I Survived a Marathon of Zack Snyder’s Unrated ‘Rebel Moon’ — But Still Can’t Tell You Why It Exists
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic I’ve never seen a line for the men’s room at the American Cinématheque as long as the one that confronted me at intermission of the marathon screening of Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon” this weekend. (Keep in mind, by that point, the crowd had been holding its collective bladder for three and a half hours, with the second half still to come.) Meanwhile, there were so few women in attendance that the ladies’ room had practically no wait at all — a phenomenon that said everything about the crowd that had turned out for a big-screen look at the 373-minute director’s cut of Snyder’s two-part space opera.
To call this roided-out macro-edition of “Rebel Moon” a “director’s cut” is to willingly buy into Netflix’s egregious misrepresentation of a project that had been conceived to exist in two separate versions all along: a by-no-means-neutered and still-plenty-aggro PG-13 version, and now this, a much longer and far gorier cut, crammed with exploding-head carnage so repetitive it starts to be tiresome, along with great big gratuitous helpings of nudity, sex and backstory — hardly any of which materially alters the underlying story. “Rebel Moon” is terrible any way you slice it.
As Snyder warned during the post-screening Q&A, “There are another four, five movies beyond this.” And that’s not all: “There’s this animated movie that we’ve been working on,” he added. “I don’t know if we’re going to make it 100%, but we’re working on it.” So it really comes down to how much time you want to invest in watching Snyder try to cosplay George Lucas.
Frankly, I think “The Fifth Element” director Luc Besson makes for a better comparison, seeing as how both he and Snyder think like 13-year-old boys.
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