I didn’t think that much about Star Wars the first time I saw the first part of the first version of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. The movie famously grew out of Snyder’s rejected pitch to Lucasfilm for an actual Star Wars spin-off, and while some of those remnants are certainly visible in the (first) final version (of the first half) (of a possible first installment in a trilogy, or trilogy of trilogies? It remains unclear), much of it is on a level more superficial than structural. Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child of Fire more closely resembles Seven Samurai and its American Western remake The Magnificent Seven, plus the violent fantasies of Paul W.S. Anderson’s movies with Milla Jovovich, plus Dune, itself a Star Wars influence.
The emergence of Snyder’s two-part R-rated director’s cut (now broken into Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood and Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness), a full two hours longer and many times bloodier than the original cut, should take the whole Rebel Moon project further away from the family-friendly George Lucas-originated franchise. The knock-off lightsaber weapons and their clean-cut, wound-cauterizing blades have been de-emphasized, in some scenes, in favor of good old-fashioned axes, and the arterial spray they enable. There is sex, depicted at a length that will be familiar to Snyder fans, and anathema to Star Wars, where a discrete shot of implied-nude Manny Jacinto bathing in a pond, or a moment where Rey (Daisy Ridley) gets a little embarrassed about the shirtlessness of baddie Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) count among the series’ all-time hornie*st moments, decades in the making.
How’s this for a contrast: In the director’s cut of Rebel Moon, Corey Stoll, playing the leader of a peaceful farming community, extols his fellow citizens to f*ck in celebration early on, and Sofia Boutella, playing the movie’s freedom-fighting lead, is obliging, fully nude, by the half-hour mark. (There’s a matching sex scene at a similar point in the second chapter.)
Even as a specific reaction against the bloodlessness and sexlessness of so much cinematic sci-fi, this could just as easily read as a rebuke to the recent and beloved Dune movies, which are violent, and technically involve sexual relationships, but often engage in desert-dry portraiture in terms of depicting its actual bodies. Plenty about Snyder’s duology doesn’t particularly recall Star Wars, either as a point of inspiration or a point of critique.
At the same time, the version of Rebel Moon that now runs around the same length as the original Star Wars trilogy did make me think of Star Wars more frequently than the original cuts. Not necessarily the 1977 original, so much as the saga as a whole, because it often feels like Snyder – rather than starting from farmboy-on-an-adventure basics – is trying to unload five or six movies’ worth of fantasy lore into a two-part endeavor (that could have, stripped down to its basic elements, worked pretty handily as a single 130-minute movie). The longer cuts luxuriate a bit more in its supporting characters’ backstories, and spend more time observing weird little sects like the High Scribes, the red-draped monks who accompany main bad guy Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) on his various maraudings, or the Hawkshaws, the orc-like creatures who serve as mercenaries for the evil Imperium army. None of this alters the basic story; it just fills in Snyder’s weird fantasy world, and provides additional opportunities for violence.
This is all the kind of stuff that so delighted me about A Child of Fire when it was first released, and continues to nudge my imagination in its longer, more unwieldy form. Star Wars does this too, of course, even over the past five years in its incarnation as a producer of spin-off TV shows rather than feature films. Yet because these shows have mostly needed to spin off from somewhere, most of them deal with the orbits of pre-established characters, with even the newer creations tending to be humans, to make better use of those star-filled Disney rolodexes. There are still oddball aliens and supporting characters to latch on to and maybe, with childlike petulance, pine for action figures that could immortalize them – especially on a show like The Acolyte, which came closer to starting from scratch than any other major Star Wars project of recent years. For the most part, though, the frames are packed with more familiar references.
Rebel Moon, in the meanwhile, just released a supersized cut that devotes extra time to showing how those red-robed dudes collect teeth from the bad guys’ victims and incorporate them into an ongoing tapestry paying tribute to their fallen princess. The movies’ C-3PO figure, Jimmy the Robot (voiced by Anthony Hopkins), gets more screen time without gaining much more interaction with our main characters; we see more of his vision quest in the first movie, and more of the results of that vision quest (namely, killing bad guys with some antlers he found) in the second. The group of warriors assembled by the end of the first film doesn’t spend a ton of time together in the second, even in the longer cut; they still just hang out during some brief downtime, exchange backstories, and then go into various sub-sections of battle.
Again, this isn’t much like Star Wars, in that those movies tend to put supporting characters into little groups of two or three or four, even if the hero gets separated – and of course the core of the first movie is Luke, Han and Leia, and the inability of the sequel trilogy to reproduce that dynamic on-screen (through either the original characters or the newbies of Rey, Finn and Poe) became a sore spot among many fans.
But Rebel Moon, especially in its longer form, does do something that Star Wars often handles more tangentially: It creates the impression of a larger world, where all kinds of characters, creatures, robots, groups and societies are off living their own weird lives. Snyder takes this to such extremes that his movies become somewhat diffuse, and harder to connect to emotionally. Hardly anyone on the screen is really connecting, either, just sharing mournful backstory, like audience members patiently listening. But there’s a part of me that admires how Jimmy the Robot never turns into C-3PO, never reluctantly toddles onto a starship for an adventure with the main group. He owns his antisocial qualities.
Snyder’s version of Star Wars could never be made with this much blood or sex, of course; you also get the sense that it couldn’t be made without someone insisting on that forced camaraderie. Rebel Moon isn’t as thrilling, vast or stirring as Star Wars at its best, but it is a thrill to see an expanded universe that isn’t afraid to keep on expanding in ridiculous directions.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. You can follow him as @rockmarooned on the social media.
