If anything is to be said of Zack Snyder, it’s that he has never met a director’s cut he didn’t like, with films such as Watchmen (3 hours and 35 minutes), Batman v Superman (3 hours and 2 minutes) and Zack Snyder’s Justice League (ZSJL, 4 hours and 2 minutes) each being works that easily cleared the three-hour threshold in the ostensible interest in helping realize and bring to life the filmmaker’s outsized visions and ambitions. Indeed, it would be difficult not to assert, caveats included as the reader likes, that the broader canvas of a director’s cut in each and any instance materially improves the work; with the concomitant increase in duration operating as a fundamental element in the enhancement. In this, the release of the extended editions of Snyder’s Netflix original two-part film, Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood and Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, which together total a whopping 6 hours and 17 minutes, are little different: the longer, the better.
In their initial “abbreviated” (read 4 hours and 16 minutes) form, Part One: A Child of Fire and Part Two: The Scargiver road an enforced narrative of being “Seven Samurai in space,” which while certainly being of some inspiration in advertising and likely even structuring the cuts, ultimately did no favors in terms of comparison — after all, we’re talking a clinically focused 3-hour-30-minute masterwork here — and undersold the sheer breath of Snyder’s grab bag of cues and references: a feature of the pair that declared itself quite clearly to anyone with a familiarity with the director or the truncations apparent in the work. Where the initial Parts of Rebel Moon, much like Kurosawa’s magnum opus, found their modus operandi in a warrior outcast (Sofia Boutella) gathering further warriors (Djimon Hounsou, Doona Bae, Staz Nair, and Elise Duffy) to help defend a small village from a vastly superior and aggressive outside force, the new Chapters share this as a central throughline but make it clear from the opening moments of Chalice of Blood that they are but one strand of a much vaster, more sprawling consideration of imperial violence and the all-consuming phase it enters at its late stage as it begins to cannibalize biopower not just in its colonies, but across all fields, including its own core.
To unpack this more directly, the promised R-rated editions we have here begin with an entirely new scenario that occupies some 20 minutes of Chapter One’s additional 85. In it, the Imperium — the military arm of the Motherworld, ruled by the tyrant Balisarius (Fra Fee) who deposed the King (Cary Elwes) in a coup d’etat — ravage a world that has harbored the leaders of a militant rebel movement (Ray Fisher and Cleopatra Coleman), brutally spilling the brains of leaders and vaporizing the helpless population with phasers before turning the planet itself to ash (think the Death Star, but without the mercy of one shot doing the job), all per the commands of its ruthless admiral (Ed Skrein). This addition helpfully slots into place the exact stakes and psychological tortures of the heroes the film will eventually spend additional time assembling, while also setting the stage for the more carefully explored mythology behind this world’s previous benevolent (indeed magical) monarchs and the deviation their government apparatus has undergone at the hands of these usurpers. With this in mind, the remaining edges of the new Chapters’ wider uncensored margins are further filled in with a greater interest in sex, swearing, a thoroughgoing bloodier sense of combat, and a freeform plumbing of Snyder’s willingness to reference his pet interests with time spent in subplots with robots and orc-like beasts in order to stitch together a vast graphic novel tapestry of ludicrous proportions.
It would be worth subjecting this now to some analysis, does this extended form of Snyder’s passion project work or help improve upon the initial Parts that were, as a whole, received roundly negatively by critics and with essential ambivalence by audiences? For this writer, who was generally positive on each of the former entries, the answer is unsurprisingly yes. What succeeded well formerly is only improved, as greater time is spent bolstering and leaving unrestrained the action, for which Snyder has always had great command; while the greater extent of this canvas allows for the director to explore with strength his more primordial archetypical interests. What the director’s cuts, for example, make clear is that while this may very well, of course, nod at Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Lucas’ Star Wars as a whole, the same may be said with reference to works such as Lang’s Die Nibelungen and Metropolis as much as the former. We are not in a film world that has time for subtlety, and Snyder dispenses with it for the most part, meaning expository weaknesses remain wherein the warriors are gathered in a single file or unpack their back stories in the same fashion; but this nevertheless allows for Snyder to also show what he wants to tell and explore the gladiatorial or fantastical as much as the lone swordsman or the aristocratic.
As a result, insofar as the viewer is meant to feel that this is a universe in which empire is very much eating everything alive, it should come as no surprise that this is literally the case; Snyder belongs to a school of mythmaking in which the body is a concept and concept is to be embodied: the engines of war are fed with corpses and those engines weep, while the situation of a farming community that celebrates harvest or preparedness for battle with ritualized free sex will become an avenue for a character to enact their feelings with regard to their place in that community vis-à-vis the control they maintain or give up in the intercourse. It goes without saying that this is not an approach for everyone, Snyder is clearly placing his approach in the tradition of the silent epics while borrowing pell-mell from anything he wants besides, be it Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, Malick’s Days of Heaven, Lucas’ Attack of the Clones, or Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan — nothing is off the table if it brings to life an idea and the feeling behind it.
The reaction to this approach is usually mixed, and little in these new Chapters is likely to shift that one way or the other, even in terms of the gussied-up, hyper-violent action that this writer can imagine some finding ultimately rather numbing. Snyder’s operation as his own director of photography has too been an area of consternation, but here images are handled overall with a sense of balance and acuity. In a proper sense, the use of what feels to be Junkie XL B-sides from the ZSJL score and otherwise unremarkable new music is perhaps the clearest area of weakness; but even this is made up for at times with quite stirring uses of diegetic sound and Snyder’s newfound interest for including song as part of his effort to evoke the primordial in individual or communal characterization.
Nevertheless, by way of an effort to begin to reach a summary or conclusion, it is perhaps best to hone in on the grand contours of this project. In essence, Rebel Moon might be best said to be a graphic novel fully realized, much in the way ZSJL was his effort to make a film of comic book panels. As an exercise in aesthetic bombast, there are few contemporary filmmakers — Rajamouli perhaps standing out as a fellow in this — who are willing to find whatever means possible to explore all that can be done within a work of blockbuster proportions. This is to say nothing of the grounding anti-imperialist sentiments of a work in which guerilla resistance is taken to be unmitigated good, colonial war machines tear apart the fabric of space-time with the bones of the conquered, and the tears of children and the very idea of any sort of bothsidesism is simply anathema to good sense. All this may very well be hokey, it may even be somewhat simplistically Manichean, and yet Snyder has parsed together here a grand vision of struggle rooted in an understanding of the ways unrestrained power on the wane cannibalizes all that it sees. This sense of moral clarity only adds to the strengths found in the visionary eccentricity and colossal imagination Snyder embeds into his large-scale projects. Will everyone need six-plus hours of this? Certainly not. But one can only hope that one of our most interesting contemporary filmmakers can continue to be this incurably idiosyncratic.
DIRECTOR: Zack Snyder; CAST: Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Ed Skrein, Michael Huisman, Charlie Hunnam, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: August 2 — Part One | Part Two; RUNTIME: 6 hr. 17 min.
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