fevered.earth

Category: Article

  • The Wasteland (Furiosa)

    Spoilers (thematic and otherwise) for Furiosa.

    That’s Furiosa.

    At the climax of the film that bears her name, Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) hunts down the man who killed her mother and set her life on the violent path through the wasteland that she has never managed to escape. Disarmed and defeated, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is alternately nihilistic, manic, murderous. But he refuses to be despondent, to beg or sob or apologise. He won’t legitimise Furiosa’s revenge on her behalf. Defiant, he demands that she either kill him — or join him. Dementus straddles the line between off-putting, unpleasant, charismatic and ridiculous in a manner that harkens back to Heath Ledger’s Joker, but without that character’s hyper-competence. Indeed, the empire of the Great Dementus rises and falls over the course of the movie largely without direct intervention from Furiosa, his incapacity as an administrator and inability to share power with his internal allies leaving him stripped down to a core handful of followers by the conclusion.

    In their shared anger — Dementus proposes — Furiosa and he have much in common. Veteran director George Miller does well to make these hoary old cliches seem fresh and novel, aided most by the abstract style of these final scenes of Furiosa and Dementus alone in the sprawling desert. Miller eschews the grand showdown in favour of a pared-back, stylised meditation on revenge, on free will, on evil. It’s the rare “we’re not so different, you and I” that works, not for a trite nihilism about there being no difference between good things and bad things, but because it’s the truth of the setting — Furiosa takes place in a world where everyone has had something taken from them. Is the brutal Dementus not right to be angry? Is there not some aspect of his wilting invocations of elite privilege that rings true?

    That’s Dementus.

    It is not hard to imagine the crisis-ruined world of Mad Max as the immediate future of our own. Climate change, war, political instability, any and all could be plausible steps on the way to turning our planet towards a desertified wasteland where there is little to do but scavenge in the ruins of our parents. Robbed blind by an ancestral class who are all too willing to mortgage the future of those who follow them, who privately mull over whether humanity has had such a good run that it might actually be better to keep not fixing the problems. After all, by the time the bomb drops, won’t everyone who matters be dead already? Hopefully in the real world we can keep this from coming to pass; but if we fail, like Dementus and his roving clan, who will there be left for us to rage at in the dust and the dirt? What catharsis will there be to have?

    This is what allows Dementus to laugh in Furiosa’s face. There’s no revenge to be had in the wasteland, only to be lusted after. I saw someone online being mocked for making the point that Furiosa’s mother and her compatriots are technically hoarding the green place, but it’s an argument worth taking seriously. Who does the green place belong to? Women, mothers, pacifists? Who can say which of humanity deserve salvation? When Dementus comes to the Citadel for the first time, making his ineffective pitch to the assembled War Boys that they should rise up, he brings to mind Tubal-Cain in Aronofsky’s Noah: the great masses of humanity coming to stake their claim to another Ark and being turned away (Furiosa . The violence was already at the gates of the green place; the green place already had a border. The green place had already become the Citadel, jealously hoarded with indiscriminate violence. What is the difference between Furiosa as a child tearing a man’s throat out with the chain of a bike, and a War Boy trained to hurl himself from the citadel as a falling bomb? Is not the inevitable end of possessing the green place, becoming the Citadel, barbarians at the gate and no end to the violence justified?

    Furiosa’s mother is no stranger to the violence of the wasteland.

    We see Dementus torture Furiosa’s mother. We see Dementus tear a man limb from limb between five motorcycles. But — we see other tortures. We see other deaths. Dementus did not bring death to the wasteland. The wasteland is death, only pending. They’re all dead already. There’s nothing to build, nothing worth having. The green place, Furiosa’s river delta, is gone by the time of Fury Road. She knows this really — otherwise she would have gone back. Furiosa never mourns the loss of the star map she tattoos herself with; that part of her was already replaced with the wasteland even before the metaphor became literal. Given the chance, when Praetorian Jack arranges for her to travel alone in a car stocked with supplies, she stays with the War Rig. The only virtue the green place had was that Furiosa was from there. Once she found somewhere else to be from, she had no need of it any more. The defining trait of Gardens of Eden is that they become lost.

