Okay. Director's cuts. I was like "Fucking Hell! They made 2 more?!"

they made more than one?!?

"Lack of understanding of the material being adapted"
The first sentence in Zack Snyder's obituary.

What's wild is that there is some seriously interesting world building stuff going on in the expanded cuts, but all that stuff didn't come from Zack. Netflix had hired a small tabletop RPG designer team (like Dungeons&Dragons) who made tabletop RPGs for a bunch of other franchises, and those guys created a world bible for the movies. As in, they sat down, explored the concept Zack had scribbled down, and turned them into a coherent whole so they could then give people an explanation of how it worked and run adventures in it. Only then Netflix tried to fuck them over, cancelled the RPG, and tried to sue them to get the world bible for free!? That court case was eventually settled, with the designers coming out of it with a big payday.

But yeah, it's wild that the most interesting parts of the movies had nothing to do with Zac.

It had the cultural impact of a particularly loud fart

Really big chunks of Rebel Moon just feel like they're 1 step to the left of Warhammer 40k characters doing a bad Star Wars fanfiction.

me and my friend watched the first one just randomly, we were so mad the movie didn’t focus on the robot more

My favorite thing to do with these films is going on r/shittymoviedetails and explaining a random part of the lore then going "despite being the coolest thing ever, it's not in the film"

The stakes being fought over in this space opera are comically small: one  tiny community's grain harvest. That could have been used for drama. Say that this galactic society is in full collapse, nobody is bothering to pay taxes anymore, nobody respects anyone else's authority, and one ship full of marines are starving and are reduced to "tax collection" efforts that look a lot like raiding. They're probably running out of fuel and ammunition, and if they have big bombs, they can't use them or they'll be destroying the only thing that can save their lives.

My friends and I summarized the movies as "Zack, 8 years old, uses his toys - most of them off-brand copies - to reenact the Seven Samurai after being allowed to watch it with his big brother."

The "search for warriors" thing is really weirdly out of place in what's meant to be a galactic-scale conflict.

The starting area looking like a weird medieval Norse village down the road from a Meiji Japan town was jarring, weird, and dumb.

I feel like having the "theatrical" and Director's Cut versions was just a marketing gimmick to trick people into watching the movie twice, or to make having a "clean" version with less swearing and toned down violence/gore not come off as censorship.

The fact that so much of the Director's Cut's extended runtime is from just having extra lingering seconds between lines is absurd...

Does Snyder ever make something that isn't a worse reference to something else?

This entire movie feels like it's trying to one-up ideas and concepts from Star Wars with "if the Empire was actually an evil Empire, they would have people go around raping women and just destroy anything in its path" and "if the cantina was actually a place of scum and villainy, then there would be a guy who sexually assaults Luke". No joke, Snyder literally thought the moment of those two criminals in the cantina intimidating Luke was sexual. The movie tries to one-up ideas in Star Wars with some cheap version of Warhammer aesthetics and has no identity of its own. It's just Excalibur, Heavy Metal, Warhammer, Star Wars, and Seven Samurai, but it doesn't do anything new. Star Wars is very similar to Hidden Fortress, but at least that film does something new and compelling and introduces an interesting world. There is nothing about Rebel Moon that makes this universe unique or interesting.

The movie really has nothing to say in terms of politics or just the nature of fascist Empires and rebellions. It doesn't have anything to say, and when it does, it moves away from it quickly to give you some action scenes because it's not interested in delving into those ideas and themes. This entire movie feels like what would happen if George made Star Wars using the earlier drafts, never once compromising on some ideas and worldbuilding to try to tell a cohesive, well-rounded story. He pretty much left those story beats about ruthless trader-barons infiltrating democracy for other stories to pick up. Rebel Moon throws a lot of worldbuilding at you and expects you to care, but you don't.

Snyder is fascinating in that he has a captivating visual style that can really draw the viewer in, but with simplistic misunderstanding of storytelling and an inability to understand subtext

Everything Great with the Rebel Moon saga:

- The cover arts for the Director's Cuts;
- That Lil Explosive Alien;
- Uhh, some alien designs are, fine (?);
- The video essays

I've always thought Zack Snyder fans were "special." Like how else does someone unironically like a director best known for doubling the length of his films through use of slow motion? But Rebel Moon proves that his "fandom" as a director is severely tied up in entirety in previously existing IPs. Dawn of the Dead remake, The 300 adaptation. The Sucker Punch adaptation. The DC superhero films.

Explains perfectly why no one defended Rebel Moon. No one cared. There is no previously loved property to hide Zack's mid level filmmaking behind in Rebel Moon. Its just Zack. And he's just as uninteresting a filmmaker as I've assumed he was all these years.

I swear, the weaponry part really frustrates me. It's one of those spaces where real world references (like Vietnam, The Blitz, other situations where a population has survived aerial bombardment) are a thousand times more useful than fiction intertexts. If you're going to take Seven Samurai and change the setting, the audience will want to see what that new setting brings the story, not 'hey, do you remember when Seven Samurai did this!'

Insane how you can have directors cuts on a franchise you have full control over