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Director / Cinematographer: Zack Snyder
Screenwriters: Shay Hatten, Kurt Johnstad, Zack Snyder
By Roderick Heath
This review applies only to the extended editions of the Rebel Moon diptych, not the shorter versions released under the titles A Child Of Fire and The Scargiver. Here there be spoilers.
A few years ago I noted that we’ve entered a new era where, in the blurring of film and television via streaming and the vestigial idea of the cinematic form remaining there, lesser talents who ought to be sticking to TV are increasingly getting employed to make movies and the real filmmakers are turning to TV. This tendency has only sped up. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is economics, but also has connections to current cultural expectations – ambitious, vigorous, visually adventurous, risk-taking directors are ironically having an easier time getting money out of streaming services who both want to make a splash and offer plenty of scope for that ambition, whilst cinema is increasingly becoming a realm for the mundanely efficient and reliably vision-free: the idea of cinema as the anodyne space has become the norm, the comfort zone, for the mass audience. Zack Snyder is, whatever else one thinks about him, a filmmaker born to work on the biggest of canvasses. It’s well-known that Snyder has one of the most vociferous-trending-insufferable fan cadres around in our great and glorious internet-fuelled age, and in particular the push to get his Justice League released in its originally intended form was a subject of a bizarrely intense groundswell. The other side of that coin is that the anti-Snyder league is just as insufferable, if not worse. So much of the conversation about Rebel Moon in critical and non-fan circles was utterly contemptuous, enough so that I was put off watching it for a time.
I was even prepared to believe that dismissal to a degree: Snyder’s return to non-franchise filmmaking after a decade misspent on superhero movies with Army of the Dead (2021) was, despite flashes of strong black humour and some wicked ideas, mostly a clumsy and frustrating exercise, stylistically and story-wise. It made me suspect getting streaming money behind him and a lack of oversight might have only freed Snyder’s worst instincts. Also, there’s the plain truth that Snyder’s shortened, supposedly more commercial versions of his movies are consistently inferior and sometimes borderline incoherent compared to his extended cuts, particularly Sucker Punch (2011) and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016): Snyder’s longer versions often reveal genuinely expansive ideas and qualities. His Rebel Moon diptych had an intriguing genesis, reportedly beginning life as a story proposal submitted to Disney-Lucasfilm as an entry in the Star Wars mythopoeia. Once rejected by those overseers, the proposal was retooled into a project better suited to Snyder’s particular bent, and produced by Netflix. When the greatly extended version of Rebel Moon emerged as a two-part edition with chapters titled, respectively, Chalice of Blood and Curse of Forgiveness and which runs, minus credits, some six hours, was finally released, I did finally settle down and take it in. I was rewarded with very likely the best viewing experience of 2024.
Rebel Moon’s basic template is what could be described in an ideal “elevator pitch” – a short and sharp summary to sell a movie to prospective backers and audiences alike – albeit one that might provoke eye-rolling amongst cineastes: it presents itself unabashedly as “Seven Samurai In Space.” Even not counting the way that model has infused itself, both in itself and via John Sturges’s Hollywood remake The Magnificent Seven (1960), into the genetic makeup of modern action cinema, that’s still not even a new spin. Battle Beyond The Stars (1980), the Jimmy T. Murakami-directed, Roger Corman-produced, James Cameron-contributing film has long been emblematic of the original post-Star Wars (1977) run of cheap and cheerful imitators that represented close to a last gasp for the classic B-movie model of cashing in on successful hits, made before the nervous system of the international movie industry realised that the special effects blockbuster had, at that time, found a way to ensure bigger-budget Hollywood movies would always remain at the top of the heap. Snyder, at least, is a filmmaker who has since 300 (2007), his bristling, bloody, entirely stylised take on the Battle of Thermopylae, committed fully to exploring the possibilities of digital-era cinema for filmmaking, both to explore and accentuate new frontiers of style and help keep costs down. In an early scene of Rebel Moon, heroine Kora (Sofia Boutella) is introduced doing farm labour on what appears to be an entirely traditional rural landscape only with a vast, ringed planet hovering in the sky above – Snyder’s camera descends to find her silhouetted against that planet, with the film’s title cards appearing on the way down. The scene is boldly illustration-like, recreating images out of old comic books and off vintage sci-fi paperback covers, not caring if it looks realistic but instead aiming for outsized evocation of genre essence.
Snyder’s reputation as a showman with an unseemly delight in blood and thunder is also borne out to enthrallingly cruel effect in the long pre-title sequence, which opens in medias res amidst the last throes of a defence by the citizens of the planet of King Heron (Yu-Beng Lim) as they’re brought to heel by Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein). Noble is an admiral in the space fleet of a vast and brutal stellar domain called the Imperium, based on a planet called Toa but generally called the Motherworld, assigned to chase down two notorious and troublesome rebel leaders, the siblings Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) and Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), and deals out incredible brutality and ruthless punishment to any planet he suspects of sheltering them: it’s Heron’s world turn. He forces Aris (Sky Yang), the son of the king, to beat his father to death in order to save the lives of the rest of the royal family. This extended sequence of torment and terrorism masquerading as virtuous order-keeping goes beyond simply letting us know who the bad guys are: Snyder enters instead into a properly Sadean realm where such spectacles of humiliation, sacrifice, and torture with false hope (Noble quickly retracts his promise to spare the rest of the family after he claims the now theoretically twisted and appropriately malleable Aris) are instead the essence of the Imperium’s philosophy, looking for pretexts to happen, and with Noble its ideal operative.