    Furiosa (Miller, 2024)
    Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)

    Furiosa expresses the wasteland to us slowly, going from the brief glimpses of the green place into bleak desert dunes devoid of any feature whatsoever. From there we pick up land features, then tents, then small structures and car trailers. We’re some way in by the time we first reach any kind of permanent structure, the great rock towers of the Citadel. This helps circumscribe what we’re also told in text titles: this is all there is. Aside from the three great fortresses (the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm) there is nothing else beside. As miserable as these locations are, anywhere else you might be is only habitable to those passing by on a vehicle. And if you’re passing by on a vehicle, you’re vulnerable to being raided by a bigger gang, and that gang by a bigger gang, until all meaningful life outside of the fortresses has rolled up into the bike gang of the great Dementus. Given this power to command and nothing left to expend it on, Dementus promptly uses it to seize Gastown. At which point everything is back to square one. The only free choices in this system are to die, or else to destroy one of the fortresses and implicitly doom everyone else to die with you in a sad parody of mutually assured destruction.

    Furiosa comes alive behind the wheel of Immortan Joe’s War Rig.

    It’s a world with no room for creation, only possession. We see Immortan Joe’s brother, the unfortunate previous administrator of Gastown, duplicating an artwork onto a mural from an illustration in a book. But even this facsimile is destroyed and degraded. It’s a world without culture, without community or family. There is no ‘living well’ to form the best revenge. The only expression is direct, personal and immediate — turning to look God in the face and scream ‘witness me’. Throwing your enemy to the ground and having him beg you for life. It’s a world staffed with people who have regressed into their own fantasies and are limited only by their ability to achieve them, as with the People Eater who is constantly stimulating himself, or the Octoboss who just wants to wear a cool mask and fly about. This is where Furiosa ends up at the climax of the film, demanding of a baffled Immortan Joe that her personal vendetta against Dementus is of paramount importance. But it doesn’t matter that Joe is baffled. Furiosa is capable of realising this fantasy, and does. And if on returning she finds that being a cool badass with a robot arm is no longer fulfilling, then Furiosa will just have to find another fantasy to realise.

    While Furiosa is the undisputed protagonist this time round, the film does not shy away from indulging the viewer in Dementus’s freewheeling joy.

    The dead wasteland sustains only the industries of death — Gastown, which turns death in the form of dead things into power. The Bullet Farm, which manufactures the instruments which cause death. And the Citadel, which produces the people destined to die. Beyond this triumvirate? Only sand and carrion birds.

    If you enjoyed this article try my reviews of Rebel Moon Part 1 and Rebel Moon Part 2. If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. Then back to Suicide Squad. Then The Fanatic again. If you’re after more text, subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

  • Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire

    The retro styling on the title card is very nice — I almost want the rest of the film to be this nostalgic.

    “Zack Snyder is making his own Star Wars.” It’s a bold premise. For better or worse, the film immediately begins to take shape in your mind — and from a filmmaker whose divisive reputation precedes him, there’s a strong temptation to assume what kind of film this will be before seeing a single frame of it. Zack Snyder’s Netflix production Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire wasn’t made on a shoestring budget, and by definition it can’t capture the blissfully ignorant innovation of making an off-brand Star Wars — a Starcrash or a The Man Who Saves The World with the ambition to do it all from scratch, in a period where the image of Baby Yoda wasn’t plastered on every lunch box. But there’s still some of that cheeky thrill in hearing “Zack Snyder’s doing an R-rated Star Wars,” as if you might have heard it on the playground at school and immediately started calculating how you would trick your parents into renting it for you.

    There’s already so very much Star Wars nowadays — mostly vented from the great Disney+ orifice, but it’s still only been four years since The Rise of Skywalker arrived on the big screen. People once had to wait sixteen long years for a new cinematic Star Wars experience. Unimaginable now in a world with Ahsoka and Andor and The Acolyte and so on. So the challenge for this new two-part space opera is to shake itself free of diminutive comparisons and distinguish itself as an original science fiction movie and setting.

    The first question is: which Zack Snyder is at the wheel? The contemplative, existentialist director of Man of Steel? The director wedged into the mythic/pulp aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s Justice League? Or the artisanal lens enthusiast of Army of the Dead? Naturally there’s a bit of each (especially that last one, with some truly beautiful lenses put together for this one ), but more than any other self-reference Rebel Moon sees Snyder return to the blushing, hyper-stylized action of 300, albeit with the benefit of hindsight and many years more experience.

    The soft focus is paired with rich, deep shadows for a unique, ghostly look.

