★★★

If this film was Star Wars: Episode VII, no one would have complained about it.

With Gareth Edwards’s The Creator joined now by Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, a pair of very good filmmakers who were both in their own ways rejected and spurned by the Disney regime for their audacity to apply creative, fresh energy to Star Wars, filmmaking as a serious art has found redemption.  I realize that this is an odd thing to say for a movie that only gets ¾ stars, but you need only look at the images and sequences in both films, in contrast with Disney’s bland, corporate market research, to understand how this is the case.

Snyder isn’t subtle about his wish to show up Disney for turning his story model down for Episode VII, and he seems to have taken on his own air of both invulnerability and inevitability since releasing his epic cut of Justice League.  Several scenes in Rebel One directly recall similar moments from Episode VII – The Force Awakens, but Snyder gives the village at the start a good deal more respect and humanity than J.J. Abrams did.

In The Force Awakens, everyone and everything is a meta device.  Every single character is dehumanized accordingly.  There’s nothing but vignettes, trinkets, tokens, samples, and references – all coldly, mechanically cut and stitched together as if to make whatever’s left of your tortured brain obediently accepting by the end, as though Star Wars could not have been anything more than just a self-reproducing amoeba that merely needed the right abstract.  As imperfect as Rebel One is, it’s easily the closest thing there is to such an abstract.  A real one, that is – an abstract that understood just as Top Gun: Maverick did, that Star Wars was both smaller and bigger than a unit in a corporate machine, sold to the white slavers of Disney who do to it something not altogether different than what the rest of Hollywood does to nearly everything else that isn’t officially new.

Snyder seems to think that the word “mother” evokes gravitas (mother boxes in Justice League, now the Motherworld here). The movie isn’t funny, and many moments arrive abruptly, but the main character has an arc that Marvel never achieved with Scarlet Johansson’s Black Widow despite trying over and over, and over again.  At the beginning of the film, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is heavily sexualized even when she retires early.  As the film goes on, she is covered so heavily with layers, both in her clothing and personality, that you might forget how often her chest threatened to pop out of her buttons when she was saving the more innocent village girl from gang rape.  This woman is no adolescent, despite her appearances, and Snyder presents her to us not only as a figure of heroism, but also of redemptive longing.  She comes across as someone who made the most of her circumstances, no matter what they were, but recognizes at long last where they led her and what they did to the universe.  If Artemisia from 300: Rise of an Empire was the main character, that film would’ve been a lot better, and Snyder paces Kora’s larger story here with exactly this in mind.

Rebel One rarely transcends Snyder’s creative restrictions.  The chief inspiration is not only Star Wars but Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, but Snyder lets his larger ideas and aspirations for character get away from him during the midpoint and the latter buildup to the final battle.  A whole bunch of scenes are transparently missing from the film from the moment we meet Nemesis (Doona Bae) to the intro to Titus (Djimon Hounsou) to the meeting of the Bloodaxe family and & beyond.  You can tell that characters have experienced far more than we have been permitted to see.  The film is its most uneven in these sections, not sure of whether to characterize the galaxy with Snyder’s slow dedication or to discard it all entirely and montage it.

If this is how cinema is supposed to work from here on out – where an interesting creator stipulates before the film is even released that his vision has been partially compromised by the studio and promises a future cut that will restore a whole hour of content that we need, I can’t say I’m thrilled to know that.  It doesn’t strike me as that much better than the original Disney fallacy, where the answer to a question can be found in a link to some concurrent propaganda that tells us how everything actually makes perfect sense and to stop asking questions, god dammit. Are studios to start releasing two separate versions of movies now – an early teaser version and then the “real” one, that you might conveniently be able to charge for?  The Snyder cuts of Sucker Punch, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League, and to a lesser extent Watchmen all show that Snyder in some ways deserves the benefit of the doubt.  But the effect of them (and some were better than others) lay in the fact that, other than in his Justice League, where it was clear from the outset that the studio was using a creative inferior to rush out a product in the wake of his having suffered a terrible tragedy, no one knew that there would even be a Snyder cut.  As such – you could expect a degree of surprise, suspense, and closure.  What exactly am I supposed to think where it’s less than even half clear what certain characters are doing here in the first place – what they represent, how they fit in, and where I am limited in terms of what my imagination can substitute dialogue that is clearly supposed to be where it actually is not?

