The Strange, Self-Sabotaging Story of Zack Snyder's 'Rebel Moon'
Tansy Gardam on what went wrong with 'Rebel Moon.'
Today I’m pleased to present to you an article that has been adapted from a podcast episode of Going Rogue, hosted by Tansy Gardam. When I discovered Going Rogue, I was blown away by Tansy’s insight, wit, and research. If you enjoy this piece, be sure to check out the podcast for a more in-depth history of Rebel Moon and other troubled film productions like Rogue One, Solo, Quantum of Solace and Don’t Worry Darling. This article will contain spoilers for the original (non-Directors Cut) versions of Rebel Moon. -David Chen
Zack Snyder was in college the first time he pitched the idea “Seven Samurai in Space.” It was just a rough idea he threw out in class, inspired by Star Wars and its soft remake of Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress, but it stuck with him. Snyder built on the idea over the years, running it by friends and collaborators, before deciding in late 2012 that he was going to take his Seven Samurai to Kathleen Kennedy and “fix” Star Wars.
It was a strange time for Star Wars – Kathleen Kennedy had become co-chair of Lucasfilm as part of George Lucas’s exit strategy, but no one knew about the company’s impending sale to Disney. Snyder saw his pitch as an opportunity to bring life back to the galaxy in its post prequel slump, to see “some Jedi going nuts” and reverse some of the wrong turns he thought the franchise had taken. And he remembers his pitch to Kennedy going “really well”, although the main thing he recalls asking was the one thing Star Wars could never deliver: “Could it be rated R?”
Snyder’s passion for pairing hardcore violence with epic storytelling has been the source of constant tension and creative concessions throughout his career. On the eve of the release of the Rebel Moon Director’s Cuts on Netflix, we’re taking a look back at Rebel Moon's strange and winding journey from a Star Wars pitch to a Netflix Original movie that was compromised before it was even made.
Zack Snyde-R
Zack Snyder makes R-rated movies. His first three films, Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen all had R-rated sex and violence, and they also weren’t in any way intended for kids or families; they were aimed at adult audiences. Before Snyder even made his first movie, he’d walked away from directing S.W.A.T over a studio mandate that the film be PG-13.
When it was introduced in 1984, the PG-13 rating was a way to split the difference between PG and R and identify films that kids could still reasonably see if accompanied by their parents. Over the decades, it has become a sweet-spot for studio films, since you can reach the widest possible audience: families, adults with disposable incomes, teenagers who wouldn’t be caught dead in a kids film. The past 15 years of bloodless superhero smash-em-ups has also lowered the acceptable age to take a kid to a PG-13 movie — it’s hard to imagine a 6-year-old lasting through Lord of the Rings or Pirates of the Caribbean, but Spider-Man is practically made for them. And because PG-13 films can reach a bigger audience, the more money a studio spends on a film, the more pressure there is to get a PG-13 rating.
Zack Snyder’s first PG-13 film, Sucker Punch, was the result of that pressure. Snyder clashed numerous times with studio Warner Brothers about the film’s tone, theatricality, and rating. And while an R-rated Extended version was later released on DVD, Snyder says it’s not his true director’s cut, which ended with an elaborate musical number (Snyder still one day hopes to release it). Ater Sucker Punch, Snyder moved firmly into the DCEU and tentpole blockbuster superhero movies, which were expected to be PG-13 four-quadrant hits since they came with $200 million price tags. But even when Snyder’s films were rated PG-13, they always had R aspirations. His films are dark, both in terms of subject matter and aesthetic. Snyder wanted to make grown up superhero films for grown ups, with pessimistic, fatalistic attitudes towards heroism and humanity that make it very funny that he made multiple Superman movies.
Even if Lucasfilm had gone ahead with Snyder’s Star Wars Seven Samurai pitch in 2012, they would have almost certainly wanted the film to be PG-13 – all Star Wars films have been PG-13 since Revenge of the Sith, and before that, they were PG. Star Wars has always promised a grittier side to the galaxy, one full of bounty hunters and gunrunners and gangsters, but it has kept that seedy side on the fringes, implied rather than explicit.