This extends to the way Noble doesn’t just deploy such elaborate viciousness for its own sake (although he’s certainly a man who enjoys his work), or even to provide the spectacle of freely employed cruelty to terrorise the Imperial populace into loyalty, but also to force the young prince to access the darkest part of himself and brand his soul with the crime. This is how the Imperium’s method and personality reproduce themselves, created damaged, deranged, murderous husks of humanity it can then employ. Noble is also fond of getting his jollies with a tentacled alien when enjoying the privacy of his spaceship cabin, a memorable vision that has its humorous aspect, but is foremost not only a glimpse of a deeply perverse nature but, again, one that makes a spectacle of inhumanity. Noble’s campaign nonetheless faces one great stymie: keeping his crew and soldiers fed, so he sets his sights on Veldt, a moon-planet with scattered populaces, including one village consisting of people who have chosen a purely agrarian, non-technological lifestyle – another philosophical choice that directly contrasts the Imperium’s kind – and also because it helps them stay completely off the Imperial radar. But Noble’s Dreadnought appears in the sky overhead and Noble descends to deliver his already familiar blend of smarmily beaming friendliness, alternated with skull-cracking savagery, because he wants their harvest and also because he knows the village surplus was sold to the rebels.
And so Noble beats to death the village’s avuncular leader, Sindri (Corey Stoll) and his wife is sliced to pieces by soldiers when she dashes forth in grief, whilst the village’s selling agent, who actually did the deal with the rebels, Gunnar (Michael Huisman), is left to pick up the pieces, desperately agreeing to Noble’s demands which will leave them with so little food as to starve. Noble leaves behind a unit of thuggish soldiers, including the theoretically indoctrinated and subordinated Aris, to keep the villagers in line and make sure they keep all their harvest for him to collect in a few weeks’ time. They’re also left with “Jimmy” (body of Dustin Ceithamer, voice of Anthony Hopkins), one a force of android warriors almost impervious to standard weapons, who used to serve the Imperium’s former royal family as their guard of honour, who have since refused to fight since that family was assassinated. The garrison soldiers start harassing and abusing villagers, including the kindly, teenaged water-carrier Sam (Charlotte Maggi), who meanwhile forms a bond with Jimmy. Unfortunately for the garrison and for Noble, there’s something about the village they don’t yet know: living amongst them is Kora, a mysterious, taciturn woman who’s been taken in Hagen (Ingvar Sigurdsson), an older villager who knows she has a dark past and has encouraged her to adopt their lifestyle to expiate it. When the soldiers set their sights on raping Sam and fully intend to extend the same treatment to Kora herself, Kora unleashes astounding, deep-honed warrior skills and slaughters the soldiers, with the unexpected aid of Aris and Jimmy. Facing extermination whatever happens for this show of defiance, the villagers elect to send Kora and Gunnar to find some fighters willing to stand with them when Noble returns.
The Seven Samurai basis of Rebel Moon is a bit of a double-edged katana when it comes to Snyder’s ambitions. The idea of a small, anti-modern agrarian community resisting a supertechnological fascist military seems to defy credulity, although recent history’s given the lie to that plenty of times. And the format has been replayed so often it’s hard to make it feel fresh. But the value is obvious too: the motif of the motley gang of warriors drawn together to defend the weak has a weathered, proven, essentialist power that offers an ideal focal point in the centre of a work of vast conceptual engineering. The world beyond the immediate focus of Rebel Moon is genuinely colossal and decorated with layers of imagination and unexpected detail. As the diptych unfolds, Snyder explores the political context and mythology of his take on the hoary motif of the tyrannical space empire. The assassination of the royal family – King (Cary Elwes), Queen (Rhian Rees), and daughter Princess Issa (Stella Grace Fitzgerald) – is an act that haunts the Imperium, and has been used as the justification for increasingly wrathful crackdowns by the leader who stepped into their place, the former top general Balisarius (Fra Fee). And his acts of repression in turn birth more rebels, like cancer cells eating away at the body. Like Jimmy, Kora, in her previous life when she was known as the celebrated and trusted warrior Arthelais, was close to the royals, serving as detailed guardian to Issa. Issa herself was believed to be the reincarnation of a legendary ancestor of the royal family, capable of miraculous deeds, and since her death has become the object of religious veneration, including by a party of priests who follow Imperium thugs like Noble around and use the harvested teeth of slain enemies to decorate an icon of the princess.