Nevertheless, there’s an earnest urgency to Rebel One that maintains my interest – one that goes beyond its own plot to the greater landscape of popular art.  Regular readers know I have a certain federalist reverence for the original Star Wars, far more than the franchise or even any sequel, even the best one that came three years later.  But what charms me about Rebel One is the fact that it doesn’t.  Star Wars to Snyder is merely a series of familiar images and a source of common language that an artist can use to realize their own story, which is exactly the attitude George Lucas had of a hundred other things that he seamlessly infused into his own movie back in 1977.  The same is true of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, James Cameron’s Avatar, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and, of course, Kurosawa’s entire samurai oeuvre since 1954.  Snyder evokes these other films consciously.  A sequence that stands out to me is a thrilling moment where an enslaved man is challenged by his own master to tame and ride a wild gryphon.  It channels the tiresome pod racing sub-plot in The Phantom Menace into a five minute sequence with such a better payoff that I was angry the movie left it all behind so quickly.  Another later on takes us to a gladiatorial arena, where an old imperial general and regular contestant is laying up against it like a homeless man.  His character recalls the brilliance of Peter Mensah’s Oenomaus in Spartacus – a TV series that owes its existence in part to Snyder’s 300 where Mensah himself played both the ill-fated messenger and Artemisia’s rescuer and trainer.  The problem, of course, is that if I had not known of these fixed points beforehand, I would not have had any response to the character in the first place.

Snyder’s confidence in the strength of his images always carries his films, for better and worse, and his narratives are unsubtle enough that you will never be confused even if you are lost.  That the first half of this Part One holds itself together more aptly than the second ultimately diminishes the total effect somehow manages to enliven the experience anyway.  This is filmmaking and viewership for adults – an imperfect, extra-referential experience that lengthens and expands upon the life of its characters by giving each of them a taste of redemption they may or may not ultimately realize. Snyder’s adventures are their own force of gravity, often rousing even when cartoonish. But his purpose here doesn’t feel so escapist.

The plot is the same as Seven Samurai, but where the villagers brave far greater and more expansive dangers to meet and recruit their resistance team.  But even Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which also tells of a kingdom thrown into turmoil by an act of regicide, never left the mind of its main character.  Snyder’s myths and episodic moments here evoke old Hollywood’s impression of the post-war American South that D.W. Griffith recognized in Birth of a Nation, where the assassination of Lincoln – who in that film was both an unfortunate puppet of northern interests and also, inexplicably, the “Great Heart” – is so profound a tragedy that it turned the victorious North into an occupational empire.  Old Hollywood often massaged and belied the terrible sins of the Confederacy in order to depict its members (see Michael Curtiz’s Dodge City Trilogy) as underdogs, and therefore also to depict ex-Confederates like Shane in Shane and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers as tragic heroes.  Snyder does not dwell on any major figure other than a certain princess whose death is akin to a sudden, immediate loss of hydrogen that extinguishes a star and darkens the entire universe, but Anthony Hopkins’s opening narration (which becomes more interesting when you hear his voice again) lays out the bare conflict in clear enough terms that you can make sense of a moon with a little farming village in it.

I could fill up twice the space here picking nits until this blog is impossible to read unless you’re returning every day up to the release of Part Two – like the fact that one of the Motherworld soldiers switches sides and is then never mentioned or seen again, or the fact that a certain character’s death is clearly meant to be an emotional moment, despite the fact that he is only seen once before from a distance without any interaction with anyone we know – but Rebel One reached me.  Any misgivings I might have with it, I could just as easily have had with Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, but both films show us how Star Wars – especially with Disney’s stench – has limited our collective imaginations.  In both films, for example, the Force Ghost is reimagined with technology allowing a kind of temporary reactivation of the brain.  And in both films, the entire conflict existed in the first place because of a tragedy that no one seems to be able to explain, let alone make peace with.  And those very same misgivings are all over Star Wars as well.  But that, of course, raises a final relevant question:

Is Star Wars even relevant anymore?

Is this what it feels like to move on from it?  For nearly fifty years, popular culture has been inexorably molded by Lucas’s old experiment in 1977, and even when there wasn’t a film or TV show, video game, or other product to market, you couldn’t go about the world without knowing what the Dark Side of the Force was.  Now we are soon to be engaged in a third world war that will take shape in popular imagination.  Rebel One does not directly speak to this, but it seems as though if we all manage to survive, this film, Rebel Two, and then the subsequent Snyder cuts for both will have to address a demand for stories that Star Wars can no longer meet.  Are these films up to that?  Are we ready for that?

I’m just glad real wars don’t have director’s cuts.

…Except the last two world wars.

– Vivek