Zack Snyder bungles myth and politics in Rebel Moon — Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness.
With the release of Rebel Moon — Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness, we see the full extent (two hours and 53 minutes) of Zack Snyder’s “director’s cut,” unencumbered by studio-executive interference. His complete vision is marginally superior to the four George Lucas Star Wars movies (A New Hope, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith), but there are political dimensions — and artistic weakness — that minimize Snyder’s “triumph.”
In Lucas’s space opera, Western and sci-fi genre codes were mixed to explore our despair over Vietnam-era American imperialism. Snyder’s Millennial answer to Star Wars reflects the succeeding generation’s skepticism about sociopolitical supremacy — via the comic-book movie/video-game fantasy that has become lingua franca.
These cultural developments come together in Curse of Forgiveness when Kora (Sofia Boutella) goes from refugee to renegade. Rebel Moon’s heroine — a soldier for the Imperium realm of the Motherworld that destroyed her homeland — recalls her war-orphan background and deserts the Imperium’s ranks to lead the resistance on her new home, the planet Veldt.
Kora’s feminist version of Luke Skywalker is less interesting than the updated politics that drove Snyder past 300’s fascination with mythology and the fantasy enchantment of Star Wars toward the brutal cynicism and sappiness of his director’s cuts.
Curse of Forgiveness continues the Holocaust evocation in Chalice of Blood, beginning with a Motherworld stevedore shoveling skeletons and ashes into the furnace of the starship King’s Gaze. Primed for more apocalypse, we get the assassination of a royal family (evoking the Romanovs and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar). But before Kora makes her mythological kill amidst an ensemble of musicians wearing Providential-eye hoods, the blonde prepubescent royal daughter, Issa (Stella Grace Fitzgerald), a pueri salvatoris Christ figure said to harbinger peace, tells her, “I forgive you.”
Kora’s guilt-ridden quest for redemption necessitates Snyder’s tangled new myths: She gathers a diverse group of warriors to combat the Motherworld — ultimately challenging Balisarius (Fra Fee), the sinister Motherworld senator who adopted and indoctrinated her. So Kora gets her own Darth Vader, but he does not tempt her toward the dark side. Instead, she opposes her corrupted heritage — a Vietnam-era hippie reborn as a social-justice androgyne. This is how Rebel Moon substitutes Lucas’s trite action-serial morality for Millennial distrust of Western civilization.
Snyder uses his visionary gifts for obtuse politics — imagery borrowed from Terrence Malick, Akira Kurosawa, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and Ray Harryhausen (plus Game of Thrones–style sexual intrigue) is used for modern globalist analogies.
At first, these visual references provide cinematic flair that surpasses the tin-pot Flash Gordon, Destination Moon: Star Trekian juvenilia of Star Wars. But as Snyder retooled his cinephile concept for binge-watching, he gave way to Hollywood’s typical progressive ideology.
The rebels joining Kora’s resistance evoke trouble spots of Western imperialism: The reformed, now-sober African, General Titus (Djimon Hounsou), repeats the social-activist phrase “Giving voice to the voiceless.” Dreads-coiffed Devra Bloodaxe (Cleopatra Coleman) alludes to black revolutionaries. In the round-table sequence, Kora’s multicultural warriors flash back to each of their war-torn histories: Chinese Nemesis (Bae Doona), Taiwanese Aris (Sky Yang), Arabic Tarak (Staz Nair), and transgender Milius (Elise Duffy) rouse a jumbled mythology of resistance — all victims shadowed by Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Khomeini, Milošević. A global audience must view these allies (and the evil Admiral Noble’s “ethnic impurity” slur) with a sense of guilt. That sentimental identification is every bit as stereotypical as the Jugendstil in Leni Riefensthahl’s mountain movies that inspired Snyder’s ambivalent Aryan and neo-Nazi iconography. (It’s Snyder’s diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) video game.)
Whereas Man of Steel’s Superman distilled various mythologies into a Judeo-Christian essence, Rebel Moon turns gnostic, even occult. (Noble’s minions construct a mosaic from the broken molars of his enemies.) Its agrarian harvest scenes on Veldt suggest a pantheistic community of pacifists doing collectivist farming, although it’s odd that a civilization with no renewable power source quickly proves adept with pew-pew-pew laser guns and automatic rifles. (The silliness is compounded with Tarak’s two-handed axes and Milius’s firing a blunderbuss.)