Snyder paints the Veldt community, which seems to have deliberately patterned itself after Viking-era villages, and Kora’s place in it, in a manner that evokes their idyllic, tight-knit communality, whilst also acerbically denying whatever expectations about traditionalist yokels they might suggest. Kora is shown, soon after her introduction, having a fleshy, vigorous bedroom romp with fellow hunky farmer Den (Stuart Martin), and Sindri encourages the villagers to “Fuck for the Gods!”, as if to spell out that even if they seem like a community of Space Amish, they’re no puritans. This also feels like Snyder’s considered tilt at the ever-increasing sexlessness of contemporary big moviemaking, getting down at dirty with Kora in a manner that exalts her carnal needs and prowess and establishes this carnality as, indeed, a kind of holy thing in her universe. Nor does Snyder feel any need to justify it beyond two sexy people having a good time and sowing their wild oats. This evocation of good old lustiness also provides an bold aesthetic counterpoint to the relished sadism of Noble, the different brands of engagement with the flesh pursued by the natural human animal and the perverted fascist presented in perfect contrast (even if one could say the depictions of both are rooted in Snyder’s delight in getting in the audience’s face with things Disney would never let him do). Moreover, this could even be called Snyder’s peculiar take on the same thesis as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975), portraying uninhibited sexuality as a classical virtue contrasting the games of dominance and brutality that define both the Sadean philosophy and the fascist mindset. But Kora’s wild humping also displays her other side, her back a mass of scar tissue.
More incidentally, but still bracingly, Snyder casually rejects the strange weak-kneed quality contemporary Hollywood has with heroines who are unabashedly sexual – Kora’s night with Den is presented as an event that’s the product of mutual lust but has no great consequence beyond that, where Kora’s deeper, evolving relationship is with Gunnar, who is in many respects her opposite in experience and temperament. Left with the guilt and anguish of being indirectly responsible for the calamity that befalls his village, and inexperienced as a fighter, Gunnar is the kind of superficially cunning, actually naïve man who gets people in trouble, and is mocked as a coward. Gunnar nonetheless commits to the mission of trying find defenders alongside Kora, and becomes her comrade, listener, and finally lover. Snyder offers Kora as a contemporary female type in contrast to the pre-modern kind embodied by the late, lamented Issa and by the winsome young Sam. As the diptych unfolds, it’s revealed Kora, in her days as Arthelais, was a creation much like what Noble wanted to achieve with Aris – an orphan of the Imperium’s wars adopted by Balisarius and raised and honed into a nigh-perfect human weapon, unflinchingly loyal not to morals, ideals, societies, or even the throne, but to her most immediate human connection, who happens to be a conniving monster who uses her to help him assassinate the royal family when they start applying the brakes to military expansion.
This version of Kora, in the high military garb of the imperial warriors with short-cropped hair, is a creation of a version of militarism that is, ironically, entirely post-gender, and just about post-everything else except the application of power. Even the death of her chosen lover, a fellow soldier, is part of the Imperium’s project and expectation, of giving its warriors something personal to fight for when other motives break down. The title given to the first part of the extended diptych, Chalice of Blood, proves to be Balisarius’s nickname for Kora as his anointed vessel of wrath and slaughter, but, vitally, even the perfectly engineered tool that is Kora crashes against the frontier of humanity. Snyder shows her gunning down the calmly forgiving Issa, only to be immediately branded by her adoptive father as the scapegoat for his own orchestrated crime, a step of treachery that finally broke his hold over her, but she still couldn’t bring herself to gun him down, cutting a swathe through his guards instead and fleeing, still remembered in Imperium lore as a totemic traitor. After the assassination and Balisarius’s ascent to the throne, the campaign of repression hasn’t just become high policy but enshrined and ritualised as self-perpetuating and self-justifying. Kora, recounting her history, also explores the melange of religion and domination ritual that defines the Imperium, with each of their spaceships containing a power source: colossi that are actually some kind of consciousness-containing form, kept prostrate in a particularly brutal caricature of subjugation, and fed with furnaces that burn up processed organic material, mostly bones and other human remains sourced, Kora theorises, from the Imperium’s slaughtered foes.
This is Snyder’s formidable poetic metaphor for the concept of self-perpetuating fascist dominance, and perhaps the most arresting and intriguing image he has yet conjured. Snyder’s desire to create a kind of cinema that seems built like a megalithic monument, carved stark and cold out of the ribs of some mountain, finally comes to full fruition throughout Rebel Moon. I also realised in watching that, even if the starting point was supposed to be a more adult take on Star Wars, Snyder instead manages to create an aesthetic and a fictional universe looks and feels far, far more like the world Frank Herbert created for his Dune books than Denis Villeneuve’s absurdly overpraised bifurcated adaptation ever achieved. This is found in the mix of superfuturism and atavism, the cyclopean monumentality of the settings, the background stew of religion, quasi-magic, politics, and raw, neo-feudal power politics. The chief difference is that where Herbert’s creation revolved around the eternally fascinating and provocative tension between large systems, particularly the political and the moral, Snyder essentially maintains the Manichaeism of the original Star Wars trilogy, distinguishing his version more by ratcheting up the good-vs-evil schism, as well its obsessive control-versus-revolt dynamic, into more gruellingly visualised and pathologically evoked extremes.