But Zack Snyder still left his pitch to Kennedy hopeful – he interpreted a “we’ll think about it” from Kennedy on the rating as a potential yes to an R-rated Star Wars. His wife and producing partner Deborah Snyder was less enthusiastic. She pointed out how much Snyder had struggled to get his darker take on Superman over the line in Man of Steel, and how much worse Lucasfilm were going to be about protecting their brand. But Zack Snyder remained optimistic and even had a second meeting with Lucasfilm, where he was presented with concept art based on his idea. Days later, Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, and Snyder was told his film wouldn’t fit into the new plans for the franchise. Deborah Snyder, for her part, said this rejection was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Almost a decade later, after a tumultuous time shepherding the DCEU for Warner Brothers, Zack Snyder made an enthusiastic return to R-rated filmmaking with Army of the Dead, a gory, bloody heist movie that doesn’t pull its punches. Army was made for Netflix, who aren’t as concerned about R-ratings as traditional distribution companies. Rather than trying to make PG-13 four quadrant films for the broadest possible audience, Netflix’s entire experience is curated around the individual user, offering specific recommendations based on their taste rather than a broad, general audience. Netflix also doesn’t need to worry about advertising restrictions on red band trailers because they can put whatever film they want to promote on your homepage and deliver it straight to your eyeballs. And if you have a family, it’s much easier to watch an R-rated film on Netflix than at the cinema, where you will probably have to pick a film everyone can watch together.
Army marked the beginning of a new creative partnership for Snyder. With Netflix allowing Snyder to go back to his roots and championing his vision, he was able to lean into his instinct rather than pull away from them, doing things like building his own lenses and operating the camera on-set. When Army did better than expected, Snyder pitched Netflix his Seven Samurai in Space idea, with the Star Wars elements carefully filed off. Netflix were into it, and with their tentative greenlight, Snyder started work on the script with his 300 co-writer Kurt Johnstad. After writing 100 pages, they also added Army of the Dead co-writer Shay Hattan as a third writer on the film that was eventually titled Rebel Moon.
Rebel Moon
If you haven’t seen if, or if you have and it slid off your brain like oil off a non-stick pan, Rebel Moon centers around a woman named Kora (Sofia Boutella), who has been living on the farming moon Veldt and keeping pretty tight lipped about her mysterious past. All that changes when Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) from the oppressive Galactic Imperium descends on Veldt and demands the grain from Kora’s village as soon as it’s ready to harvest. He leaves troops behind to ensure a safe harvest, but when those soldiers attempt exactly the crime you’re imagining, Kora kills them in one of Zack Snyder’s signature slow motion gunfights. Knowing that the Imperium will retaliate violently against the village, Kora decides to gather a group of warriors with a grudge against the Motherworld to help defend their harvest and their home.
Kora and fellow villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) then travel through a series of action scenes “inspired” by other movies to collect the team: they pick up smuggler Kai (Charlie Hunnam) in the Cantina from Star Wars, then find blacksmith Tarak (Staz Nair) in a mash-up of Harry Potter 3, Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon, before meeting dual glowing sword master Nemesis (Bae Doona) in a sci-fi version of the Shelob scenes from Return of the King and finally locate the disgraced General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) in the basement of a Gladiator-ial arena. The team then finally get through to the organized rebellion, led by siblings Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) and Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), and Darrian agrees to protect Veldt along with his lieutenant Milius (E. Duffy) and a cadre of his best fighters (who you should not get attached to, since there’s a very specific number in the title of the film they're riffing on).
