When Zack Snyder first announced his Netflix sci-fi epic Rebel Moon, he admitted that the concept was originally made for a “mature” Star Wars movie that he pitched to Lucasfilm—which Lucasfilm was not interested in. So he sanded off the serial numbers, replaced the lightsabers with different kinds of laser swords, and swapped out the Empire for The Imperium. Rebel Moon is no longer a Star Wars, then, but it is the story of a guy who really wanted to make a Star Wars, couldn’t, and is now creating his own new thing, making it the ultimate extension of Snyder’s fan-forward filmography.
Snyder, after all, burst onto the scene with the surprisingly good Dawn Of The Dead remake, a movie that jacked up the action of George Romero’s original without really bothering to deepen (or even engage with) its social commentary. But it was cool! Same with 300 and same with Watchmen, two movies that undeniably have some striking visuals, even if they are both pretty shallow (it’s probably good that 300 is shallow, because otherwise it would come across as worryingly pro-fascism).
The movies are crowdpleasers, made by a guy who wants to please crowds and whose whole angle on these projects is doing what he did on Dawn Of The Dead and jacking up the action—or the violence, or the stakes, or whatever—within the boundaries of an established property. 2011’s Sucker Punch breaks the trend, but it was also a critical and commercial flop, so it’s telling that Snyder went back to his old formula and let it define the next decade of his life.
Warner Bros. hired him to make a Superman movie, so he made the kind of Superman movie he wanted to see—one where he’s a cape-wearing, heat vision-blasting messiah figure. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe was making movies about superheroes who were chatty and relatable, Snyder chose to make a superhero movie about a god amongst humans and how existentially shocking that must be (though it’s up for debate how successful that was). His Batman, similarly, is all brutality and rage, a rejection of Christopher Nolan’s elevated take on the character in favor something like what Frank Miller (who Snyder is an obvious fan of) wrote in The Dark Knight Returns.
Those versions of the characters carried through to his Justice League, adding Snydery versions of other DC superheroes and more of the “let’s take this thing and make it really cool” attitude he enjoys so much. Then, after leaving the DC universe and starting his current Netflix deal, Snyder made Army Of The Dead—technically an original concept, though it’s also a spiritual sequel to his Dawn Of The Dead and retains the “make it cool above all else” thing.
And that brings us to Rebel Moon, which, again, was born from the fact that he wanted to do his Snyder thing to Star Wars—make it “cool,” though “mature” is the word he used—but the Star Wars people said no. So now he’s taking the thought he put into his version of Star Wars, not to mention all of his experience working on franchises that belonged to other people, and making his own thing out of it.
Snyder has proven that he knows what he likes to see in a genre movie, and he apparently knows what other people want to see as well (Superman snapping necks, Batman shooting people, etc.), but now it’s all on him to put the pieces together for an original work without the crutch of an established property.
But Snyder’s not really making that “original work” thing easy on himself, because despite not being a Star Wars, Rebel Moon just looks so damn much like a Star Wars. This is probably true for any space opera made after 1977, but it’s going to be hard not to compare Rebel Moon to Star Wars—to the point where it was surprising how much one of its trailers insisted that it was more Dune than anything, not that that’s going to be a more favorable comparison point. Snyder has built a large and loyal fanbase on giving people what they want, but that’s harder to do with a (technically) brand new universe.
How do you cater to fans of something that doesn’t have fans yet? The answer might be to do something that you’d never see in a Star Wars, but then that would draw more Star Wars comparisons. That’s why this is the ultimate test of Snyder’s sensibilities. If he made a bad Superman or Batman movie (if he were to do such a thing), then it’s just his take that’s bad, not Superman or Batman as a whole. But if Rebel Moon is bad, then it’s an indictment of Snyder’s whole thing. It’s a test to see if he really knows what fans like and can structure a whole two-part movie saga around that, or if his ideas begin and end with “what if this existing character/story/concept was bad ass?”
Then again, given Snyder and his fans, people might just decide they like it no matter what, rendering all thoughtful discussion about his oeuvre irrelevant.