And yet there’s an intriguing approach to the Imperium under all the hyperbolic bloodlust, neither trying to indict it as a monolithically wicked creation nor as a hijacked realm of sweetness and light, but with elements of both encoded into its structure through the eternal dialogue of force and idealism that defines a civilisation. Snyder takes more stylistic cues from the Byzantine Empire than the standard Roman reference points, down to the Orthodox-looking priests with their icons, and from medieval gothic and Victorian-Ruritanian flourishes. The religious exaltation of the two Issas of two different eras bespeaks of the Imperium’s roots in something genuinely miraculous, glimpsed in paintings young Kora is glimpsed gazing at in reverence and identification. Here Snyder reengages with a concept he explored in 300 about the idea of the construction of legend in serving multiple purposes, as both a personal thing – the inspiration we as people take from heroic figures – but also a political thing, feeding into how societies see themselves and what kinds of institutions they tolerate, and how such iconography can be perverted, revised, and restored. This is hinted at through the rebirth of the ancient miracle in the later Issa, whose apparent gift for healing and reviving of the dead, as well as a preternatural wisdom, made her seem to so many as the reinstitution of the Imperium’s essential nature – an embodiment of the extraordinary Kora herself, in a supreme irony, was tasked with gunning down whilst her “father” and his cabal slayed her parents.
The opening scenes of Chalice of Blood establish an epic sweep of focus as Snyder depicts Noble’s forces invading and smashing to rubble Heron’s capital, before zeroing in to acts of incredibly intimate feeling and violence as father encourages son to kill him in order to protect the family, the very notion of masculinity bound in hyperbolically rendered chains of rectitude and responsibility. Snyder delivers a dark joke in that opening too, one that might be taken as a bit of a jab back at Disney-Lucasfilm by making sport of the familiar cute aliens in the Star Wars franchise, as one of Heron’s family pets, a small, green creature, is released from its cage and confronts the Imperium forces chasing the family into its broken palace, and, in a moment of self-sacrifice bidden by the King, unleashes some power within itself that erupts and decimates attacking soldiers. Snyder counterpoints this whilst exploiting the freedom of his medium to evoke the mythic reaches he’s going for in their cruellest and most spectacular dimensions: the images of the Imperium’s priestly creatures stripping off and branding the planet’s priestesses (calling them “pagan witches” to boot) and Noble’s theatre of cruelty evokes some of the most unbridled images found in the traditional takes on the fall of Troy, a sweeping survey of ruthless execution and ritualised, misogynist-tinged humiliation. The king’s swashbuckling ferocity in delaying the Imperium troops, aided by Aris, is a last flourish of idealised warrior culture honour and familial valour before Noble’s hammer, or rather the “femur of a sacred lochnar,” is dropped, and gets an extra twist that drags deep into a pool of dank evil. Once Aris is finished clobbering his father to death and escorted away, the queen notes to Noble that she knows he’s not actually going to let her and the rest of the family live, to Noble’s smug agreement. This long, galvanising opening of course sets in motion the relished countdown to when Kora unleashes her wrath on the garrison soldiers left at the village. The soldiers have supped at the same cup of learned enjoyment of the spectacle of cruelty, but they’re not as good at it: they don’t break down the souls of those they mean to abuse before safely crushing their bodies too.
Kora’s backstory is explored in episodes throughout the entirety of the Rebel Moon diptych, and the emphasis on her experience doesn’t just place her at the heart of this mythos of domination and dissent, but also echoes through the other warriors she and Gunnar collect, all of them defined by the Imperium’s marauding and personal loss. They trek to one of the few larger towns on Veldt hoping to make contact with the rebel agents Gunnar sold to, only to arrive just in time to see him being carted off by imperial troops. They encounter the space pilot and mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam) and help him out of a spot of bother in a local tavern. He proposes, by way of recompense, to take them to other fugitives with an axe to grind and keeping their heads down, leading to the traditional set of sequences depicting the various heroes displaying their unique talents and character traits as they’re visited and recruited. Tarak (Staz Nair) is the fallen prince of a planet razed by the Imperium, another man marked with the repute of a cowardice because he didn’t die with his soldiers: now he works as a blacksmith. Nemesis (Doona Bae) is a woman who sacrificed her natural hands for cyborg ones after her own world was destroyed by the Imperium, and fights with two energy-charged swords. Titus (Djimon Hounsou) was once an Imperium General, who refused to commit war crimes and was punished by watching his solider be slaughtered, whereupon he killed his captors and escaped. Now he regularly drinks himself into a stupor between fights as a gladiator.
