Your investment in Zack Snyder’s creative vision will likely determine how badly you need to see the R-rated director’s cut of “Rebel Moon,” Snyder’s grim Netflix space opera adventure. This new director’s cut adds 120 minutes of footage, including a numbing wealth of computer-animated gore and a bit more sex. Some of this new material adjusts without significantly enhancing Snyder’s stab at a “Star Wars”-style sci-fi pastiche and an over-extended update of “Seven Samurai” that mainly takes place on the storyboard-perfect farm planet of Veldt.
Some new scenes add more information about the characters’ motives, while others extend already lifeless action sequences. This new material usually only lets the previous version’s footage play out slower. In its new form, “Rebel Moon” now seems mediocre where it used to be outright bad, a frequently monotonous fable that confuses volume with intensity and generally resembles cut scenes from a video game that you’ll never get to play.
Where the previous release of “Rebel Moon” sometimes sped through superfluous flashbacks, this new director’s cut wades through them while still being over-reliant on leaden expository dialogue and faux-lyrical voiceover narration. Now we get to spend more time with the robot warrior JC-1435 (voiced by Anthony Hopkins), who mostly watches and frets over the people of Veldt as they prepare to fight the implacable space fascist Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) and an inexhaustible army of Nazi-looking Imperium soldiers. There’s also more backstory connecting Noble with Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious orphan hiding out on Veldt. Kora leads a group of castoff fighters, including former Imperium General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and cyborg swordsperson Nemesis (Doona Bae), in protecting Veldt from Noble.
Everybody good in “Rebel Moon” has lost somebody that they’ve loved, usually because they had no other choice but to either kill for or be killed by the Imperium. Now they kill the Imperium’s soldiers with impunity, even the few who express misgivings, and especially that one guy who, in the movie’s second half, begs to be spared for the sake of his wife and children. He gets shot in the face and so do a few other Imperium soldiers, many of whom get pumped full of holes with laser guns in slow-motion. Noble also betrays a few more of his informants and allies, presumably establishing how badly he and the Imperium need to be stopped. It’s still hard to understand why we need to see the same process of collaboration and violent betrayal play out so many times and at such punishing length in “Rebel Moon,” as if repetition necessarily added meaning instead of just extra steps.
“Rebel Moon”’s grisly action scenes remain pretty monotonous, featuring way too many stock poses and gestures, and at such length that even diehard fans will likely wonder why so much dramatic short-hand was used. Too much money’s on the screen for the movie’s big fight scenes to be flat-out ugly. Still, there are only so many times that you can be impressed by turgid bloodletting wrought by stick-figure heroes whose physical movements are never graceful or well-choreographed enough to warrant so much slow motion. Everything blends together (often literally, given the eye-straining soft-focus camerawork and butter-colored lenses). Only the most hardcore Snyder fans will care about what happens to protagonists who explain away their personalities rather than embody them through their behavior.
Stunted by Snyder’s literal-minded, reproduction-heavy imagination, “Rebel Moon” lacks the sort of emotional inflection needed to justify its indulgent length. There are some additional stabs at a topical/timely subtext to the movie’s hammy anti-fascist parable in this new director’s cut, particularly whenever a supporting character forgives one of the leads for doing whatever they must to survive. It’s also pretty telling that the best new material in this new release of “Rebel Moon” is an extended sex scene in “Chapter 2,” a relatively tender reunion for Kora and her meek farmer beau Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Sadly, Kora and Gunnar’s sex doesn’t match the tone or style of the movie since it presents the two leads as human-scaled individuals instead of over-inflated effigies of suffering and badass revanchism.
More of everything doesn’t otherwise enhance this new version of “Rebel Moon,” whose shameless and uninspired cribbing from superior films soon makes six-plus hours seem interminable. The best scenes remain the ones that don’t revolve around people. I said it before, but I maintain that Snyder’s latest only really sings when big objects are either exploding or crashing into other large things. The director’s cut of “Rebel Moon” features the same imaginative shortcomings as the last edition. It’s campy and joyless and will never be more than the sum of its well-oiled parts, a feature-length mood board for Snyder and his collaborators, and a pretty slog for everyone else.
