Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon saga began in December 2023 with the release of Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire. Just weeks after its release, however, Snyder confirmed that Rebel Moon would receive a director’s cut. Its sequel, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, was released four months after the first installment, and director’s cuts of both movies were made available on Netflix in early August 2024. The director’s cut is quickly becoming Snyder’s bread and butter, following Zack Snyder’s Justice League after the troubled production of the 2017 DC epic (including a change of director partway through filming).
Curiously, though, Snyder and Netflix had been keen to emphasize the fact that the director had creative control over the Rebel Moon films from the start, making director’s cuts seemingly redundant – perhaps he had double creative control over the new versions. Despite this, Snyder insists that the new edition director’s cuts of Rebel Moon are the definitive versions of the movies – and different films altogether, rather than merely re-edits of the original releases. This means that there are some substantial changes between the different versions of the films as well as minor differences, which are bound to excite fans of Snyder’s newest cinematic saga.
I waited to for the director’s to watch this in the hopes it was better than the poorly reviewed original cut. Unfortunately so far it feels like he must have filled in all the extra runtime with more slow motion shots. Like so many slow motion shots. Maybe if he’d cut some of those he would have had less need for all the exposition dumps.
Like so many of his films Rebel Moon is a collection of beautiful moments with very little to hold them all together.