit out of poor Imperium subjects, it was never going to solve the films’ crucial problems: rote characters operating inside a generic plot with thinly developed dialogue and a director overindulging in his visual craft. There’s also very little challenge to what Snyder is trying to accomplish here, no boundary pushing despite what the R-rating might indicate. Many of the same scenes run as they had previously, including a near-rape scene involving a local village girl and some soldiers in the first part, the monotoned flashback round-table gabfest involving the principal heroes Kora gathers up, and several action beats caterwaul with the same overplayed sense of misaligned ferocity, interspersed with a load more bodily gore and graphic murder, depicted with Snyder’s typical relish. Even Snyder’s choice of shots and uninteresting framing gave me pause – where’s the inventiveness of the man who gave us 300 and Watchmen? Has he run out of ideas? The slew of gratuitousness hides a deceit of inexplicable blandness, formulaic framing and camerawork, masking the reliance on slo-motion to stretch out nonsensical action. Honestly, it really did become wearying, with the mounting bodycount becoming a slop of white noise against a cosmic background I struggled to find enjoyment in. I’m a big sci-fi fan and Rebel Moon continues to perplex with indifference to the actual characters of interest, and a focus on characters lacking any nuance or subtlety whatsoever.
Snyder appears desperate to ape the greats – echoes of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (filtered through Pornhub), touches of the Wachowski’s Matrix franchise, and yes, even George Lucas’ Star Wars (mainly the prequels, with this film having a similar “digital sheen” artificiality overlaying much of what transpires) – to the point he goes full David Lean on Rebel Moon, and trips over his own feet. Bawdy titillation and rampant bodily violence can’t paper over the cracks of this gargantuan misfire, and while I applaud the director for managing to screw Netflix out of whatever bloated budget they afforded for this horrendous vanity project (to say nothing of releasing even worse versions earlier, thus utterly ransacking hope of a successful continuance later) he has delivered barely passable nonsense as some highbrow pulp fiction genre work. Snyder has badly overstepped his ability here, and even through some of the creative choices are remarkably intriguing they’re never fully realised or executed beyond brief brush strokes of simplicity. Hysterically over-the-top musical cues from Tom Holkenborg and somebody aiming to echo Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard from Gladiator accompany the po-faced seriousness against a backdrop of arguably the most equally over-the-top pomposity afforded such a major release. Had Snyder gives us something fun, something frivolous or less earnest, Rebel Moon might have been a gleeful throwback to pulp sensibilities, but Snyder isn’t that smart a director that he’s able to craft something so esoteric. Rebel Moon’s Director’s Cut versions might be more savage in their mis-en-scene but they’re still just as stupid as the versions that came before. You get more Boutella nudity and a lot more brutality and vulgarity, but there’s no intelligence behind it to make us give a shit.
Who wrote this?
