Zack Snyder’s career has had more than a fair share of low points. Despite the clear affection he has for his inspirations like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, George Romero, and John Boorman’s Excalibur, his work hasn’t seized the hearts of viewers. The adoration for slo-mo as a means to heighten the mystical physique of his characters isn’t a particular recipe for success, but he has managed to create a unique enough language as a storyteller to separate himself from the lifeless matter of blockbusters around him.
For better or worse, Snyder does not seek validation for adhering to the status quo of uninteresting, safe, mega-scale boomboxes of cinematic entertainment, and his graphic novella visual style makes it so easy to get lost in the scope of his worlds. With his newest Netflix feature, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire, Snyder gets a chance to work outside the parameters of someone else’s sci-fi IP to launch his grand cinematic opera on his terms. His world, characters, iconography, writing, cinematography, and direction gifted to us on a platform primed to let him run wild on set, and the theatrical result could not be worse.
In 2017, Snyder’s place in the DCEU came to an unexpected and tragic close. During post-production on Justice League, his daughter Autumn passed away, and while Snyder was stepping aside, Warner Bros. scapegoated him by completely tarnishing his vision for the film. The rest is history and we don’t need to reflect on it because of the social dominance it had for the better part of a decade, but the culmination of his passion project was stripped away from him at one of the most pivotal moments of his life. It’s difficult not to feel for him and his eventual catharsis with his complete vision of the film released with an apt title: Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It’s his film, for Autumn, and it will live forever as the true intent of the first Justice League regardless of the Joss Whedon-fied theatrical release.
We could go for hours on what this movement may or may not have enabled amongst avid fans of his work, but the visceral nature of the film’s resurrection is not a second chance many directors have been afforded. Regardless, someone as sincere, earnest, and self-aware as Snyder deserves to have his say on the stand before the jury sentences him to director jail, and it seems like he’s avoided indictment. Unfortunately, Netflix took every possible wrong lesson from the Snyder Cut craze, and they continued to lean into their deeply ingrained corporate cynicism by releasing a virtually incomplete movie the same weekend the DCEU crawled towards its inglorious conclusion.
Penned by Snyder, Rebel Moon starts with an all-too-familiar harvester (Kora) who looks at the beyond and wonders what the stars could have in store for her even if there is a hint she might know more than we realize. It’s one thing to work within the framework of inspirations, but to cave to them without tweaking them even a little bit is perplexing. Most of the film is a beat-for-beat recreation of plot, tropes, and characters we’ve seen before without any of the imagination that might push it forward as a mode of innovation. Many will argue that the film’s visual aesthetic and abundance of slo-mo would warp the perception of cinematic invention, but this has no artistic bearing on the meaning of anything. The dialogue is so stilted and laborious it couldn’t plow a clear path for Snyder to let his camera do any talking because it is chocked full of so many familiar plot beats that it gives us the illusion of movement. When, in fact, it is at a petrified standstill like someone just discovered their grandma got run over by a reindeer.
This is what makes the entire film so astonishing. Snyder can typically articulate a sequence of images that transcends stilted dialogue (see Man of Steel) by harnessing a perspective of mysticism and physical prowess, but in this case, he seems to have become complacent with his bag of tricks. You could note how poor the screenplay is because it fails to challenge his craft or push it in a direction that allows the visual fidelity to let you get lost in the textures of the world, but even the effects are alarmingly unimaginative. Every beat is so familiar, emotionally unprovoked, and visually derivative that it looks and tastes like hologram food. Rebel Moon wants to act like a pulpy graphic novel but the personality is expelled because it is hacked to the tiniest practical bits of storytelling within the scope of extraneous digital realms.
We’ve had a long year of debating what ‘Parts’ of films are incomplete, but Rebel Moon is the most garish example of incomplete storytelling. This is a conclusion drawn by Netflix that has allowed them to market Snyder’s name brand as an opportunity to breach our pockets so that we can resubscribe when the director’s cut launches at some point in 2024. The most bizarre angle in this mess is that Snyder has openly said he doesn’t consider the Director’s Cut an “extended” version but an “alternate reality version - it’s almost like a different movie.” This has to be one of the most insulting gestures any studio has made if the director doesn’t appear to be totally on board with the process of how they've chosen to release it. It may be harder to fully critique Snyder’s shortcomings in light of this, but still, the material is so barren and unimaginative that it is challenging to formulate what it is the “true” cut of the film could be.
More violence? Sure. More story? There better be. Action sequences that evolve throughout the story instead of rehashing woefully derivative firefights? Who's to say? I guess the message here is that no matter how much we might believe Zack Snyder is a worthy filmmaker in his own rights, his image has been zapped into an ant-sized iteration of himself by the conglomerates that employ him. We spent years losing our minds waiting, wanting, begging, championing, or fighting over a cut of a film abandoned in purgatory, and now the best we deserve is incongruent cinema that solely exists to allow us to project what the image of an incomplete, unreleased movie looks like? That is sick. I don’t understand how anyone could watch this movie and come away feeling like it was released in the best interests of the viewer and the artists!
If the theatrical release is truly just another Joss-tice League mess as compared to the rigidly glamorous pillars uplifted by the muscular definition of heroes and heroines in Zack Snyder’s worlds then how is it any different from what WB did in 2017? Have we stooped low enough to applaud a studio we’ve fought against all year for giving our “guy” a shot? Just so we can stay subscribed? Guys, we're better than that.
Rebel Moon’s theatrical release is a ridiculous nightmare built off the anguish of personal tragedy for the betterment of quarterly numbers in board room meetings. A clear business move made by one of the most cynical companies not run by Bob Iger or David Zaslav that alludes to an idea it may be working in the favor of the artists they employ. Rebel Moon is a dreadful, visually defunct batch of bad images, characters, and stories that can’t properly elevate a single emotional element of the picture to help us understand what Zack Snyder is trying to do here. It may have shades of every little sci-fi thing we like, but that isn’t a properly assembled frame around a picture dripping with the venom of late-stage capitalism and blissful ignorance that makes the failures an easier pill to swallow.