The Rebel Moon director’s cuts are a lesson in how not to start a franchise

Over three years since his overstuffed but artistically coherent re-edit of Justice League hit a pandemic-starved market, Netflix has made it clear that they still consider the booming, bullish buzz surrounding Zack Snyder’s triumph over studio interference a lucrative distribution strategy—so much so that they’re willing to sabotage their own projects to replicate it. Last December, Netflix dropped Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child Of Fire to near-universal confusion. The murky, misanthropic, trope-addled space opera felt like it needed one or two (or ten) more passes in the editing suite. There was little sense of character or momentum, and the fact that the streamer had already confirmed Director’s Cuts releasing some point in the future further indicated that we were perhaps not seeing the finished version of Snyder’s passion project—a feeling that didn’t go away after the timid release of the equally botched Part Two: The Scargiver this April.

Now that the Director’s Cuts—respectively subtitled Chalice Of Blood and Curse Of Forgiveness—are available to watch and audiences have insight into what a functional, coherent Rebel Moon two-parter looks like, one thing is clear: Netflix has fully misunderstood why the Snyder Cut was a success. Their launch of a $166 million franchise hopeful has been bundled with a manufactured appeal to Snyder auteurists without understanding how manufactured that original “movement” was, or that nobody cares about it outside of a specific context (read: 2021). The streamer, who recently replaced their chief of film, has produced and released 10 hours of Rebel Moon in a way that incrementally killed public interest in the would-be blockbuster series, giving impressive and depressing new meaning to the cultural maxim that Netflix doesn’t know how to release their own movies.

If you only registered the first Rebel Moon installment last December (it’s the only one that got any marketing momentum or fanfare), we’ll catch you up. It’s a space opera with spectacle and elemental conflict on its mind, featuring as many expulsions of belching flame as it does furious, filth-smeared avengers. On the outer world settlement of Veldt, rebellion is brewing. The quiet farming community, which has a pagan-coded fantasy aesthetic, has recently sold surplus grain from their harvest to the Bloodaxe siblings, who are rebels against the nasty Imperium.

This is our big bad: an industrial military power that channels every European fascist power of the past century, who are in a state of violent flux after the assassination of the King, Queen, and young Princess. The cruel General Balisarius (Fra Fee) took over as regent and, on a galaxy-wide trip crushing independent kingdoms, Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) stopped at Veldt to claim all the grain for the cause. When things get bloody, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a relative newcomer with an Imperium history, sets off to round up a bunch of miscreants, outlaws, and warriors to defend the settlement, Akira Kurosawa-style. Along the way, we see tested corners of the cosmos, dive into tortured backstories, and witness more “rebirths from flames” than we know what to do with.

Snyder has been tinkering on his plans for a sci-fi epic for decades (commonly cited as Seven Samurai meets Star Wars meets Heavy Metal magazine) but production properly kicked off after the twin streaming releases of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Army Of The Dead in 2021. Even before that, a 218-page script had been drafted by Snyder and co-writers Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten that former Netflix film boss Scott Stuber insisted they shave down; Snyder agreed to release his epic vision in two digestible chapters. It seemed like a dream collaboration: Netflix wanted a franchise, Snyder wanted a working relationship he couldn’t get in the traditional studio system. Splitting his film in half was a good compromise.

Except this wasn’t the final doubling of Rebel Moon films. The potential Netflix saw in Rebel Moon came with an asterisk: Snyder’s blood-gushing, profanity-spitting, nudity-flashing vision should be accessible to families and young teens, and the first released version of Rebel Moon, Parts One and Two, were PG-13. Extended, R-rated versions finally dropped on August 2; these Director’s Cuts featured about two hours worth of added footage and all the blood, cursing, and Zack Snyder Sex Scenes that were originally planned but left off the table. In interviews, Snyder is capable of both toeing the company line and pointing out the superiority of his Director’s Cut. 

There’s no way of knowing the extent to which Snyder made the original cuts through gritted teeth, and such speculation is not our point of focus. The original cuts of Rebel Moon feel so incomplete that they fatally wounded the momentum of the Director’s Cuts. Here comes the more insidious part of the release strategy. Sure, teen-friendly versions of Rebel Moon are valuable to a mass-appeal streamer, but even more appealing is the chance to manufacture a second wave of Snyder Cut hype by withholding better, actually watchable films.