Rebel Moon does do some interesting things with its script, particularly early on: there’s some fun characterization, especially Noble, who is part Colonel Hans Landa, part Eli Wallach and is constantly chewing scenery. The script also builds an expansive world: the history of the Motherworld, the Imperium, the Bloodaxes, each character’s home planet — everything’s got a Wookiepedia worth of lore and backstory. For example, there’s the Jimmys, a type of a droid which once formed the backbone of the Motherworld military, who all went through a religious crisis when the last king and his family were assassinated because they’d been programmed to believe that the king’s daughter, Princess Issa, was the “Chalice” or great redeemer of prophecy who would usher in a new age of peace and compassion for the universe and allow the Jimmys to finally return home from the war. After the Princess’s death, the Jimmies refused to fight, so now they’re reduced to minor manual labor, and won’t even fight back when attacked: there is a single Jimmy on Veldt, voiced by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who tells the history of his kind in possibly the most Star Wars Prequel coded scene of the film, before communing with nature, discovering his purpose and swooping in to save the day in the final battle.
(If you want to know more about the Jimmys, you’re in luck - a star studded scripted podcast about their creation launched this week, and it contains more sex-bots than you could possibly predict.)
Between the three of them, Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hattan wrote a 200 page script for Rebel Moon. Conventional screenwriting wisdom say that one script page equals one minute of screentime, but for Synder’s scripts, it’s actually a little more than a minute per page - 300 was a 106 page script and a 117-minute film, and Sucker Punch is a 90-page script and a 110-minute movie. (While the obvious joke to make is that Snyder does so much slow motion that his films are longer than their page counts, it’s actually more to do with formatting.)
Given that average over-run, the 200 page Rebel Moon script probably would have made a three-and-a-half hour film. Seven Samurai, after all, goes for three-and-a-half hours. But Scott Stuber, the Netflix head of Original Film, told the Snyders that films under two hours tend to do best on the platform. On that advice, the three writers got to work cutting down the script. The leanest they got it was around 138 pages, but for Snyder, that version of the film was simply too lean. He later said on the Director’s Cut Podcast that:
I met with [Johnstad and Hattan] and I said ‘what do we do to the script to make it 90 pages?’ And uh, we had a road map — we did it on the dry erase, we were like ‘this is what we’d have to do, this is how we’d cut it’ and I was like ‘that’s insane, I don’t even know what that is, that’s like a crazy movie’. You know what it is? What it does is it makes the movie very much, you can just kinda beat it out, like anyone could do it: if I gave you a two hour timeline and said these are the events that need to happen in that two hour timeline you’d have to go like ‘ok so we’ve got five minutes to meet Kora’… then we have like forty minutes – less, thirty minutes to collect the team.
Snyder was also worried that this shorter script was losing all the character growth for the sake of page count. According to Deborah Snyder, he said “If you ask me to make this less than two hours, I’m going to lose all the character. You won’t care about these people.”
So Snyder proposed a different solution: rather than trying to cut the 200 page script down, what if he delivered two films instead? Netflix agreed, and Rebel Moon became two films: Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire and Part Two: The Scargiver.
To split the script into two films, Snyder, Johnstad and Hattan essentially cut the 200-page screenplay in half, taking an existing beat from the midpoint and bulking it out to create a climax for the first film. So, at the end of Rebel Moon: Part 1 - A Child of Fire, once the team has been assembled, they’re sold out by Kai to Admiral Noble and the Imperium, kicking off a big fight scene where Darrian Bloodaxe goes out in a blaze of glory and Kora manages to triumphantly kill Noble. However, this ending is almost immediately rendered meaningless because Noble is resurrected by the Imperium before the credits even roll. In Part 2: The Scargiver, there’s a grand total of thirty seconds between Kora’s announcement that Noble is dead and the confirmation that he isn’t. The two halves of Rebel Moon don’t feel like two satisfying two hour films: they feel like one, over-long four hour film with an artificial climax that is immediately undercut.
But when Snyder presented his 200-page “phonebook” of a script, Netflix had another request: that the two films not only be two hours, but also rated PG-13. Snyder was reluctant, but once again suggested a compromise. He later told Joe Rogan that:
Basically the deal I made with Netflix was…I said, this is the script I want to make. And they said, that is insane….is there any way it could be PG-13? And I was like, well, if it's PG-13, it kind of misses the whole point a little bit. But I can imagine that for a mass audience and for viewership, that seems like it's a smart way to go. I go, what about this? What if …I take this script, I make you a PG-13 version that you can just blast into the world and hopefully as many people see it as possible. And then you let me, as a bonus, you just let me make this version exactly as I think.