Snyder renders each of these sequences, nominally familiar as this sort of thing as, as epic vignettes in their own right. Tarak is currently being held in forced labour by a swinish farmer named Hickman (Ray Porter), and demonstrates his prowess to the visiting Kora and Gunnar by showing off his ability to ride with the griffin-like creatures called bennu, an animal his people have gift for bonding with, before leaving the creature to Hickman, knowing well the creature will rip him to shreds. Nemesis, sullen and taciturn, is sought out to confront an ogumo – a creature that appears part human, part arachnid – named Harmada (Jena Malone), who’s being driven to crazed frenzy since humans colonised her home planet, preventing her from hatching out any young ones, so she’s snatched a child for revenge. Nemesis, after trying to make an emotive appeal to the creature and failing, kills her in a fight. Finally, using Gunnar’s rebel contacts, the team head for the planet of Sharaan, run by the sympathetic but line-walking King Levitica (Tony Amendola), where they rendezvous with the Bloodaxes: whilst Devra doesn’t want to commit her rebel band’s dwindling resources to this particular stand, Darrian elects to join, and brings with him a small cadre of warriors, including the stalwart non-binary fighter Milius (Elise Duffy). After Devra departs, the team finds that Kai has actually contrived to gather all these famous dissidents together and sell them to Noble, and the Admiral arrives to take charge of them once Kai has them prisoner, and proposes to gruesomely paralyse them all before shipping them back to the Motherworld.
Hunnam wields his best insolently taunting Irish accent as he’s initially offered as Snyder’s take on Han Solo, the roguish space captain with a charmingly cocky grin, and one who engages in a flirtation with Kora that contrasts Gunnar’s uncertainty as a farmer who’s never been in space and is far out of his comfort zone. The reveal that he’s actually a conniver actually makes sense – the proximity of Kora and Gunnar’s first meeting with him and the apprehension of the agent they came to meet is revealed to be no coincidence. Gunnar’s redemption arc begins when he dashes in to help Nemesis save the child from the raging Harmada, and its apotheosis comes as the catalyst for the fight that climaxes Chalice of Blood, when he tricks Kai by seeming to obey a command to paralyse Kora, only to free her, kill Kai, and unleash a scene of chaos as Noble and his escort are consumed in battle. In the ensuing rampage, Derrian dies during a one-man attempt to bring down one of the Imperium’s hovering gunships. This vignette could well be the ultimate example of Snyder’s capacity to conjure outsized, Olympian heroism, as Derrian sprints up a gantry and leaps atop the gunship, taking blaster hits that burn through his body, globs of blood and glowing plasma energy swimming through the air like the stuff of a sci-fi Jackson Pollock painting. Still Derrian refuses to go down until he’s skewered the pilot of the craft through the cockpit windshield with an appropriated girder as his lance. Snyder moves in for a mighty close-up of the dying Derrian, tears dripping from sightless eyes, his death also the death-spiral of the gunship that crashes into the aerial dock the fight’s unfolding upon: Snyder’s techno-Moby-Dick.
Dodging exploding and disintegrating wreckage, Nobel and Kora both finish up dumped onto a hovering platform to fight an intimate duel that delivers all the bone-crunching, justifiably stoked wrath anyone could ask for as Kora snaps Noble’s arm and impales him with his own sacred femur club, before dropping his mangled, broken body fall into ocean below. Snyder stages this whole sequence with magnificent, lunatic verve, capturing the essence of a particular brand of cyberpunk-tinged space opera in the imagery, Snyder’s cinematography and the special effects awash with a signature visual patina, part sleek, blood-and-fire-daubed technocratic feast and part gritty, smoke-infused arena of primal violence. The only problem is that whilst Snyder caps Chalice of Blood with this rowdy, cheer-along piece of satisfaction, it also kills off Skrein’s Noble who has been, up until this point, the film’s singularly goading representative of the evil Imperium. Not to worry: Noble’s body is rescued by his people and the Imperium’s cadre of priestly doctors revive and repair his mangled body, complete with jaggedly toothless maw, whilst also projecting his consciousness across space to the Motherworld for an interview with the testy Balisarius, who demands Noble, once repaired, follow through on his promise to capture his former daughter. This move that has obvious rhythmic appeal for Snyder, delivering a strong climax to the lengthy introduction before a surprising twist as Noble is revived and restored – a twist that also underlines something interesting in terms of the film’s overall design, taken up again at the very end of the diptych, the idea that whilst defeating a wicked enemy sure does feel cool, that enemy or someone just like them will always be waiting in the wings.
