Zack Snyder’s ‘Rebel Moon’ Is More Than Just An Edgelord ‘Star Wars’ — It’s A Rebuke Against Denis Villenuevue’s Somnambulant Spin on ‘Dune’

Zack Snyder has the cult following, mixed reviews, and instantly recognizable style that might characterize a misunderstood genius, only he’s not a genius and his work is generally easy to understand, on a visual and thematic level if not necessarily always a plot one. His adaptation of Frank Miller’s ultraviolent graphic novel 300 won him huge budgets and leeway for several years at Warner Bros.; his interrupted run making turgid superhero dramas featuring DC Comics characters made him a cause célèbre among certain fan factions; and his newfound status as a genre hero has won him even more carte blanche at Netflix – a freedom that, at times, seems to leave him overwhelmed with ideas for new universes.  

This is a filmmaker so accustomed to needing director’s cuts to fully explain himself (and, via the unlikely but successful campaign for Warner to pony up and let him finish the “Snyder Cut” of Justice League after a compromised version was released in theaters, justify his fans’ devotion) that he now seems to build them into his release plans. Hence Rebel Moon, Snyder’s sci-fi-fantasy epic for Netflix, receiving a rollout on par with a Choose Your Own Adventure: First the movie will be split in two, with Part One: A Child of Fire now available to stream on Netflix and Part Two: The Scargiver following in April 2024. Then each PG-13 part will receive a longer, R-rated director’s cut. Then – and this is just speculation, but it seems reasonable – perhaps they’ll at some point be recombined into a super-long Ultimate Cut, like that four-hour Snyder Cut of Justice League or the three-and-a-half-hour version of Watchmen with the animated interludes. James Cameron might consider this forward-thinking, but at the moment it does feel like the filmmaker’s world has become a series of Snyder Cuts, affixing asterisks to everything he makes. 

And yet, for all that, I do think Rebel Moon – or at least the 135 minutes made available to so far in a limited theatrical release prior to its Netflix debut – has been somewhat misunderstood, by critics and fans and possibly Snyder himself. This was supposed to be his edgelordy version of Star Wars; the project even began as a rejected Lucasfilm pitch. But it’s really his bozo version of Dune – only it’s way more fun than that two-part epic’s handsome but sluggishly unsatisfying opening salvo. 

The confusion starts with the movie’s origins. Multiple critics have already confused some superficial Star Wars steals – a cantina scene, a lightsaber-like weapon, an initial farm setting – with a wholesale beat-for-beat recreation. But Kora (Sofia Boutella) is not a Luke Skywalker figure in the least; she’s an ex-soldier roused from her peaceful farming life when imperial, er, excuse me, Imperium forces from the interplanetary government show up and demand a ruinous ration of crops from her home village. Goaded by her witnessing the Imperium cruelty of Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), Kora sets out to recruit other warriors to help fight back. In other words, Snyder is definitely ripping off Star Wars, but he’s doing it via Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, and, if you will, A Bug’s Life (at one point, someone fights a spider-woman).

Snyder being Snyder, this Magnificent Seven recruitment process takes up most of A Child of Fire, which consists of gathering approximately seven badasses with mini-fights, engaging them in a halftime fight, and promising a bigger conflict to come in Part Two. As has become the Snyder house style, it often feels like significant chunks of information are missing. But if we’ve learned anything from various Snyder Cuts, it’s that the improved coherence doesn’t necessarily add up to much more on a narrative level. Even his 100%-longer and less tonally confused Justice League has the same basic story thrust as the bowdlerized version. With Snyder, no matter how many versions he puts out, the movie is pretty much the movie.

But this particular movie also might be Snyder’s best, in part because it’s less inclined to philosophize about the burdens of this broken world or whatever. A bigger reason for its success is where the Dune comparison comes in. Denis Villeneuve’s first part of Dune is full of world-building, atmosphere, haunted visions, and expensive production design, at the expense of old-fashioned plotting, character development, or having an ending. Rebel Moon opts for the same approach, only the atmosphere is less “solemn palace intrigue with some youthful ennui and a bunch of new vocab words” and more “slamming a Mountain Dew while playing D&D with Chronicles of Riddick blaring from the next room.” This is a deeply silly movie with the courage of its convictions, and if I’m supposed to let Villeneueve slide on the sheer restrained majesty of his unfinished megaproduction, surely we can afford similar grace to the stuff of true cinema, where Jena Malone plays a vengeful spider-woman, Anthony Hopkins voices an imperial robot who goes native, and one character is introduced attempting to win freedom from his debts by taming a griffin-like creature in an extended Avatar ripoff.

It’s easy to see, then, why critics are giving this a hard time regardless of all that awesome stuff, equal parts visual invention and shameless pilfering. The latter doesn’t stop at specific movies. Snyder is fond of picking up “cool” cinematic tricks – aspect ratios going ultra-wide or IMAX-boxy; speed-ramping in and out of slow-mo; shallow focus to alter perspective on his CG splash panels – and flogging them endlessly, often without much sense. But the slow-motion overload he indulges in Rebel Moon finds a perfect partner in Sofia Boutella, his leading lady; she has background as a dancer, and Snyder’s camera captures the physical grace as she runs, twirls, stabs, and so forth. It’s character via sensation, which is why Kora’s generic grimness doesn’t matter any more than the movie’s lack of a fully completed story arc. It’s like complaining about the quality of the interstitial dialogue in a silent movie.

So I wasn’t really thinking about Star Wars that much while watching Rebel Moon (and I’m someone who will think about Star Wars at almost no provocation). In addition to both versions of Dune, I was thinking about the disreputable cinema of Paul W.S. Anderson, particularly the movies he’s made with his wife Milla Jovovich, and big-budget boondoggles like Jupiter Ascending, where the filmmakers’ loopy faith in their own outré production design and weird creatures fuels the movie like so much spice. Some viewers’ Mountain Dew Spice Slam will be others’ poison, of course, and I won’t – can’t – argue for Rebel Moon as a future slept-on masterpiece. It does, however, feel like a firm strike against the faux-tastefulness that has crept into sci-fi and fantasy movies, whether through the slightly somnambulant respectability of Dune or the normie quipping of the more generic Marvel pictures. Instead, every sequence feels like another room in that cantina. I don’t doubt that Snyder himself finds deeper meaning in re-forging so many genre clichés, but unlike some of his other projects Rebel Moon rarely feels encumbered by those beliefs. What should read as cynicism – Snyder creating a faux-visionary sci-fi universe simply because his brand now allows it – frees Snyder from his own mythologizing. This is the kind of delightful high-fantasy nonsense only a non-genius could make.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.