The Snyder Cut
Over the years, Zack Snyder has become famous for his director’s cuts. Beyond just the #SnyderCut, there’s been the Ultimate Cuts of Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman, the R-rated cut of Sucker Punch, his longer version of Watchmen (the original was limited by how much film could fit on an IMAX reel) and his unrated Dawn of the Dead (made because he wanted to emulate his hero Ridley Scott). Only two live action Snyder films haven’t had a Director’s Cut: Army of the Dead, which was released on Netflix and didn’t have to compromise on rating, and 300, which was so tightly budgeted and scheduled that Snyder claims “every frame of film we shot is in the movie.”
Previously, Snyder’s directors cuts have been a reaction or a response to compromises made in the edit for the sake of runtime, story and rating. The director’s cuts of Rebel Moon, however, are different: rather than being a reaction to decisions made in the edit bay, they were made alongside the shorter PG-13 films that Netflix wanted. According to Snyder:
The thing that Netflix has done is that they said to me from the beginning, and I’ve never had this experience ‘Well why don’t we give you some extra money, and set scenes aside, and allow you to have the director’s cut run parallel — not be a reaction, you know what I mean?
So during the 153-day shoot of Rebel Moon, Snyder was essentially making two versions of the same films: the 2-hour PG-13 films (Part 1: A Child of Fire and Part 2: The Scargiver), and his longer, R-rated versions, which would later be titled Rebel Moon Chapter 1: Chalice of Blood and Chapter 2: Curse of Forgiveness.
But “Director’s Cut” is a bit of a misnomer here. The Rebel Moon “Directors Cut” was made on-set, while Snyder was making the film. So rather than making the film knowing that it would later have to reach a 2-hour runtime and PG-13 rating, Snyder was making his R-rated 3 hour films, with the consideration that this material would later be cut into that shorter lighter shape, but he would still get to release “his” version. It would probably be more accurate to refer to the shorter PG-13 versions as the “Netflix Cuts”, since they were made out of the longer, R-rated films that Snyder really wanted to make. Both cuts would also be released on the same platform and terms, rather than one being in cinemas and the other on home-media, and the Director’s Cut was always coming less than 8 months after the PG-13 versions.
And because Syder always knew he was going to get those R-rated Director’s Cuts, he seems to have compromised on everything for the PG-13 version. The PG-13 cut was released first, but it was only a matter of time before people saw the “real” Rebel Moon, so Syder compromised far more than he did on films like Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. Rather than fighting to make the best film possible, to push boundaries and protect his creative vision within practical restraints like runtime and rating, Snyder made his R-rated film and let them cut a compromised, shorter PG-13 film out of it, occasionally shooting less graphic alternate shots where necessary or removing slow-mo gouts of blood in the VFX process.
Most of the issues with the PG-13 Rebels Moon that were released in December 2023 and April 2024 stem from that compromise: not in the rating, but in the construction of the film. The world of the film is overbuilt because it was built for a film that is 50% longer. The characters have expansive, complicated backstories, but there’s no time for personalities. The pacing is slapdash, with the first film spent assembling the team in a repetitive cycle of going to a planet, meeting a new guy, listening to them explain their deal and do an action scene before they join the group and stand awkwardly behind Kora in the next scene on the next planet collecting the next guy.
These team building scenes also barrel into one another at full speed: Tarak joins the team, Kora ask Kai if he knows any other fighters, then we get some big establishing shots of the ship landing on the next planet, before suddenly the whole gang are in an elevator with Nemesis, ready to hear her explain her deal. Despite spending the whole first film collecting the team, Part 2: The Scargiver also takes 12 minutes out of its runtime for the team to recite their backstories to one another, complete with flashbacks, while only 5 minutes is spent actually training the villagers and preparing for the Imperium’s attack, before the film descends into a big, weightless battle that is so poorly set-up that it’s often hard to tell if characters are in the same room fighting the same enemies.
