Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (The Director's Cut)

Parked at Netflix and issued by the streaming giant in ways that - having viewed both films in longer, bloodier cuts - now registers as a strange and cynical kind of self-sabotage, Zack Snyder's pass at Star Wars is both appropriately massive and acutely humourless. Unusually for a writer-director rapidly approaching his sixties (and therefore perfectly placed to have had his mind zapped back in 1977), Snyder is better tuned to the wavelengths emanating from George Lucas' prequel trilogy. To wit: the feeling that you're viewing an instalment rather than a self-contained piece; the self-seriousness of the characters; as well as a narrowing of outlook that exchanges naïve teenagers in alien spaces for human empires and garrulous in-fighting. Snyder even shouts out the plaid grandmaster with extra shots of scurrying, computer-generated rodents. These superfluous, distracting additions to scenes of Sofia Boutella navigating winding corridors are evocative of the charming visual noise Lucas insisted upon for his Special Edition re-releases back in 1997. 

When considering these Director's Cuts as a whole though, it quickly becomes obvious that these are (moment to moment) the better experiences. Overstuffed and exhaustive where the previous episodes felt clipped and oddly anaemic, Chalice of Blood, and now Rebel Moon - Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, offer up a double helping of the excesses that have become synonymous with their extended edition loving director. Paced around two battles - one fought against fields of alien wheat, the other with skinhead invaders from this galaxy's equivalent of the East India Company - Curse of Forgiveness benefits from the extra sense of danger, not to mention gore, that the new, stronger R certificate implies. Basically, the bloodless extermination of the PG-13 cut simply cannot entertain in the same way as the bodily detonations on offer here. The truncated, previously released edits carry with them no sense of shock or satisfaction; built, as they are, around confrontations that have had their sudden, stunning acts of violence snipped away. 

In Curse it's not just faceless stormtroopers who explode into satisfying clouds of weightless viscera either. Cowering civilians (perhaps even children?) have their heads blasted through with molten laser fire by advancing, bearded operators. The sequences in question crossing the pitiless carnage seen in big screen Yoshiyuki Tomino anime (Snyder being one of the few American directors who proudly namechecks influences drawn from Japanese animation) with the instinctual unease generated by the sight of private military contractors. What was previously presented as, more or less, a full-on rout now has an element of wincing, human pain threaded through it. The tweaks that have been applied to Curse then, including tiny instances of dialogue that reframe the imperial war machine in starker and therefore more logically consistent terms, help to massage some individuality into a film that is, by design, deliberately derivative. Perhaps the biggest impact of these differences though are the ways in which Curse accentuates not just the barbarism but the racism of its advancing Imperium. 

Previously, when writing about the first instalment, I insisted that Rebel Moon mishandled its re-telling of Seven Samurai by failing to translate the hierarchical structure of Japanese society in the16th century. Although Boutella's Kora can mix and engage with Djimon Hounsou's disgraced general or Bae Doona's sword master on an equal footing, that's not the important element in these relationships. What unites the warriors recruited to protect Veldt - and even the shorter cuts state this outright - is that they are, predominantly, non-white casualties of a white European coded empire that has either smeared their civilisation (for no detectable advantage) or recruited these people then used them as cannon fodder. Here, the betrayals premised on the social inferiority of non-white instruments land a little harder when the floors and the braying, invective spewing accusers are themselves fouled with recently spilled blood. Even the bone eating engines that the Imperium's ships run on are now named for Hindu Gods; towering women shackled in iridescent prisons that are only able to disobey their sneering conquerors in tiny, barely detectable ways. Where Star Wars used stuffy British thesps as a natural antithesis to its louche, American freedom-fighters, Rebel Moon broadens this conceit to focus in on actors who can trace their real-life lineage to countries that have suffered horribly under colonial aggression: Boutella is Algerian; Hounsou is Beninese; while Staz Nair spoke about his Malayali heritage when promoting Game of Thrones. Hardly a fix all for a film that is desperate to immediately undermine its hard won victory with graceless pleas for further sequels, but it's not nothing. 

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.