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. 

Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver

Rather than a full-blooded sequel, Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver is the previously unseen, feature-length third act for its predecessor, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire. The films are two pieces of the same Games Workshop-does-Star Wars whole and, unfortunately, the hard split separating the twins invites strange, structural imbalances in the individual fragments rather than allow for the wriggle room required to stage two successive, complimentary conclusions. Experienced apart on release day(s) - rather than streamed later, when both parts can be viewed back-to-back - the disinclination to twist and reassess the pieces on the board between instalments is disappointing but understandable. Scargiver is not a sequel, in the traditional sense. Instead it is the other half of a science fiction saga focused on crawling movement and noisy portraiture. Ed Skrein's fascistic Admiral Noble is a case in point: bloodily vanquished in the previous chapter, he returns here in the exact same human body he died in, despite the glowing, biomechanical juices that had to be pumped into his chopped-up corpse to revive it. 

Writer-director-cinematographer Zack Snyder (co-writing with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten) then deliberately foregoes his own grimdark approximation of Darth Vader to anchor this finale, preferring instead to shoot and frame the emaciated, Buccal drained Admiral as sacrilegious iconography: the diseased Christ that adorns the Isenheim Altarpiece returned, unnaturally, to life. As before, the subsistence stakes that powered Seven Samurai make very little sense when the aggressive party is an advancing, galaxy-spanning empire rather than a gang of starving noblemen who have turned to banditry. Although the assailed farmers pack their crop around key buildings, daring their invaders to incinerate their prize, Noble and his bovver boys are, as it happens, more than happy to detonate the grain. Once this idea of a battle between two armies running on empty stomachs is voided, all that remains is palace intrigue (both Noble and Sofia Boutella's Kora have been lieutenants in the orbit of Fra Fee's higher power) being played out, inconclusively, at the expense of Space Scandinavians. Wheat does remain important to Snyder though, specifically as an adored, photographic subject. The director's eye - which could, in short, be described as that of a muscle obsessed Malick - luxuriates in the slow motion wave of this grass and the straining, human hardship required to harvest it. 

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Zack Snyder's latest, a holiday season blockbuster for Netflix, resuscitates an unsuccessful Star Wars pitch that the writer-director made back when Disney and Lucasfilm were looking for ways to expand their (surprisingly parochial) space saga. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire does then, at least in conceptual terms, betray a slightly deeper understanding of this disconnected predecessor. The film isn't satisfied to mindlessly wield the used-up aesthetic or revolutionary warfare of George Lucas' space opera, Snyder knows to poke around in the bones of that piece, recognising the debt to Ray Harryhausen's Dynamation monster films or Akira Kurosawa's rain-lashed chanbara. Snyder and his team are obviously fluent in the works that followed in Star Wars' wake too - the fantasy epics; the lead figure tabletop games; the science-fiction comics, like Heavy Metal or 2000 AD, that stripped the religious aspiration out of an American cultural phenomenon, replacing it with human avarice and body-shredding violence. Unfortunately this pop culture fluency is communicated by a film experiencing a severe, structural lurch. 

Although Rebel Moon's first act shows promise, teasing out the familiar tale of impoverished farmers forced to hire warriors to battle the invaders who would drive them to famine, once Sofia Boutella's ex-imperialist Kora starts putting the gang together Snyder's film begins to run aground. Seven Samurai (and to lesser degrees, The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars) built scenes around the emerging camaraderie experienced by a growing gang of misfits. The small connections that their similar backgrounds reveal or their collective responses to attempts at trickery. There was a class dimension too, one that doesn't quite scan here thanks to Kora's backstory. She may live as a farmer now but she wasn't born one; she wasn't raised as one. When interacting with the people she recruits, Kora does so as an equal rather than somebody who is scared and suspicious, who perhaps even considers themselves to be somehow socially inferior. Rebel Moon doesn't just skip over successful or misfiring fellowship though (drawing together a line-up that barely interacts), the film eventually abandons the basic, consumptive stakes outlined when a battleship landed on a wheat field. As the canvas swells to include a star system's worth of planets, seemingly instantaneous space travel (and therefore retaliation), and the genocidal glassing of a pacifist planet, the basic thread of hopelessly outgunned mercenaries repelling a technologically superior force slips away completely.