    Much like the under-appreciated Jupiter Ascending, which had the Wachowskis exhibiting a similar competency, Rebel Moon treats its classic pulp sci-fi locales as a given, trusting the viewer to immediately clock the idyllic space-farm, the hive of scum and villainy, the Blade Runner city, the old West and so on. These varied settings are bound by a rich saturation and contrast in the colors that forms a coherent visual throughline; a comforting intensity that’s established in the lurid opening shots on protagonist Kora’s home moon of Veldt. As well, the infamous slo-mo — which has often been restrained or absent in Snyder’s work post-Watchmen — is back here in force, ratcheting the tension up in a way that will make you sad this initial release isn’t actually R-rated and can’t yet feature the heavily implied explosions of blood.

    The visual coherence helps the viewer keep up to speed, as the film moves at a breakneck pace through the second half of the story. The plot of Rebel Moon is explicitly that of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai — or more directly John Sturges’ adaptation of that story, The Magnificent Seven. The traditional peasant village comes under threat from an evil empire and sends out representatives to recruit itinerant heroes, any they can find, to defend it. The opening act is given the most time and attention, laying out the lives of the villagers in such a way that their plight is apparent and human, as well as showing the evil empire engaged in some classic evil empire behavior: more Caesar than Palpatine, the fight is over grain tribute rather than lofty ideals (at least at first).

    The dreadnought in low orbit evokes similar imagery from last year’s The Creator.

    Similar to Magnificent Seven, the gathered recruits only get the space of a single vignette to distinguish themselves in. Even these, though, have evidently been cut to the bone to hit that two-hour runtime. It’s still intelligible — all we need to see is the indentured blacksmith strutting confidently towards the beast-too-wild-to-be-tamed to understand what’s going on, for example. Unlike this year’s other novel sci-fi epic, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, there’s never a sense that the film has engaged the plot compression unit to such an extent that things have become dreamlike and abstract. The worst thing you’ll suffer is disappointment that we don’t get to spend more time with the various rogues who end up getting recruited.

    The final act is the least complete, given the difficult task of not resolving the plot before part two arrives in a few months’ time. It’s a hard sell, as hard here as it was for Across the Spider-verse or Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning earlier in the year. A movie should have an ending. There’s an action showdown as you might expect, all flashing lights and dramatic violent flourishes. But without the catharsis of final victory or the establishment in that tight runtime of something like a Death Star to blow up, it feels like what it is: a midpoint. But even if this finale is more “wait and see” than it is overwhelming, the stinger right at the very end promises a sequel which might upend all sorts of expectations for how this story plays out.

    It casts the hexagonal grid motif the Marvel movies have settled on in a certain light.

    Being a knock-off is permission to break all the rules, and Rebel Moon knows this full well. Is there a C3P0? Yes, and he gets shot. Is there a cantina? Yes, and it’s flirting with being a brothel. Is there a Han Solo? Well, no spoilers. And will it be trashy as all hell? In a clear statement of intent, the film opens with a girthy, tumescent space cruiser crossing the threshold of a great yonic portal.

    Despite the headlines, Star Wars (and Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven) aren’t the only inspirations Rebel Moon is playing off. Excalibur is another obvious one, with the king dead or dying and his errant knights sickly and dispersed across the land. The Perceval here is Anthony Hopkins’ entrancing ‘Jimmy’, the C3P0-like pacifist robot who immediately breaks from that mold by shooting someone dead and fleeing into the forest to discover himself, only reappearing at the close now decorated with deer antlers. Comic relief, Jimmy is not.

    The taming-the-beast sequence owes much to Avatar, though I somehow doubt featuring in a Zack Snyder film will quiet the “no cultural impact” crowd. Of course, George Lucas never shied away from having a character mount a great computer-generated beast — there’s one in all three prequel films. The Bennu, a griffin-like winged beast, is a fine addition to this canon.

    Star Wars is when there’s a weird little guy in it.

    The most notable element of classic Star Wars that is missing is, sadly, the space politics. A much-mocked Lucas fixation, the scenes of machinations in the galactic senate or boardroom tables full of Imperial officers griping are lacking here. The tone is more in line with Dune, with us meeting or hearing about individual power brokers within an Imperial hierarchy but without even the token bureaucracy represented by Dune’s Mentats. And (delightfully for this PG-13 cut) we get to see just a little Baron Harkonnen moral decay on the part of the Imperial forces, and a touch of eXistenZ-aping body horror in the process.