Snyder has also freely admitted that the fundamental tone of the PG-13 version is different, and not what he intended, telling The Hollywood Reporter:
Well, the director’s cuts really are the alternate universe version of these movies. They’re what I wrote. They’re much more mythological and much more tonally weird and much more the deconstructivist quality of the sci-fi universe that I intended…much more irreverent than reverent. The PG-13 version is much more earnest. It’s weirdly earnest because you don’t have over-the-top sex and violence to set a tone. You are stuck in this dour … it is fun and the action is exciting, but the people have to express in this middle zone.
But the idea that PG-13 films have to be earnest, that you can’t set an irreverent, deconstructionist tone in that rating and it requires actors to express in a neutral “middle zone” speaks to a real lack of imagination from Snyder. Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo are all PG characters. Films like Mr and Mrs Smith, James Bond, Indiana Jones, the Mummy, Zorro, Austin Powers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Addams Family all managed to strike an exaggerated, violent, horny or irreverent tone without tipping the scales above a PG-13 rating. If you take the time to frame and execute it carefully, you can get away with some seriously impactful violence (there’s a pan up and away from a number of prisoners getting their heads axed in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 that haunts me to this day).
And the PG-13 cuts of Rebel Moon do occasionally show a glimmer of this kind of filmmaking. When Kora kills Noble at the end of Part 1: A Child of Fire, the film cuts to a shot of the floor as a handful of Noble’s teeth clatter into focus. It’s a really evocative way to capture a graphic, violent hit without actually showing Noble’s head being caved in. But at the end of Part 2: The Scargiver, when Kora once again kills Noble, Snyder opts instead for a digital punch in to frame out Noble’s decapitation that might as well have PG-13 CUT stamped across the screen.
Snyder is right to say that the tone of the PG-13 Cuts is dour, and too earnest, but I would also add that it aims for enormous and grandiose and instead reads as empty. There's an awful lot of telling in Rebel Moon: people telling each other their backstories, their philosophies and thoughts and flaws and why they do or don’t fight in the one scene most of them get to talk about who they are, without anyone ever feeling like a real person. Even when the film tries to show character through action, it’s in action scenes that they inevitably win, easily, showing how cool they are. And despite their different backstories, all the characters behave in the same broad strokes, doing the same kind of choreography with the same slow motion cinematography and making the same grand statements about their backstory and philosophies that all feel like they’re reading off the back of the box for their own action figures.
And if this is Zack Snyder’s Star Wars, then you’ve gotta compare it to Star Wars, which is fast paced, funny and fun, hinting at a bigger world but never losing sight of the story it’s telling. If this is Seven Samurai in Space, then it comes up short compared to the original, which deftly builds a team of very different personalities, from the stoic Kambei to the stern Kyuzo to the jovial Heihachi and the gremlin Kikuchiyo. And if you compare Rebel Moon to the most famous Seven Samurai remake, The Magnificent Seven, that film managed to translate the characters to a new world and genre in interesting, inventive ways and did it in a smidge over two hours.
The Curse of Compromise
Rebel Moon did not need to be two films. It didn’t need to be two 2-hour PG-13 films, or two 3-hour R-rated ones. It needed to be more judiciously edited in the script stage, because there is within the two parts of Rebel Moon, one good film: it’s called Seven Samurai. And it’s also the film that Snyder said that he didn’t wanna make, the one where you have five minutes to introduce Kora, and half an hour to get the team together at the midpoint before spending the third act fighting off the invaders. And theoretically, making a two-hour film would have forced Snyder to really examine what was 100% necessary to the film. Giving him four hours, across two films, gave him the chance to indulge in some of his worst impulses as a storyteller: paper thin characters full of backstory but not personality, a barrage of meaningless action scenes and over complicated world building that doesn’t add to the story being told — that, if anything, distracts from it. Rebel Moon takes an hour longer than Seven Samurai to assemble the crew, doesn’t even fully assemble it by the end of the first film, and doesn’t capture the spirit and breadth of those characters.