In his ill-fated time as the appointed helmsman of the DC Comics universe for Warner Bros., Snyder consistently provoked and irritated viewers. The popularity of the superhero craze was always attached to a between-the-lines purpose in the post-9/11, War On Terror moment, which was to offer a sense of moral security and personal rectitude in a fractious and random moment of history by tapping childhood avatars of right and nobility. Snyder refused to grant them that kind of easy stature, and instead kept noting how close superheroes are conceptually to figures of myth and religion, but also kept in mind the nature of the hero in the classical sense, a fundamentally unstable fusion of the immortal and human, and how troubling enormous power is in the hands of beings with psyches that can be hurt far more easily than their bodies. This was, depending on one’s viewpoint, either the essential treachery of his efforts or the most interesting. Regardless of the hoopla around it, Snyder’s augmented version of Justice League was a rich, lumpy romp through the world he was trying to build out of the basic stuff of superhero tales, and one that clearly showed Snyder trying to articulate his themes in this regard whilst also letting his storytelling sprawl: it’s the closest anyone came to the general ideal of turning the superhero craze into the authentic stuff of mythopoeia rather than just a vague academic sauce on the same old power fantasy. Where many with 300 felt Snyder seemed too exalting of the Spartans as heroes, considering their Frank Miller-sieved tendencies towards ideals that now seem quite fascistic, like their practising of tribal eugenics and relentless military training, here Snyder essentially inverts the moral equation, but retains a key dichotomy: the forces that forge heroes are barely distinguishable from those that create monsters.
Then again, the aspect of 300 that many missed was that it was a movie told not just from the Spartan point of view but through modes of cultural propaganda, transforming everything that came into its focal range into a battle of noble Spartan perfection against all that was corrupt, depraved, and malformed, from the invading Persians to the Greek oracles and traitors. Rebel Moon is an action-adventure movie as well as a sci-fi epic, and the irony it offers is a fairly common one in this style: the Imperium has, in crafting such incredible organic engines of death and mayhem, has also begotten its most committed and talented enemies. Here, working with his own material, Snyder works from the opposite direction, which is obviously more in his wheelhouse: his heroes in Rebel Moon are all shattered husks of the mortal but this has made them ideal candidates to find apotheosis in a nominally hopeless act of resistance to a seemingly, utterly unstoppable power. Indeed, Snyder strikes this particular note so often, including in a lengthy scene in Curse of Forgiveness in which the warriors narrate how they came to be what they are, that it moves beyond dramatic nicety and rooting interest to become the central preoccupation of the diptych, the sickly fascination with the forces that make people into something both more and less than human. Snyder delivers imagery conveying this concept with woozy visual force, in vignettes of Nemesis literally slicing off her own arms and replacing them with bionic ones that are antiques of ancient warfare to her massacred people, and Titus slaying his captors after being forced to watch his men annihilated, the plumes of hellfire spread from where they were bombarded in the background of the frame matched by the globs of mangled flesh and blood exploding from Titus’s foes.
All of this might be said to be a variation on the famous Nietzsche quote that opened John Milius’s Conan The Barbarian (1982) about that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and Snyder makes the debt fairly obvious by naming one of his heroes Milius (and whilst not given as much depth as the other heroes, Milius is intriguing, and Duffy is eye-catching in the part, particularly in the climax when rampaging through Imperium soldiers with knife and bazooka). The notion of political and military repression being at once a tool for maintaining control but also so often the spur to rebellion and insurgency is articulated with equally obsessive focus. Kora assures Gunnar that Noble will massacre the village no matter if they completely comply with his demands, demands that will incidentally leave them to starve, purely because that’s the only kind of strategy his and the Imperium’s kind can wield. My chief objection to the story here was in terms of the dramatic backdrop: surely the Imperium has resources for supplying its military forces far beyond whatever produce the Veldt town can offer up. Still, the point is made early on this is as much an exercise in ritual terror as it is one of pragmatic need, and that need, whilst Noble proves willing to bend his methods for a while to ensure it’s met, is nonetheless not something the villagers and their defenders can count on forever. Also, the motive of drawing out Kora is also dangled: once he knows she’s connected with the village, Noble knows the best way to draw her out is to attack what she loves. Sindri’s murder by Noble, committed in front of the appalled and staggered villagers, including Gunnar whose slippery if not malicious dealings have brought down such wrath, is painted as a fairly mundane act for Noble, having committed this act at the outset more elaborately with Heron and his family. In one of the illustrative flashbacks to Kora’s own youth, Balisarius the now-dictator is shown performing exactly the same deeds.
Meanwhile Snyder presents the android Jimmy as having an ovular face with many small eye-like lamps, only two of which glow most of the time, but others flickers when he speaks with Sam and glimpses other events around the village: Snyder makes it plain that when all of those lights come, the serious ass-kicking will begin. Jimmy hovers around the edges of the conclaves and confrontations, but intervenes to exterminate a team of alien spies called Hawkshaws who are keeping tabs on Kora and her team for Noble. The notion of making the android the film’s melancholically meditative and poet muser – complete with Hopkins’ Augustinian tones – is an inspired one, as is the way, via the crown of garlands Sam gives him and which he later replaces with one he makes himself with pieces of antler and bone and also a crude cape made of sackcloth, he is transformed from an officially technological phenomenon to a veritable nature deity, incarnating the ancient idealisation of wisdom and decency a natural, elemental thing, something that wells from the state of sentience when it is not denied by the animal part of being. This is equated with Sam’s lucid-eyed, fresh-faced beauty as the embodiment of such essential, natural perfection (I have a feeling Maggi is on a quick path to stardom), and she in turn forms romantic connection with Aris, who has retained his humanity despite all efforts at warping it. Jimmy is introduced treated with the contempt of the soldiers, but they still expect him to save them in the fight, only for Jimmy to make his vote with a blaster that blows the head off a soldier holding Sam as a hostage. Jimmy doesn’t take this as a cue to immediately join the villagers’ cause, however, and he hovers in the pastures, musing on the conflict between his essential “nature” as an artificial intelligence invented to serve noble power instead subordinated to its devolved and evil version. Bae’s Nemesis meanwhile is introduced, in perhaps an effective blend of the Kurosawan mystique with sci-fi strangeness and emotional metaphor, being sought out to take on Harmada, and recognising the maddened creature as just another damaged and malformed by-product like herself and loaded with her own particular angst as a mother literally tortured by her incapacity to birth her young. A recognition that nonetheless can’t stave off the inevitable moment when Nemesis has to slay the scuttling alien.