    There’s more than a little of The Witcher creeping in around the edges too, especially in Kora’s flashback retellings of the story of the young princess. The backstory of Snyder’s universe here is more fantastical, more Lord of the Rings than Lucas’s tragedy of the republic — it’s good Kings and bad Regents, and prophesied children who will bring peace to the realm. And with a gothic God-King, a great empire across the stars that’s just maybe a little bit fascist, and a concerning undercurrent of implied necromancy , it’s hard to escape the touch of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 setting.

    A caped figure looms over a youngling.

    It’s unclear if Rebel Moon will be the Zack Snyder film to win over his detractors. Having made himself deeply unpopular in some circles with his mythopoetic take on DC’s superheroes, applying the same techniques to another sacred cow risks solidifying his reputation as an iconoclast — or worse, a contrarian. Netflix, who you can assume would very much like to have ‘Netflix’s Star Wars’, have engaged in an all-out marketing blitz, plastering the film across their media outlets and building small interactive moons in various cities. The film itself risks being swallowed up in all this external drama, but it’s enjoyable and distinctive enough to stand by itself. There are few big-budget films with a comparable ambition of style and motion and a director visually talented enough to realize that ambition. Rebel Moon is worth seeing on that justification alone.

    Is it Star Wars? Perhaps predictably, what makes Rebel Moon most interesting is all the ways in which it’s not Star Wars. Able to vary in characters, mood, setting and tone, Rebel Moon is fresher than any attempt to do this sort of thing since Jupiter Ascending. That film was compromised by running out of the hard cash required to see the full vision on screen. The fate of this film has been gambled on what has so far been a losing proposition, the two-part film epic. Like young Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine, we can only hope the old master has rigged the dice, and Rebel Moon realizes all this potential when part two lands next year.

    If you enjoyed this article I have conveniently already reviewed Rebel Moon Part 2. I’ll probably end up reviewing the extended cuts when they arrive in the summer also; subscribe to get them by email when I do. If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. Then back to Suicide Squad. Then The Fanatic again. If you’re after more text, subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.

    This article was originally written for Blood Knife which is currently on hiatus.

  • Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver

    Mild spoilers for Rebel Moon and The Tortured Poets Department.

    That’s Jimmy.

    In Dave Moore’s multipart essay on Taylor Swift, ‘How You Get the World’, he speculates that the media conditions of the late 2000s produced a generation of ultimate media: acts and brands and series that came from the era of universal appeal but which persisted into the era of Spotify and Netflix, where we are all so micro-served in our wants and desires that the sun has set on fame or success at that level. There may be more acts as talented as the Beatles, but their success will be diffuse, celebrity arriving in dribs and drabs instead of a supernova explosion of fame. Taylor Swift, as you might expect, is Moore’s primary example of this in modern music. For cinema, Moore cites the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

    For over ten years the MCU was inescapable in pop cinema, an Imperial march through the box office the successes of which were only accentuated by the tragicomic failure of every attempt to replicate it. Warner Bros sank their own battleship trying to ‘fix’ Justice League to the Marvel formula; the less said about Universal’s ‘Dark Universe’ the better. Even Disney — who bought Marvel wholesale — couldn’t keep Star Wars going for more than a handful of films.

    Getting the pictures of grain in early so I can fit them all.

    Now it seems likely that we are in the twilight of the MCU, with tepid entries like the sequel to 2019’s billion-selling Captain Marvel failing to make back its budget and upcoming fare like Deadpool 3 leaning on the ageing, uncertain legacy of the Fox X-men films for appeal. The Achilles’ heel of the MCU was always the unbroken chain of continuity; the fear of missing an essential entry and slipping from the zeitgeist. In this Disney have prepared the MCU a shallow grave, the integration of streaming service TV shows into the core narrative turning an occasional pleasant visit to the cinema into something you need to devote hours of downtime to keeping up with. Even a smart director like Sam Raimi can’t make an attachment to the six hours of 2021’s WandaVision completely optional.

    Taylor Swift by contrast has retained her throne, for now, as a new round of reviewers tangle with the fear that her popularity might be driving their positive coverage rather than vice-versa. The roles of critic, taste-maker and customer advocate are never as intertwined as they seem and fresh off her enormous stadium tour and movie Swift seems likely to shrug off any negative reviews for her new album The Tortured Poets Department, released April 19th (Paste’s review was posted anonymously for fear of fan reprisals). A double album is one of the traditional marks of an act falling to hubris, and Swift’s detractors might be hoping that 31 songs with lyrics like “What if I can’t have us/I might just not get up” will be enough to bring her down to earth again. Personally I wouldn’t take that bet. This kind of uncomfortably proximate emoting is Swift’s trade, her authenticity, and what might appear cringeworthy to outsiders is the beating heart of her appeal to fans.