Despite having the same story, A Child Of Fire and The Scargiver are night and day when compared to Chalice Of Blood and Curse Of Forgiveness. Chalice and Curse are better films in conception, design, and execution; they also clock in at a total length of six hours. To get the full experience, you could add the four hours of Child Of Fire and Scargiver and watch all four films back-to-back (like this writer did), but there are severe drawbacks to this strategy, other than it sounding like a miserable way to spend a day. (It is, for what it’s worth.)

Watching all four Rebel Moons just reveals how compromised these films were before the Director’s Cuts were revealed. Child Of Fire and Scargiver feel like they have been cut out of a complete cloth and patched together on an editing timeline before all the gore FX and CGI were finished, or as an experiment in excising as much characterization and pacing as possible—not as something you’d be happy to release to subscribers as an introduction to a new sci-fi world.

It’s worth detailing the changes between the Director’s Cuts. Any time someone gets shot, stabbed, mutilated, or exploded, Child Of Fire and Scargiver cut away, leave it bloodless, or disguise all the viscera with burns and/or lasers—the usual hallmarks of a PG-13 genre film. In the new cuts, lasers to the chest, bolts through the skull, and flaming blades to the limbs now spurt dark, wet blood and tissue in amounts that are ludicrous, but not necessarily incongruous with the hyper-charged sci-fi style. 

(Sidenote: like Army of the Dead, Snyder served as cinematographer for these films, and regraded the Director’s Cuts to alter the exact degree of saturated, murky color palette that suited each version. Both versions, however, are shot with a hand-crafted shallow depth-of-field lens that makes everything beyond the foreground really warped, which is very annoying.)

Because it’s the same base footage used for the PG-13 and R-rated fight scenes, all the blood spurts, decapitations, and dismemberments feel like post-production plug-ins, and the seams of the effects show often enough that you can picture the VFX supervisor highlighting all the visual viscera and drag-and-dropping it into a folder named “use for R-rated version.” The violence is certainly more colorful and exciting in the R-rated cut, but if you’ve been primed by first watching the incomplete version, you’re made hyper-aware of all the places that goop has been inserted. It’s too easy to see the layers making up Rebel Moon when we should be immersed in its fantasy.

The main appeal to an extended Rebel Moon will, for many, be a deeper insight into Snyder’s imagination—and boy, do the Director’s Cuts bring the lore. Some new details from the Rebel Mooniverse: the Imperium has enslaved giant deity women to power their dreadnought-class spacecraft; robed and masked bishops collect enemy teeth to adorn a portrait of the princess in service of a manufactured mythic cult; the backstories to the disparate warriors Nemesis (Doona Bae), Prince Tarak (Staz Nair), and General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) detail a far-reaching and historic campaign of Imperium tyranny over highborn royals and unassuming peasants alike.

There are smaller changes that demonstrate why one cut surpasses the other. Veldt leader Sindri (Corey Stoll) joyfully shouts “fuck” about a dozen times during his harvest time festival speech in Chalice, but not in Child Of Fire; including his hearty profanity hammers home those Norse fertility vibes central to Veldt, giving the village our characters almost die defending some vitality and personality. 

Also missing in the original editions are Kora’s two sexual liaisons; when they’re restored near the start of Chalice and Curse, they successfully and wordlessly convey how her capacity for intimacy changes between leaving Veldt and returning. Instead of replacing them with equivalent story beats, Child Of Fire and Scargiver simply cut around them, hoping we’ll just infer character development by the time the action starts. It doesn’t speak much to Snyder’s storytelling integrity that he thinks sex scenes can be useful for character growth, but not useful enough that removing them harms the film.

But through the Director’s Cuts, several characters now feel like actual people. Aris (Sky Yang) is a teen prince kidnapped by the fiendish admiral Noble and his unusual capacity for empathy turns him against the other Imperium soldiers when they first occupy Veldt. Chalice opens with 20 minutes on Aris’ home world, where his family are slain in front of him and he’s enveloped into Noble’s army, eschewing Child Of Fire’s opening narration and giving us a personal insight into the Imperium’s cruelty (even if Snyder can’t help but include gendered violence before the seven-minute mark).

Another Imperium turncoat is the robotic guardian Jimmy (mo-cap by Dustin Ceithamer, voiced by Anthony Hopkins), who’s hardwired to serve the King and protect his Princess, and now faces a test of loyalty and an existential crisis under Balisarius’ rule. Throughout the Director’s Cuts, we intermittently see him explore Veldt, connecting with nature and philosophizing upon his purpose in an uncoordinated world. More than just fleshing out the obligatory droid character in a space opera, Jimmy’s presence measures the stretch of time leading up to the climactic siege—it doesn’t build tension per se, but does acclimatize us to a place anticipating a great struggle. Aris and Jimmy are basically non-entities in the original cuts, stand-ins for Star Wars archetypes rather than characters we can imagine doing stuff when they’re not on screen.