There are many, many issues with both PG-13 cuts of Rebel Moon: but I can’t imagine all of them will be solved in the three hour, R-rated Director’s Cuts when they arrive on Netflix this Friday. Over-the-top sex and violence won’t solve the problem of no character having a sense of humor. If the director’s cut of the second film, Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, does devote a full hour to carefully setting up the battle plan and the geography of the village, that just raises the question of why that was cut from the 2-hour version to leave room for more backstory and multiple scenes of slow motion wheat harvesting. The characters are probably better fleshed out in the 3-hour cut, but that doesn’t change the fact that in Part 2: The Scargiver, every character conflict is effortlessly solved in the first 20 minutes, and the film spends long sections building to a sequel tease for a film that has nothing to do with Veldt and the farmers, and will likely never be made. Scott Stuber, who was head of Original films at Netflix and brought the Snyders over to the streamer, has since left the company, and his replacement Dan Lin was brutal in his initial assessment of the company’s slate, saying that the movies weren't great and the financials didn't add up.
Even if the Rebel Moon Director’s Cuts are a massive cinematic success that successfully captures the magic of Star Wars through a distinctly Zack Snyder lens and leaves audiences clamoring for Part 3: The Return of Princess Issa, that just raises the question of why Netflix would bother with the shorter PG-13 cuts in the first place. Snyder claimed the PG-13 cuts were something “anyone can enjoy and watch”, but it’s hard to imagine who exactly that “anyone” is.
Hardcore Snyder fans will watch them, but they’ll be disappointed by the compromised vision. Families might watch the films together, but they will probably be turned off by a heavily threatened rape scene less than 40 minutes into A Child of Fire, and it’s much easier to just stop watching a film on Netflix than walk out of a cinema. Teenage boys, once Snyder’s strongest demographic, will probably be bored by the censored violence. People looking for a movie under two hours to watch after work will skip it because Part 1: A Child of Fire is listed on Netflix as 2 hours 16 minutes, even though it’s only 2:04 without credits — and even if you overcome that, it’s only the first of two parts, a four-hour odyssey which manages to both rush and drag.
And if you put Rebel Moon on to watch with your friends or partner, it’s also just… not very good. Snyder simply wasn’t committed to making the best film he could within the constraints of the rating and runtime, because he didn’t have to. As far as he was concerned, the better film was only six months away. And by hacking away at the film that he was actually making to produce this shorter, less graphic version which functions almost as a teaser trailer for the “real” movie, the films lose any integrity they might have once had.
Watching the PG-13 cuts of Rebel Moon, it’s hard not to slip on a tinfoil hat and theorize that, by releasing the PG-13 cuts of Rebel Moon first, Netflix were trying to recreate the social media frenzy of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. The fact that the trailer for the Director’s Cuts declares those films to be “Zack Snyder’s True Vision” certainly backs up that idea, but it requires a level of conspiratorial thinking that I can’t quite entertain. There was never any question of whether Netflix would #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, because Zack Snyder was promising it while promoting the PG-13 cut in December. And by releasing the PG-13 cuts first, Netflix have really shot themselves in the foot, because Rebel Moon can’t rely on the promise of its own IP. People aren’t demanding to see Snyder’s darker take on Kora and General Titus like they were with Batman and Superman. Even if the Director’s Cuts are masterpieces, Rebel Moon will always be associated, first and foremost, with these weaker, compromised films.
The Rebel Moon Director’s Cuts are streaming on Netflix starting August 2nd. Tansy Gardam is a podcaster and producer who lives and works in Australia. Her podcast, Going Rogue, is available wherever you get your podcasts.
Informative article, but I wonder if it would have made more sense to watch the R-rated cut and then compare the cuts