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.
Maybe there’s something more to the “Director’s Second Cut for no particular reason other than that’s his thing now”, but good god-damn, the first version of the first one was terrible. Imagine the crappy scriptwriiting and line delivery of the Star Wars prequels, the lazy worldbuilding of the Star Wars sequels, the inexplicably awful production values of the last Ant-Man movie, and enough blood-soaked 13-year-old-boy “badassery” to make Elon Musk proud. Then imagine all of it padded out with dozens of tedious slow-motion scenes that make you actually question how many pages he managed to write.