Netflix released some footage from Rebel Moon Part 2, and they’re kind of doing it like Dune. They’ll do more movies if the first two are successful.
Netflix clearly wants to make this their next real big franchise. Like their prequels, they’re working on their tie-in books. They were also supposed to be making a Rebel Moon video game, but it might have canceled that.
There is meant to be a director’s cut for Part 1, like they went full Snyder cut. Part of me thinks that Netflix kind of planned it this way, though. Like “We’ll release the short one first to build demand for the Snyder cut of Rebel Moon. Then we’ll release the Snyder cut, and it’ll be way more popular”.
Rebel Moon Part 2 Release Date
Rebel Moon Part 2 is coming out on April 19, 2024. I do not know when they’re going to release those director’s cuts or if they’re going to release a single director’s cut for part one and part two, just jamming it together kind of like Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, where they release a bunch of different episodes, and it wound up being like an eight-hour-long cut of the movie. But at some point, there will be super long versions of all these Rebel Moon movies available.
Zack Snyder said it’s almost like 4 hours long. So they cut it way, way down for, like, this regular theatrical version of the cut. And I think a lot of the complaints against the movie, like a lot of the criticisms, are just due to the fact that they cut out so much from the movie.
Most of the stuff that hit the cutting room floor was the character work. So there’s a lot of universe-building going on during this. It all seems like a really cool mythology that they’re setting up.
But I think when the director’s cut comes out for part one, the movie will just wind up being way, way better. The same way that the Justice League Snyder cut wound up being vastly, vastly better than the Joss Whedon cut of Justice League.
Trailer Breakdown
The first movie ends in a pretty abrupt cliffhanger because we know that there is going to be a part 2. Their Seven Samurai Space team basically comes back to Velt thinking that everything is fine, that Admiral Noble is definitely dead, and they’re definitely not coming back, which, of course, they are.
They are a couple of characters that they barely tease like you barely see Balisarius. There are a couple of flashbacks with him and then him in the present day. There are a couple of scenes on Mother World, and they’re like a couple of flashbacks to the original royal family before they were assassinated. But it sounds like they’re saving a lot of that backstory for part two.
This trailer for Rebel Moon Part Two also has a bunch more flashbacks for the other characters. So it seems like we will be getting a bunch more backstory across Part Two.
But essentially, it seems like, just based on the trailer, that part two is mostly dedicated to the actual fight, like the other half of the Seven Samurai film where they basically teach the townspeople how to fight the armies of Mother World to come back, like Admiral Noble comes back with his Dreadnought and they battle it out. But there are a bunch of flashback scenes in the trailer and a bunch of scenes on Mother World, too.
We see this person in the Trailer unfurling their cloak. They might be in a completely different world in the middle of some other completely different battle. They’re a bunch of different battles in the trailer, some for different characters, some on different planets.
Kora Is The Scar Giver
Then we see a scene where this seems like the war robot Jimmy, but his lights are all red, so it might be a flashback for him before they lay down their arms, so to speak, In declared pacifism.
The way that Anthony Hopkins’s character Jimmy explained it is that he was created like his entire model line was created to protect the unborn Princess Isa, and they lost all their purpose when she was assassinated. So essentially, they still have all these battle skills, but they refuse to use them, and they’re now using them inside the empire as worker robots.
They kind of got into that during part one, where all the troopers were trying to assault that girl that Kora saved. He yelled at Jimmy to kill Kora, but Jimmy wouldn’t do it even though he picked the gun up. It is because all the robots within his model, like him, swore off all fighting when they lost their purpose when the princess was assassinated.
They kind of blame Kora like they don’t explicitly say it, but they call her the “Scar Giver,” which is the title for part two. Part two is called Rebel Moon Scar Giver, which is the name that they sound like they gave Kora after the royal family was assassinated.
Kora kind of explained that backstory with Balisarius, too. Balisarius assaulted her world when he was younger, then took her in like he saw something in her.
But it looks like what he did is he actually set her up as a sort of backdoor to assassinate the royal family and made it seem like she did it herself. He groomed her, gaslit her till she was close to the royal family, then somehow found a way to assassinate them and pin it on her, and then he seized power.
Riff On Star Wars
So if we’re saying that Rebel Moon is kind of a riff on Star Wars, like Zack Snyder’s alternate Star Wars pitch that turned into something completely different, then he’d be kind of like Emperor Palpatine seizing power from the Senate during the prequels.
I don’t know if he has any crazy force powers. But we did see that Princess Isa seems like she actually has some powers. So, a version of the force might actually exist inside the Rebel Moon universe. If Zack Snyder were going to be doing a Star Wars movie, then the force would have existed during that.
Throughout the first movie and even in this trailer, too, and in future spinoff movies or anything like that, you can see a lot of the analogs for things that he changed to be copyright-safe. Nemesis uses lightsabers, but they’re kind of like plasma weapons that look like lightsabers, drippy-looking lightsabers.
Starting The Rebelian
We see General Titus getting ready to address the townspeople. As I said, this is like the other half of the Seven Samurai movie, with them arming up the village and teaching them how to fight.
We get the voiceover from Kora talking to the townspeople, talking about how the mother world is deathly afraid of the other worlds in the universe rebelling against them. “They’re afraid of us,” like all the regular people out there turning against them.
That’s part of why one of the first things that Balisarius did when he seized power was to try and stamp out any form of rebellion so that it wouldn’t spread and become a much bigger thing. There’s a brief slo-mo montage, and we’re talking about Zack Snyder here. So it wouldn’t be Zack Snyder if there wasn’t a bunch of slo-mo in his movies.
Robot Jimmy Get A Reason To Fight
Then there is Robot Jimmy basically telling Kora to take the lead on this. What they might do during the course of the movie is part of Jimmy’s arc, and he might find a reason to fight again. He’s in pacifism mode now since Princess Isa was assassinated.
If he doesn’t know already, he’ll probably learn that Kora was involved in her assassination, even if she didn’t do it herself. But I think we’re building up to the moment where a robot, Jimmy, also picks up arms and finds a reason to fight against the empire with them.
There’s a much longer montage of all the villagers arming up and General Titus basically telling them to grab anything that could possibly be used as a weapon. Here are a couple of scenes of the main characters, like Tarak helping them sharpen all the blades.
Then there is Dan, who was supposed to be the best hunter in the village. They cut his scene with General Titus, talking about grabbing every hunting knife, every blade. He’s cocking the rifle, though, like he’s meant to be a crack shot. There’s a little montage of all the women practicing with their blades on all the straw dummies.
Admiral Noble Will Be Like Darth Vader
This next scene just seems like Admiral Noble Dreadnought is moving through space on their way back to Velt. There is just another scene from that inner chamber on Admiral Noble’s Dreadnought of him being shocked in that pool of fluid. I’m not totally sure exactly how it works here.
What fluid are they pumping into him and out of him? Most of his body seems like it’s cybernetic. He’s meant to be kind of like the Darth Vader in this Star Wars equation, like a more space Nazi version of Darth Vader.
Looks like they use this to resuscitate him and keep him alive because he was on the edge of death at the end of the last movie. This is basically meant to be their version of Darth Vader getting his armor put on. He hadn’t completely died yet, but they also use it for those space Zoom calls where he’s talking to the Balisarius in that 3D space.
