Rebel Moon (2023-2024)
Disquieting, in the most visual way imaginable.
There is a particular kind of bad film that leaves a pungent memory. It occupies the screen, fills the runtime, accumulates events, and then moves in for good, far beyond the credit roll, souring any image, line, or feeling that might have served as a reference point. Rebel Moon is that kind of film. I watched both parts over Thanksgiving — possibly all four, if you count the extended director’s cuts, though my brain has mercifully composted the distinction — and what struck me afterward was not that the films were bad, but that they were frictionless. A train wreck you can’t look away from in the moment and can’t quite remember an hour later. The defect is not a failure of execution. The defect is the absence of anything underneath the execution to fail.
Snyder’s films are over-designed, not under-designed. Every frame is composed within an inch of its life. Every costume is textured, every locket and dagger and grain silo treated with the gravity of a religious relic. The man is not lazy. He is the opposite of lazy. And yet none of it adheres, because surfaces are all there is. Iconography is mistaken for meaning, slow motion is mistaken for weight, and a sad backstory monologue is mistaken for character. The films are an essay in the category error of confusing the texture of significance with significance itself.
This is the essence of the problem, and it operates simultaneously at every level of the work — conceptual, material, and structural. A filmmaker who thinks in shorthand at the level of ideas will think in shorthand at the level of costumes, props, sets, dialogue, and plot. The grain silo is an idea of a grain silo. The peasant is an idea of a peasant. The villain is an idea of a villain. When you photograph an idea of a thing rather than a thing, the audience feels the absence even when they cannot name it. That is the dirty-garage feeling these films leave behind. Surfaces accumulating without anything underneath them, like clutter.
It is impossible to discuss Rebel Moon without acknowledging that it began as a Star Wars pitch, was rejected by Lucasfilm, and was reconstituted as original IP. That origin is visible in every frame, and not in a flattering way. The film plays as if assembled by someone whose primary creative wound is being told no, and whose response was to gather the constituent parts of the thing he was denied — dreadnoughts, droids, a farm boy, a princess with a hidden past, a cantina of misfits, an evil empire — without understanding why those parts cohered in the original. Lucas was synthesizing Kurosawa, Joseph Campbell, the Flash Gordon serials, WWII dogfight footage, and the anti-imperial mood of post-Vietnam America. Snyder is synthesizing Lucas. It is a xerox of a xerox, and the degradation shows.
Consider the dreadnoughts. Consider, by contrast, the stormtroopers. “Stormtrooper” works because it carries actual historical freight — Sturmtruppen, the visual grammar of fascism — into a pulp context, and the friction generates meaning. “Dreadnought” is a borrowed naval term applied to a spaceship because spaceships are supposed to sound impressive. One word does thematic work. The other does branding work. Multiply that distinction across every design decision in the film and you arrive at the answer for why nothing lands.
Or consider Jimmy, the gentle warrior robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins, who is recognizably C-3PO with the comedy filed off and the sentimentality dialed up. Or consider the title of the second film, The Scargiver, which is reaching for the mythic music of terms like the Old English or Old Norse ring-giver — the king who distributes treasure to his loyal warriors and binds them to him through gifts — and lands instead on a Hot Topic T-shirt. A ring-giver gives gifts. A scar-giver gives wounds. Wait. What? The compound noun has the music of mythic language without the grammar that makes mythic language work. It is the kind of name a fourteen-year-old invents for his D&D character because it sounds badass, without noticing that it casts the hero as the aggressor.
The most damning comparison, and the one that clarifies what Rebel Moon actually is, is with Andor and Rogue One. Those films treat occupation, collaboration, and resistance as conditions with texture — boring meetings, compromised people, the cost of an action measured in something other than spectacle. The historical references they reach for, from Vichy France to the Troubles to anti-colonial insurgency, earn their weight because the filmmaking has internalized what those references mean. Snyder reaches for the same iconography — jackbooted imperial officers, peasant villages, harvest as sacred labor, a coalition of misfits — but he is reaching for the look of moral seriousness, not the substance. It is cosplay of significance.
Nowhere is the gap between these two productions more legible than in their respective sexual assault scenes. In Andor, the scene involving Bix is unbearable because she is a person we know, the violence is staged with the camera’s complete moral attention, and nothing in the framing invites us to look. The audience is positioned as witness, and the witnessing costs something.
