Rebel Moon: Zack Snyder Confirms Director's Cut Details

Zack Snyder says the director's cut of Rebel Moon is "super violent, super sexual, super visually gigantic."

By Jamie Jirak

Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire is heading to Netflix this month, and the first reviews for the movie aren't exactly positive. At the time of this writing, the movie is up on Rotten Tomatoes with a 24% critics score after 41 reviews. One of Snyder's most famous projects is his cut of Justice League, which was a four-hour version of the superhero film. The director plans to take the same route with Rebel Moon. In fact, he's already teased different cuts of the movie before the first version is out. The director recently spoke with ComicBook.com and revealed some details about his next version of the film. 

"I think that the director's cut sort of contains a slightly more sort of sci-fi, deconstructive element. Because for me, one of the things that I was tackling in, sort of conceptually, when I was thinking about it, was a way to have the irony of something like heavy metal, something super violent, super sexual, super visually gigantic in a movie where it has no business belonging in a movie like this," Snyder explained. 

"It cost a ton of money and that is like a real legitimate production value and it's crazy," he continued. "Normally, those two things don't go together too well, because these things have big commercial appeal. So if you make it too niche ... No, but you know what I mean? It allowed me to do both ... so when you see the director's cut, you just see something a lot more weirdly, more personal, and bizarre." 

During a recent interview with Collider, Snyder talked about the R-rated version of Rebel Moon, and he explained why that cut is actually "cleaner." 

"Yes, it's influenced sort of iconographically in some ways," Snyder explained when asked about the film's graphic violence. "We have space fascists, they have space fascists, but I was kind of into that relationship because I like the comment. I think that's one thing that you'll see in the director's cut that is different from the PG-13 version is the irony of a super hard R-rated sci-fi movie at this scale is cleaner in the R-rated version. In the PG-13, we push. It's a hard PG-13. We push them to the ragged edge."

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"[I] had really wanted to keep the movie close to two hours," Snyder added. "That was like a thing I really wanted to do. I just felt like these two movies together, if they're both about two hours each, and I think movie two is even shorter, it's like an hour and 54 minutes – it's like, I think, one of the first movies I've made that's under two hours, which is incredible – that was the sort of thing I had in my mind was that I really wanted to keep it close to two hours. So Dody [Dorn] and I, he's an amazing editor, it was really the exercise of like, 'Okay, what's the leanest line through the movie?' And that was the game we played with ourselves – only good shots, the best, cleanest line. That was the way that we went about finding what stuck. What stayed in the juggernaut of the movie is what we were looking for, and that was really how we did it."

Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire is set for release on Netflix on December 22nd.

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