Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon” movies are back, and this time they’re longer than ever. Not better, for the most part. Just longer. Unlike many director’s cuts — including Snyder’s own “Justice League” — the updated versions of “Rebel Moon” don’t change the narrative very much. There’s a little more backstory and a lot more fake-looking CGI blood, but “Rebel Moon — Chapter 1: Chalice of Blood” and “Rebel Moon — Chapter 2: Curse of Forgiveness” tell the same tale as before and make about as much of an impact.
The story of “Rebel Moon,” in case you missed it the first time, tells the tale of Veldt, a small farming village in outer space. When the evil Motherworld comes to take the town’s grain, a fugitive in their midst named Kora (Sofia Boutella) embarks on an epic quest to find warriors who will risk their lives to save her village, or at least kill the bad guys because they have a grudge.
That’s a massive simplification of what is now a six-hour story, but it’s easy to wrap your head around it because it’s essentially “Seven Samurai” in space. There’s nothing wrong with making “Seven Samurai” in space. That’s what “Battle Beyond the Stars” was about. Come to think of it, that’s what “Galaxy Quest” was about, too. Snyder’s version is, it must be noted, now twice as long as Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 samurai epic, and still nowhere near as deep.
The original cuts of “Rebel Moon,” released in December 2023 and April 2024, were not well-received. Then again, that may have been the plan all along. It was always Netflix’s stated intention to release shorter, mainstream versions of “Rebel Moon” first and Snyder’s longer, bloodier, nakeder versions later on. Which raises the question of why, if Netflix thought Snyder’s vision was always worth releasing, did they bother to release watered down versions at all? It sure looks like an exercise in manufacturing demand instead of giving the fans what they wanted in the first place, and what the filmmaker actually deserved.
The other question these director’s cuts raise is, can they address the fundamental problems of the original “Rebel Moon” movies? The issues the first two films had were not that they weren’t gory enough or needed more sex scenes. They had a lot of main characters with the same backstory, all revealed at once, undermining the weight of each one and making the film look repetitive. The main villain dies in the first movie and comes back in the second, but is in no way more of a threat, which undercuts the suspense from there on out. After all, we already know Kora can defeat him, and pretty easily.
Even the film’s central conceit, that the evil army of the Motherworld desperately needs grain, had nothing to back it up. The fascistic space conquerors weren’t starving, and even if they were, they could steal all the food they wanted from the multiple planets they razed to the ground on camera. By the time they come back to pick up the grain, their priorities have completely changed and the food is entirely irrelevant to them — a fact they only seem to remember halfway through getting their butts kicked, all because they were afraid to destroy that grain they literally don’t need.
“Rebel Moon: Chapter 1 — Chalice of Blood” and “Chapter 2 — Curse of Forgiveness” don’t fix or even address most of these problems, but at least the flashbacks are more vivid for some of the heroes. Kora’s backstory better explains why she did the terrible deeds that made her a fugitive. The energy sword-wielding Nemesis (Doona Bae), one of the films’ two breakout characters, is more clearly defined as a grieving mother, which makes her role in the climax — defending a building full of the village’s most defenseless citizens — play less like she’s getting sidelined and more like a satisfying dramatic conclusion to her arc.
“Chalice of Blood” now opens with a remarkably long sequence in which Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) brutally conquers a planet that was harboring revolutionaries, a sequence with extreme violence, suicide bombers and — as if we didn’t think the bad guys were bad yet — women stripped fully nude and branded on camera. It’s not clear what function that imagery is supposed to serve other than to tell us that these are now the kinds of movies in which that kind of thing can happen, which isn’t an encouraging way to start a film.
That opening concludes with Aris (Sky Yang), the son of the planet’s ruler, forced to murder his father to save his family. Upon completing the task, he’s pressed into military service, something the villains of the Motherworld do a lot, apparently. They like to crush people’s spirits and turn them into soulless soldiers. Ostensibly this should give more depth to Aris, who was depicted in the previous cuts as a young, idealistic man who only turns on his fellow soldiers when they try to sexually assault a villager on Veldt.
