Zach Snyder Wants To Steal Our Time
With a Rebel Moon, he wants more, more, more.
All art is about the artist on some level, and we can learn a bit about them through what they make. Let’s take Zach Snyder, the auteur behind the Rebel Moon series. He wrote, directed, produced, and did the cinematography. It is, from top to bottom, his movie. What can we learn about him from the film?
One, he’s a 14 year old boy at heart. This is the kind of work that a 14 year old would scribble in a tattered notebook, with many side notes about how cool his characters are and why they’re super edgy and amazing. As a former 14 year old boy, I understand this instinct, but as a nearly 40 year old man, I recognize things like “anything resembling a structure” and “not having a scene where characters just sit down and explain their back story” are essential parts of fiction. This isn’t a mature work, and while being mature isn’t always necessary for making good fiction, you do still need to have an adult in the room to ensure it respects the audience. Say what you will about the Fast and Furious series - which also plays like it was written by a young man high off unchecked hormones and action cartoons - at least it knows how to move the story forward.
Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver does not move the story forward.
For a two hour movie, it’s remarkable how little actually happens. You get an extensive sequence of people fondling grain, you get the scene where characters talk about their backstories - most of which was covered in Part 1 - and you get an endless battle sequence. Not much is original - the entire premise is just Seven Samurai handled poorly - but the bigger problem is how little is accomplished. A hero dramatically kills some attackers, and more attackers immediately show up. Another hero blows up an enemy ship, and another four show up. Every time you think it’s progressing, it stops to play the same beats again. The battle scenes are a repeated chorus to the lengthy song.
Which leads us to the second thing we learn about Zach Snyder: He doesn’t respect our time. There had been plenty of indications of this before - his cut of The Justice League is four hours for some reason - but the entire Rebel Moon series is the result of someone who doesn’t respect the people on the other side of the screen. He’s planning for six films total, but that’s only a good idea when you have six films worth of material. We are at the second and it’s already clear he doesn’t. There’s no reason to recycle the villain from the first film - this should have been about the villain’s boss, the source of the main character’s traumatic past, and current crusade. We could learn something about the missing princess that is talked about in the earlier film. We could actually move the story forward. We could resolve at least one part of the established lore. If we need a third film, new questions could be raised, and the story continues, each part satisfying the audience while keeping the myth going.
Snyder, instead, just has two hours of nothing.
You can question the worldbuilding - why is this massive space empire so obsessed with grain? Why do the ships run on coal? Why are these people farming by hand instead of using a space combine? But weird worldbuilding fades into the background when the people within the world are given something to do, and the story itself actually shows signs of interest. I wouldn’t question the bizarre nature of this agrarian society if he didn’t spend so much time on slow motion shots of people harvesting like it was 1863. I wouldn’t question the coal burning spacecraft if the spacecraft were actually doing something interesting - I didn’t notice them in the first movie, which was a complete mess but at least moved forward in a meaningful way. The world is still stupid - the ships spouting black smoke like Uncle Wayne’s half-broken F350 is definitely a 14 year old choice - but at least it’s part of something larger. With a film this inert, the world is the only thing we have.
But if you’re going to subject audiences to a six movie series and you only have the material for three, you’re going to draw things out, you’re going to make things that spin their wheels for a needlessly long period of time. You do this because you need the filler. If you cared about the audience’s time, you’d drop the filler, cut the fat and make a strong single film. Snyder wants your time, he wants you to see his often questionable cinematography. He wants you to see every single idea he has, and every single thought that has wandered through his head. He doesn’t respect your time, because if he did he would make a film that didn’t waste it.
He also doesn’t respect his own. A six film series is going to take a decade to plow through. All of this is in service of a single idea, an ersatz Star Wars with a bunch of other, better movies thrown in. While I’d never accuse Snyder of having range - he mostly does comic book movies and zombie movies, all of which look like they could be airbrushed on the side of a van - he could at least do other things. He could try a different genre, create new worlds and new experiences. He’s committed to doing one thing for a significant part of his life. Isn’t his time worth more?
It’s grim to say we only have so much time, but in the time we have we should try to give ourselves as much joy as we can manage. But instead of that, Snyder insists that we waste ours basking in his self-indulgent spectacle. Can you get joy out of the Rebel Moon series? Yes, it’s very easy to make fun of and there is a scene with violinists which is absolutely hilarious. But it’s clear we would get more joy if we spent it watching a movie where things happened, instead of two hours of nothing.