In Rebel Moon, the equivalent scene is lit. It is scored. It has the visual grammar of seduction applied to assault — the same lacquered slow-motion treatment Snyder applies to his sword fights and his harvest sequences. That is not a misjudgment. That is a worldview leaking through the filmmaking. The grammar of his images cannot distinguish between reverence and leering, and so everything is given the same treatment, which means nothing means anything. The only thing actually being communicated is the filmmaker’s relationship to surfaces, and that relationship reads as appetitive rather than moral. The films leave behind a strange aftertaste — the sense that the people who made them might share your stated politics but not your moral instincts. A filthiness in the grammar itself.
The shorthand metastasizes structurally, too. Betrayals stack on betrayals — someone is revealed to have been working for the other side all along, and then a second reveal layers on top of the first, and then perhaps a third — and the cumulative effect is not surprise but exhaustion. A real betrayal lands because we have watched a relationship be built. We have earned the trust that is about to be broken. Snyder skips the building part and goes straight to the breaking, then stacks another break on top, as if the mechanism of betrayal were itself the satisfaction. It is the narrative equivalent of someone yelling “plot twist” at you.
“You got my brother, but you didn’t get me! I was hiding behind the coconut tree…”
The form is present. The substance is absent. Same disease as the dreadnoughts and the grain silos. It plays less like adult drama than like the rhythm of a playground feint — got you, no I got you, no I got you — delivered with the lacquered self-seriousness Snyder applies to everything else, which is precisely what makes it ridiculous rather than fun. A pulpier, lighter film could pull off that kind of cartoon double-cross. Snyder shoots it like Greek tragedy.
The resurrection of Admiral Noble — pulled from his goo-bath like an afterbirth, umbilical tubing twitching, body reanimating into consciousness so he can answer to the Regent — is one of the genuinely repulsive sequences in the film, and it is worth sitting with why. Snyder shoots it with a fetishistic attention clearly meant to feel mythic and transgressive, like Frankenstein or a Bacon painting. But there is no idea underneath it. It is body horror without a thesis. Cronenberg’s resurrections mean something because they concern the violation of the boundary between flesh and technology, between flesh and identity. Snyder’s resurrection means: the antagonist is back so we can have a sequel. The grotesquerie is decorative, and that is worse than restraint would be, because the film asks the audience to receive something as profound while delivering something as mechanical as a video game respawn.
The romance fails for related reasons. Kora is supposed to be a former Imperium soldier — a killer, someone shaped by violence and complicity and survival, whose interiority, to the limited extent the film grants her any, is built from hardness, regret, and the impossibility of going home. A romantic counterpart for that character needs to be someone who can see her, who has enough weight of his own to register against hers. Gunnar is a sweet farm boy with no edges. He is not a person she would fall in love with. He is a person she would protect at arm’s length and feel tender toward the way one feels tender toward a younger sibling.
The film mistakes gentleness for compatibility and assumes that placing two attractive people adjacent to one another will generate feeling. It doesn’t. Compatibility is not a by-product of osmosis. Gunnar has the bobblehead energy of a quirky character on a workplace sitcom, parachuted in to be the emotional anchor for a soldier carrying a body count. The miscalibration shows you that the writing has no theory of who Kora actually is. She is a collection of action-heroine signifiers. He is a collection of love-interest signifiers. Adjacency is supposed to do the rest of the work.
All of which adds up to the question of what one does with a film like this. Not much, honestly. The piece does not reward excavation, and pretending otherwise would dignify it. Rebel Moon is what happens when a remix artist tries to do original work without access to the generative layer — when someone who has spent his career working downstream of other people’s imaginations attempts to invent at the source and reveals, in the attempt, that the source is not where he lives. The Lucasfilm rejection did not cause this problem. It only made the dependency visible. The films would have been the same kind of empty whether they wore their Star Wars iconography openly or, as here, wore it slightly disguised.
What lingers, finally, is the aftertaste rather than any specific image — the sense of having spent four hours in a dirty garage. Surfaces without substance, gestures without freight, the music of meaning playing through speakers wired to nothing.