Snyder might have nabbed his ramping effects, dramatically varying the speed of film during action scenes, from The Matrix (1999), but he’s long since claimed it as his specific dramatic and visual tool. Snyder’s passion for slow motion as device has become a meme-like aspect of his movies, derided by some, but it’s also, undeniably, the essence of his particular cinema, one that tries to capture physicality in many forms at a time when almost everything about contemporary filmmaking seems to repress it. He turns his fight scenes into spectacles where pivots of body become operatic arias that realise the emotions of his characters – something plain enough in Kora’s battle with the garrison soldiers where her righteously murderous rage flashes on her face when Snyder slows the action down before delivering the punch-lines of flashing blasters and slashing blades and spuming blood and tissue. But this only part of the visual texture: later, in the second part, the villagers get down to harvesting their crops with the warriors pressganged into labouring alongside them. Snyder turns this sequence, which would be for many directors a chore to be quickly passed over or ignored entirely, into a unit of deliriously lyrical filmmaking, replete with lingering, loving shots of threshing against low sunlight and water poured over bare bodies. The sequence illustrates Snyder’s idea of a pantheist-pastoral rite of salving passage for the fractured warriors and one that turns the idea behind the farmers’ lifestyle from a spoken ideal into a cinematically enacted one: the idea of working with their hands and enjoying the emotional balm as well as pleasure found in the kind of physical toil that produces bounty is captured, and with the reborn Green Man figure of Jimmy overlooking all.
There’s some timeliness, too, in watching Snyder’s work here in close conjunction with perhaps 2024’s signal, proper cinema release, Francis Ford Coppola’s boondoggle epic Megalopolis: despite vast and obvious differences in design and intent, both films keep alive the ideal of filmed storytelling as a realm of visual fervour and heedless, headlong big thinking that works to hold the audience arrested within an invented world. And, indeed, are both works that harken with unexpected and almost wilfully perverse vigour to the ideals not just of old-school epic filmmaking but even late silent-era cinema. I’ve noted before the qualities in Snyder’s work that recall to me the likes of Fritz Lang and Abel Gance, and this streak is entirely hatched out in Rebel Moon, sprawling across the colossal canvas of his work’s scope if not the cinema screen where it should be, immersing the viewer in this weird bricoleur universe he’s conjured, this swooning, flowing style blending the brutalist and the lyrical, the bloodthirsty and the dreamy. The overall design of Rebel Moon complicates even as it draws towards inevitabilities – another aspect that again recalls the kind of mythology it explores. But in the end, all the external concerns and veils of world-building fall away and the story returns to runic starkness: the small, outmatched band of heroes against the awesome might of the villains.
Boutella has, since catching eyes as the gimlet-eyed, razor-footed assassin in Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), proven one of the most intriguing talents in current film, something even roles in movies as bad as Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy (2017) couldn’t entirely ruin. She’s gifted with a balance of qualities that don’t usually come together so ideally for movie stars, vulpine beauty and a physical nimbleness and force that cuts the mustard in playing this kind of role, as well as an ability to seem soulful even when engaged in berserker mayhem, and it’s great to see her in a lead role. She’s backed up with some real stalwarts: Hounsou, for instance, has probably played the same kind of part a half-dozen times too many since Amistad (1997), the fighter who’s stalwart and poignant, and yet he always delivers in them. Skrein first gained attention first on the TV series Game of Thrones, but he’s found his cinematic niche as a particular kind of villain, where his weird and particular kind of S&M-accented New Wave band frontman handsomeness wields ideal vibes. Some enriching touches of world-building also deliver nicely twisted humour, like an alien that speaks using the mouth of some hapless human thrall it’s latched onto, and Noble’s bedroom habits. Not that Snyder’s invention is always consistent, like the very slightly augmented horses the farmers of Veldt use and the samurai flick take on the usual seedy tavern, pointing to one of the real challenges of creating effective space opera realms, where one must needs to keep things based in a convincingly grounded but also fantastically transformed version of the familiar. Rebel Moon also doesn’t entirely escape the fragmented quality his expanded Justice League: the way Jimmy’s experience threads through the film, for instance, feels isolated too much from the main thread of the drama, and in the climax extra ranks of bad guys keep coming out of seeming nowhere. On a more petty detail level, Fee’s fake beard as the older Balisarius amused and aggravated me to equal degrees.
