Rebel Moon — Chapter One: Chalice of Blood is a cut-rate director’s cut.
At three hours and 24 minutes, Rebel Moon — Chapter One: Chalice of Blood never recovers from its opening murder scene. Prince Aris (Sky Yang) is forced to bludgeon his father King Heron (Yu-Beng Lim) in the first of Zack Snyder’s innumerable head-bashings. It’s a particularly ugly curtain-raiser, fulfilling Snyder’s promise that his “director’s cut” of Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire would contain “the hardest stuff.” But what’s hard to take is Snyder’s excessive exhibitionism, modeled after the Heavy Metal comic books, introducing dark fantasy, science fiction, violence, and erotica to stimulate Rebel Moon’s revamp of the kid-friendly Star Wars series.
Aris commits patricide at the urging of evil Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and is conscripted into the Imperium army — Rebel Moon’s world-dominating villains — yet never mentions his transgression. Snyder also forgets it after wringing out all the horror he can (despite the trauma of lost fathers in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice).
Upping the stakes in Chalice of Blood, Snyder displays the hot-iron branding of bare-breasted women (the third flashes pubic hair) and features explicit brutality that nearly out-Schindlers Spielberg. (Throughout the director’s cut, Snyder explores the question: How much spray can a melon head squish?)
The father-king’s head-bashing scene poses a Sophie’s choice — Aris must choose to save either his father or his mother and siblings (whom Noble kills anyway). This fake-serious evocation of the Holocaust indicates Snyder’s unwise stretch for profound storytelling — to be more than a Star Wars correction. Yet even those striking moments of Tarak’s (Staz Nair) taming the Gryphon and Nemesis’s (Bae Doona) battling the maternal arachnid Harmada (Jena Malone) don’t cohere.
The original Netflix version (A Child of War) was mostly fantastical, but this elongated, misguided version never builds dramatically and is full of dread. Chalice of Blood evokes the horrors of religious war without coming close to reviving our collective unconscious. Instead, it makes historical and future mythology enervating.
That gore-fest intro throws the rest of the movie offtrack. Snyder drops Aris to make Kora (Sofia Boutella) the story’s protagonist, twisting issues of heritage and loyalty into relentless sensationalism. Interplanetary refugee Kora adds androgynous sensuality established in scenes on the agrarian planet Veldt. A village celebration (“F*** for the harvest!”) shows Kora and expendable he-man farmer Den (Stuart Martin) heaving their respective breasts and pectorals in the sweaty-exertion style of Heavy Metal illustrator Frank Frazetta.
Eroticism was one of the qualities that distinguished Snyder’s filmmaking. Naysayers ignored that talent in deference to the desiccated inanity of Marvel’s war-toy movies. But when sex doesn’t reveal personality, Chalice of Blood seems prurient and superficial. Snyder has extended his story without enhancing it. A Child of War’s yonic opening scene suggested unfulfilled possibilities now traded for head-busting violence.
The complete “director’s cut” is deficient of adult observation — as was Star Wars. (Even Aris’s Yoda-like pet rodent in a birdcage is just an explosive device.) The confluence of sex and violence no longer defines modes of human expression. Kora’s own varied erotic life confuses her understanding of love and politics. Snyder’s key failure becomes apparent as Noble and his minions from “the Motherworld” descend on Veldt. Kora tells the villagers what the invaders want: “Everything!” — which was better shown than said in Powell and Pressburger’s 49th Parallel when a Nazi seized all of a citizen’s politely proffered cigarettes.
Instead of grasping the seriousness of conquest and resistance as experienced in human history, Snyder makes everything — such as farmers without machines or munitions fighting marauders with space weapons — into a humorless Heavy Metal cartoon.
Heavy Metal’s soft-core porn wasn’t artful enough to help Snyder understand human motives. His WWII analogies, replete with quasi-Nazi, semi-Riefensthahl, semi–Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron imagery, merely exchange sex with violence. Babble about “justice,” “revenge,” and “myth” lead to sexually charged scenes of heroics and cruelty — a bordello-bar shoot-out, Kora’s random lust, and Noble’s deviant carnality (he receives injections from snakelike tubes that form a caduceus which he fellates).
Calling this “the hardest stuff” keeps Snyder in the superficial exploitation-movie mode, so he neglects “the politics of expansion” and “the why of conquest,” cheating ideological and religious details. More bloodshed and more sex don’t give this director’s cut depth or richness. The incomplete version indicated sketchy, unfinished poetic expression, but the complete version feels fragmented and ultimately shallow.
Aris’s patricidal choice loads the movie with diabolism that forces us to wonder whether Snyder is a mature artist. Does his extended, repetitive head-bashing reveal a juvenile mania customized for the Netflix era — or something worse?