But even though Chalice and Curse are finally functional films, they are not excellent ones. We now have six more hours of evidence that Snyder doesn’t understand Seven Samurai. Instead of playing with the tension between villagers and ronin, multiple space samurai now have personal stakes in the place they’re defending, and everyone falls in line to defend it for honor and personal vengeance rather than the gray zone of opportunism and archaic, classist divides. All our heroes basically share the same motive, as detailed in a punishing calm-before-the-storm dinner scene where four consecutive flashbacks reveal that all these suckers have been intimately wounded by the Imperium’s sadism and believe that fighting alongside each other will redeem them, with no room for any nuance.

Everyone projects either power or weakness throughout all variations of Rebel Moon, adopting a binary mode of good or evil that balloons into a climactic siege that may impress the senses, but also abandons the David vs. Goliath story as the importance of the characters and the size of their artillery grows larger. Because the Director’s Cuts are an act of clarification and not transformation, watching Chalice and Curse becomes an exercise in renewed audience goodwill constantly bumping up against narrative misfires and impediments; even the most generous audience member must admit the director may not be capable of pulling this off—something that was implicitly sold to us with the promise of a definitive, “hardcore” version of the story.

To add insult to injury, Charlie Hunnam’s studio-mandated Irish accent softening in ADR is intact even for the Director’s Cut, which isn’t only cowardly (give us a Geordie going full Irish!), it indicates what’s wrong with the entire Director’s Cut narrative. Netflix and Snyder aren’t interested in expanding the ambition or strangeness of their project in interesting ways, just those that they know from the offset they will be rewarded for. This entire process was designed from the start, with Netflix assuming that compromising and concealing the best version of their film would not alienate or infuriate the same fans their convoluted release plan depended on.

The Rebel Moon Director’s Cut is not an expanded version of a finished film, it’s the finished version of an incomplete one. Audiences were initially sold something that was intentionally lesser and lacking, with the full package dangled temptingly in front of them. Netflix has been rewarded for this bargain with the Director’s Cuts receiving an incurious, barely-registering shrug from that same audience.

It’s telling that the streamer—which in peak disruptor fashion, has no lasting plan for changing the entertainment industry—misinterpreted the key lesson of the Snyder Cut phenomenon. After years of clamor from “Snyder bros,” Warner Bros. did grant the fans’ wish to let the slighted and suffering director make peace with the franchise that abandoned him in an underhanded way—on the surface, a classic story of underdog triumph that queasily validated aggressive, entitled online campaigns.

But the conventional Snyder Cut narrative is filled with revisions. Warner Bros. only sanctioned the completion of Snyder’s vision because it was a cost-effective way to attract blockbuster traffic to Max in the midst of a pandemic content drought. The sincerity of pro-Snyderists’ plea to do right by Snyder after he left Justice League to grieve his daughter’s death is undermined by the death threats that were sent to both executives and critics. And, as it turns out, the cause was inflated by tons of bots. The mechanics of the Snyder Cut fiasco are not as instructive as Netflix interpreted them to be when developing this strategy.

Even though releasing an in-demand director’s cut of a blockbuster title may look like a win for a studio like Warner Bros. (and now Netflix, although nobody is calling Chalice or Curse “in-demand”), it also makes them look like colossal idiots, because they were the ones who interfered with the project in the first place. Netflix was so intent on capitalizing on Snyder’s brand of authorial control that they forgot it’s not a great look to be the studio withholding it from him. Netflix wanted to have their cake and eat it too—no matter that producing an updated version as definitive as this would fully invalidate the one they just released.

Maybe we should give kudos to the streaming platform for what may pay off as culture-shifting four-dimensional distribution chess; we’re not dismissing the Director’s Cuts in their first few days of release—they’re pretty good!—but the way they reached us. To Netflix, Rebel Moon could only be introduced in a way that was more appealing to families because it was less explicit and vulgar. In reality, it wasn’t appealing to families…because it wasn’t appealing to anyone. It’s the rare self-elected hatchet job, a 10-hour unforced error, the $166 million version of Jackass 4.5’s “I’ll show me!”