Of course, liking Rebel Moon means liking or at least appreciating Snyder’s style, refined here, or perhaps rather unleashed, to a zenith. The peculiar lensing and patina he experimented with on Army of the Dead , where it seemed wilfully distracting, here resolves into a more complete aesthetic. Even the moments of visceral carnage are touched with a perverse, artisanal romanticism and air of the bygone, and Snyder is plainly trying, like some other filmmakers of the moment, to find ways to overcome the blank, smudgy prettiness of so much digital photography, and gain something vital and expressive from his games with focal plains. Much of the CGI is unconvincing, and not as worked over to be convincing as it would be in a megabudget blockbuster. But I got the feeling that it’s not really supposed to be – ever since 300 Snyder has embraced the idea that movie special effects, no matter how glossy and grandiose they get, are in the end only another tool, part of an aesthetic texture, rather than something that’s supposed to fool the eye. If I balked sometimes at the oceans of CGI blood and bone Snyder insists on decorating every action scene with, it’s not because it provoked squeamishness, but rather crossed the line into the self-consciously theatrical, when all the blasting energy weapons should probably rather be cooking and cauterising flesh. But then again, that theatricality is very obviously the point: this is Snyder’s theatre of sadomasochistic exultation.
The climactic battle is a wild and woozy blast that sees Titus’s well-laid traps and cunning grinding up the Imperium soldiers and outmanoeuvring Noble’s predictable notions of being sneaky, with echoes of both World War I trench warfare, the Spanish Civil War, and Vietnam, as the rebels ambush the attacking soldiers from underground tunnels. In one of Snyder’s more ruthlessly memorable tweaks, he has Noble personally descend into one of the tunnels and cut a swathe through the rebels, hacking and blasting their numbers entirely indifferent to age and gender, clearly in his element as another of the honed Imperium weapons. The rebels use a recovered Imperium gunship, which Jimmy has brought to working order, to add some real firepower to their resistance, and later take advantage of the chaos to use the ship to fly to and board the Dreadnought in posing as wounded. There, Kora turns the warship’s own turret weapons around on the bridge and blows it to smithereens, but doesn’t manage to take out Noble, who demands a more personal touch to his defeat. Snyder might well be gilding the retrofuturist lily more than a little given his futuristic world-blasting spaceships take as much time to aim and fire their weapons as a World War II tank or an actual 1906-model Dreadnought ship, but never mind all that: Snyder delivers one of the more relishable comeuppances for his fascist villains to be found in modern cinema with this flourish.
When Jimmy finally enters the fray and cuts loose on the Imperium soldiers, decimating their ranks armed only with an antler as a weapon, the film’s lyrical and visceral personas, its particular and oddly idealistic take on the polarisation of nature and technology, finally unite. Importantly, too, Snyder keeps dotting the standard action stuff with jolts of strangeness stemming from his careful setting up, particularly when Kora has a vision of the Dreadnought’s tethered colossus power-source, which she means to sabotage, suddenly wrenching itself free of its tethers and announcing support for her actions. And, of course, Noble gets his in an aptly nasty and this time final manner, and Snyder delivers a genuinely and appropriately madcap sense of ferocity and outsized emotive meaning with the spectacle of him and Kora duelling with energy swords within the rapidly disintegrating Dreadnought. Snyder offers a hymn to mutual responsibility in couplehood as Gunnar helps Kora defeat their enemy, but Gunnar’s wounds finally claim his life in a last flourish of tragedy. The last scenes of Rebel Moon make it plain that Snyder means to continue the story, as Titus informs Kora that Issa is still alive in some form and they need to find her to continue the campaign against the Imperium.
Snyder ends the movie on the threatening image of Balisarius taking the news of a defeat in his stride before lording over a parade of his military might – one head of the hydra cut off, but many more remain, and now this kind of bellicose power has been challenged in just the way it likes. Recent events seem to have shown Snyder’s more on the ball than many give credit for. I for one am very eager to see if Snyder goes further and what he does with it: the chief challenge I ask of him is to abandon the crutch of stories like Seven Samurai and get deep into the guts of his invented universe. Because god knows, something current, ambitious genre moviemaking desperately needs is more of what Snyder tries to deliver in Rebel Moon, in its quasi-originality and particularly in comparison to the way, for instance, Villeneuve somehow managed to neuter and suborn the strangeness of Herbert whilst affecting to honour him, and when Star Wars has been bludgeoned into lifeless, focus group-led submission. Rebel Moon isn’t just Snyder’s best work to date but in many ways is the most enfolding work of big-budget cinema I’ve seen since Peter Jackson shelved his Tolkien. Except, of course, that it got nowhere near a cinema.
film freedonia