But Aris’ new origin, which takes place shortly before the rest of the film, only makes this subplot more confusing. After all the bleak and punishing violence, Aris is still played like an idealistic guy who cheerfully goes about his duties. His extremely recent tragedy doesn’t seem to have had a profound effect on him, except one time it makes him stab a guy more times than was strictly required. This makes the whole opening sequence seem awkward and unnecessary — except, again, to convince us that the bad guys are bad. And that part was pretty clear.
The most obvious changes to the “Rebel Moon” movies are that the characters swear more — a lot more, so much so that in an early scene on Veldt, people act genuinely excited just to say the f-word — and there’s a lot more blood and gore. But it’s CGI blood and gore, and it never looks tactile or believable. More like shiny red sludge. Add that to the film’s sci-fi guns, which make people explode in bright orange neon goop (unless they’re a main character, then they make conveniently smaller wounds), and it doesn’t give the film more grit. It’s just silly after a while.
There’s also a lot more consensual sex and nudity, which Snyder wisely uses to illustrate the differences between Kora’s romantic relationships: first purely physical, then emotionally intimate. They are, to use parlance, “necessary to the plot.” But then again, they also go on so long after the narrative point has been made that it’s still fair to call them a little gratuitous.
Then again again, we’re talking about a sci-fi remake of “Seven Samurai” that’s now over twice as long as “Seven Samurai.” Gratuitousness is the order of the day. Snyder seems eager to indulge in these aesthetics, wallow in these characters and linger on this violence. And yet the biggest pleasures of the director’s cuts are their spirituality and melancholy.
We finally see a lot more of Jimmy, the Motherworld robot (voiced by Anthony Hopkins) who joins the resistance. In the original cuts, Jimmy disappears for most of the films and seemingly goes feral in the woods for no stated reason. In the new versions, we watch his whole journey to enlightenment. Jimmy was the most wondrous part of “Rebel Moon” the first time around, and the most tragically underserved. It’s beautiful to see more of him and find out that his story, at least, really was important and worthy of — forgive me, Jimmy — fleshing out.
The most intriguing element that Snyder adds back to the “Rebel Moon” films are the Rue Kali. The Motherworld’s spaceships are powered by giant engines that, in the original film, looked like giant shackled women. In the director’s cuts, we learn that’s not a stylistic decision on the part of the Motherworld’s engineers — these actually are giant shackled women, forced to use their magical energy to build wormholes and rejuvenate the dead. When they do, they cry huge luminescent tears. The Motherworld feeds them human corpses. And all of this is actually going somewhere, or at least it seems like it will in the next chapter(s). It’s powerful imagery that, unlike most of “Rebel Moon,” feels more like an unforgettable issue of “Metal Hurlant” than a knockoff of “Star Wars.”
“Chalice of Blood” and “Curse of Forgiveness” improve small parts of “Rebel Moon,” but not the big parts. The films are still cloyingly derivative and relatively shallow, especially compared to their most obvious influences. The plot doesn’t hang together, and for every character whose story now feels more important, there are others who go just as unexplored and still more whose tales make less sense than ever. And while some of the films’ new incidental moments add much needed character interactions that finally make our heroes act like friends, or at least a team, that doesn’t so much fix the franchise as make it a little easier to digest.
And since these new versions are structurally the same as the originals, and since Netflix always intended to release them, one can’t help but wonder — again — what the point was of withholding Snyder’s director’s cuts at all. It can’t have been just because Netflix cares about his vision; if they had, they would have released Snyder’s preferred versions in the first place, which they were already planning to do. Instead, it’s hard to shake the sense that Netflix mostly wanted a way to get subscribers to watch the same films twice. Those who like these movies will no doubt be happy to do so, since they’re still “Rebel Moon” only more so. But those who were underwhelmed the first time around are likely to remain unimpressed.
All four “Rebel Moon” movies are now streaming on Netflix.
