Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood (The Director's Cut)

The first part of writer-director Zack Snyder's streaming serial returns, half as long again and brandishing a stricter ratings board certificate that allows for swearing, nudity and varying degrees of sexuality (including gagging submission to a mass of writhing tentacles), as well as moments in which heads are blasted into glowing, molten slag. Really, everything that was originally expected upon hearing that Snyder was plotting a course to a galaxy far, far away. Although, like its first draft, Rebel Moon - Chapter One: Chalice of Blood does eventually flounder, the film's opening passage - already the better section of the feature - benefits further from a new prologue that portrays Ed Skrein's Admiral Noble departing from a drop ship that looks very much like White Dwarf's scratch-built Grav-Attack vehicle (made from a used stick deodorant, Zoid sprues and several plastic cough syrup spoons, back in the late 1980s), before slowly advancing on a cornered, royal family. 

Flanked by necrophilic clergy, Noble is in his element: wearing a furrowed brow when surveying the cultural detonation he is party to but, nevertheless, delighting in the powerlessness of Lim Yu-Beng's rifle-racking monarch. Apparently considered extraneous when compiling the original, holiday season-friendly 'theatrical' cuts, this twenty five minute prelude is, comfortably, more personal and emotionally excruciating than anything else that this saga has previously offered up. The central dilemma of the addition - should a son stave in his father's head to save his weeping sisters - has broader consequences within the piece too: it foreshadows the unexpected bravery of Michiel Huisman's Gunnar when faced with another no-win situation; knitting this naïve farmer into a collective of hardened warriors. Staz Nair's Tarak actually congratulates Gunnar, perhaps recalling his own powerlessness when faced with the might of the Imperium. Similarly, frequent visits to the wheat planet to see how Anthony Hopkins' robot pacifist, Jimmy, is getting on helps massage the bullet point plotting of the theatrical cut's middle section, even if these scenes basically repeat the same idea over and over again. 

The real lesson in all of this, which Chalice of Blood enthusiastically underlines, is that Snyder is often at his most purely effective when using compressed time and collage as a means of leaping, anthropological study. The director then more naturally attuned to telling tales in massive, sweeping strokes that match the grandeur of his vision. Snyder and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, have compiled a terrible path for mankind's future, one that looks to the smoking, industrialised empires of the 19th century then blows them up to function on an intergalactic scale. As with the Dr. Manhattan on Mars sequence in Watchmen or 300's demented opening narration, Sofia Boutella's Kora, and Rebel Moon as a whole, are at their most engaging when this brainwashed orphan takes a moment to detail her path through the screaming, bone-shovelling machinery of conquest. A whispering Kora, confiding in a would-be lover, is given the space to talk through the complicated pride and intermingled guilt she feels about collaborating with, and succeeding within, the regime that doomed her civilisation. These embellished interludes, which now feel complete thanks to a greater scope for emotional incongruity, have a vulnerability and dimensionality to them that was previously lacking in Rebel Moon.