Snyder’s own political conflicts play out through daughter Kora’s search and daddy Balisarius’s intimidation — the same antagonism that Lucas’s Star Wars copied from John Ford’s Americana touchstone The Searchers. Balisarius, regent of the Imperium, is identified by a face swollen with evil, matching his skill and cunning as a senator. His big speech, “I’d give my f***ing soul to protect us from the darkness coming toward us,” closely resembles Biden’s infamous Dark Brandon oration of September 2022 (Rebel Moon was in postproduction at that time).
As Curse of Forgiveness climaxes, it becomes a mess of ideologies and mythologies. The big battle montage crosscuts boots-on-the-ground combat with the film’s most accomplished spectacle — Kora and Noble fighting aboard the King’s Gaze as it collapses, forced down by gravity like the great Sidewinder slant in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The Imperium’s gleaming blue Krypteia sword suddenly appears, spinning through the air like Excalibur, then is in Kora’s hands — a familiar rather than esoteric symbol for Snyder. The Arthurian Excalibur signifies more than does the enigmatic robot Jimmy (voiced by Anthony Hopkins) who becomes a lethal C-3PO with antlers and a cape, dispatching Veldt’s enemies.
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This interminable mishmash matters only because Snyder is one of the few filmmakers concerned with the moral lessons of mythology. But Curse of Forgiveness turns good vs. evil into progressive mindlessness not so different from the World War II revisionism of Godzilla Minus One — a reimagining of WWII mythology that pleased formerly patriotic fanboy Spielberg by its genre credibility and Japanese cultural pride. (Its closing line, “Is your war finally over?” should apply to the unending Rebel Moon.)
Snyder amasses so many Dark Brandon genre provocations that Curse of Forgiveness never clarifies the moral and political horror we face, which might have made it meaningful and popular.
The excessive head-bashing — Snyder’s calling card — resembles that of a zombie movie. The Rebel Moon saga seemed praiseworthy for Snyder’s victory over industry interference, yet these compleat “director’s cuts” reproduce the usual industry clichés.
Snyder had raised expectations for comic-book sci-fi action through his kinetic mastery and powerful evocation of myth. But after four iterations, his eccentricity wears out its welcome. Both Chalice of Blood and Curse of Forgiveness ruin the attempt at comic-book profundity. Unimaginative critics misunderstood how 300 abstracted the West’s war impulse, but now Snyder offers facile, abstruse justifications for his characters’ erotic and violent impulses. This repetition — minus insight — is banal and tedious.
Final flourishes offer confusion: Kora confronts a giant Kali statue (Hindu myth replicating the insipid Issa ideal). The bad father Balisarius regroups, approaching a church’s stained glass of a half-naked Joan of Arc figure. It’s a Marvel coda: Snyder’s preparation for another damn battle and director’s cut.
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George Lucas never could figure out how to make Star Wars into an adequate myth of America’s Vietnam experience. No doubt Lucas got stymied by Reagan’s usurpation of Star Wars for his Strategic Defense Initiative — and maybe regretted Padmé’s (Natalie Portman, the original Kora) Revenge of the Sith warning, which the Washington Post adapted for it disingenuous “Democracy dies in darkness” motto.
Lucas relied on literary anthropologist Joseph Campbell to explain the significance of Star Wars and its relation to history and myth. Snyder’s instinct follows the nonacademic, subcultural Heavy Metal to reboot Star Wars, reveling in psychic displacement — epitomized by Rebel Moon’s alienated figures, all struggling with the narcissistic tendencies seen in contemporary politics.
That’s the skepticism implied by the exploitation titles Chalice of Blood and Curse of Forgiveness that represent Snyder’s going full bore into adolescent subcultural extremes — ultimately bewildered about the meaning of life. (At least the DC movies gave him consistent clarity.)
Now, Snyder faces Lucas’s dilemma — the liberal impulse to challenge patriarchy and critique the failings of imperialism. Sending Lucas’s basic story through endless hipster variations, Snyder proves cynical yet naïve about the West — especially the self-destructive way modern politics unlearn the lessons of history and mythology. Confused as to whether he’s making art or politics, Snyder, in Curse of Forgiveness, shares liberalism’s secular refusal to acknowledge absolution. It doesn’t require predicting destiny (so many Americans’ recently embracing communism suggests they feel accursed like Kora). But telling that story well means knowing how to properly consummate it.