One of two posters created by Sachin Teng.to announce the release of the R-rated versions of Rebel Moon.
For the past two seasons, Kora (Sophia Boutella) has been living a quiet life in a farming village on the moon of Veldt. While she remains tight-lipped about her past, the people of the close-knit community have come to accept her as one of their own. Alas, Kora’s idyll is shattered with the arrival of The King’s Gaze, a dreadnought under the command of Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) of the imperialist Motherworld. Ordered by his sovereign, the Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee), to crush an insurgent cell operating in the sector, Noble has made the detour to Veldt to resupply his ship’s stores for the campaign. While Noble arrives with an air of geniality, the mask quickly slips. After murdering the village’s headman Sindri (Cory Stoll) and his wife, Noble demands the entirety of the village’s harvest in nine weeks, leaving behind a platoon of soldiers to ensure compliance with his demands.
Kora’s plans to flee the moon are interrupted the following night when the Motherworld soldiers attempt to gang rape villager Sam (Charlotte Maggi). Putting her experience as a former elite soldier of the Motherworld to use, she slaughters the entire platoon save for Aris (Sky Yang), the one soldier who stood in Sam’s defense. Realizing the village has no choice but to fight, Kora seeks out harvest overseer Gunnar (Michal Huisman) for his contacts with the insurgents, and together they ride to the spaceport of Providence in search of transport. In a seedy brothel they encounter Kai (Charlie Hunnam), a smuggler and rogue who offers Kora and Gunnar passage aboard his ship as well as leads on more potential allies. The three recruit the exiled prince, blacksmith, and griffin tamer Tarak (Staz Nair), the cyborg swordswoman Nemesis (Bae Doona), and the disgraced Motherworld general Titus (Djimon Hounsou). The party eventually picks up the trail of the resistance cell and plead their case to its leaders, the siblings Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) and Darrien Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher). The Bloodaxes ultimately pledge their support, with Darrien himself joining the group along with a squad of loyal fighters. This windfall is short-lived, as the whole group is led into an ambush by Kai, who decided to sell them all out to Admiral Noble to fund his retirement. In the ensuing battle Kai is killed along with Darrien Bloodaxe and all his fighters save for Milius (Elise Duffy), while Kora is able to kill Noble in single combat. The survivors lick their wounds and return to Veldt, heartened by the fact that Noble’s death will force the dreadnought to abandon its mission and return to port…
…only to discover upon their arrival that Noble has been resurrected and the dreadnought is still on its way, leaving them less than a week to bring in the harvest, share their backstories, teach the villagers to fight, and come up with a plan to defeat The King’s Gaze before it sacks the village.
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It has taken me a long time to figure out how to approach Rebel Moon. Any discussion of Rebel Moon has to contend with the fact that this first installment of the project consists of two versions of two films, which necessitates a lengthy explanation of the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to this unusual state of affairs. On top of that, Rebel Moon is the brainchild and passion project of director/cinematographer/writer Zack Snyder, a highly polarizing filmmaker even at the best of times. It is very easy to succumb to groupthink when discussing Snyder, either to dismiss his films out of hand and resort to clichés and name-calling, or to pump his work up with breathless superlatives while avoiding any discussion of their substance. Finally, I have had to figure out how to process my own contradictory feelings about these films in a way that makes sense on the page. These movies have a lot of problems, but something about them fascinates me. Rather than dismissing them and moving on with my life, I have spent actual years of my life grappling with them, trying to figure out why they are what they are.
What follows is a long, meandering essay where I dig through everything I’ve learned about Rebel Moon over the past two years – the history of its development, the various works of art that inspired it, and the complicated relationship it has with those inspirations – and tease some reason out of all the sound and fury and maybe, just maybe, come to a final verdict on Rebel Moon as a whole.
The Futurist Dolmen 