    The Rebel Moon title cards are an absolute joy.

    A world away from all this but on the same day, Zack Snyder finalises his own double album with the release of Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver. The journey of this one seems to have taxed whoever is in charge of managing releases at Netflix to a point beyond all comprehension; it’s hard to imagine a more unhinged market strategy than “two films, each with two cuts, but not at the same time, and they’re each about five months apart”. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and five months is not long enough to forget that the first part suffered deeply from being cleft in two like this. Arriving too soon to demand a rewatch of the first part, and effortlessly defeated in epic stakes by the recent blockbuster success of Villeneuve’s Dune, this latter half has not been set up for success. As with Ms Swift though, Snyder has a habit of beating the odds and confounding the critics — who may never forgive him for the trump card he pulled on all the nay-sayers and industry insiders by seeing his Justice League through to completion.

    In my review of Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire I speculated that Snyder was returning to his roots in doling out crowd-pleasing action with simple moral messages, with the risk being that Star Wars was yet another revered cultural artifact he might be perceived as mistreating. Star Wars is serious business, even now, and there’s something typically audacious in Rebel Moon’s refusal to emulate it too closely. There’s no force, no monks, no robot peasants. In this second part there isn’t even any planet hopping save for flashbacks and recaps. Snyder is mythopoetic where Lucas is spiritual — what unites his band of adventurers is life, living and working, and much of the first half of Part 2 is given over to seeing the protagonists of Rebel Moon working the land in common with the villagers they have come to save, sharing food and drink and dance. It’s an earnest message that casts into relief the difficulty of such human connection even in Snyder’s own superhero efforts — Batman v Superman in particular hinging on the distance Superman’s existence puts him and the people he aids. The MCU often inelegantly sidestepped this by having the heroes defend property in the quickly achieved absence of people; cars and buildings and other totems, Thanos meeting his final defeat when he knocks over the campus building. The lack of humanity can become distracting — the Avengers famously share a shawarma, but they don’t share it with Happy Hogan. Rebel Moon is deeply concerned with human behaviours — love, work, sex, violence — in a way that is often absent in modern films.

    It was a shame to watch this one on the small screen — there apparently were screenings in London this time but I wasn’t aware of them.

    Being in essence a two-hour final act, there’s not much room for structural game-playing here. We get an hour or so of beautifully shot grain harvesting with the expected nods to Magnificent Seven where they should be, and the brief story of how Admiral Noble got his groove back — in a joke that’s just a bit too arch for this movie, we’re repeatedly told that the resurrection process (a visual reference to The Matrix) may have turned him into a deranged psychopath. Naturally, his behaviour doesn’t change at all. Following this we get the scene which most resembles the first movie, as the members of the troupe who didn’t get to show off their deal in that movie fill in the gaps here in a series of vignettes. This includes a delightfully theatrical recounting of Kora’s killing of the magic princess, beginning with the King deciding to call his biggest, ugliest ship the ‘Peacemaker’ and ends with the string quartet playing a gun-toting Kora out of the room. It’s playful and stagey without being ridiculous or self-indulgent.

    More so than Part 1, the new film does flaunt some significant references to Lucas’ work. The invasion of the village, with walker tanks being airdropped in alongside ground troops as dust flies past the camera is a loving reproduction of the final battle from Attack of the Clones, and the topsy-turvy swordfight between Kora and the resurrected Admiral Noble at the climax has a similar sense of outlandish fun as the Obi-wan/Anakin duel in Revenge of the Sith, along with the spectacle of a great flagship crashing through the atmosphere. Closing the film out on a funeral pyre also highlights the affection this film has for that series. The comparison does throw up some areas where Rebel Moon’s reach exceeds its grasp, with the personal enmity between Noble and Kora always seeming more like pathetic competition than ideological clash. It’s not just that Vader is Luke’s father, it’s also that he’s a symbol of paternal authoritarianism to Luke’s hippy freewheeling. Kora on the other hand, though we’re shown that she has instinctually picked up the communitarian values of the village, is herself a product of the same Empire that Noble serves.

    Notably, there’s no contrivance to give them different coloured blades — in the end, they’re fighting over just one.

    What the interpersonal conflict doesn’t show though, the incidental details are happy to express — the extended sequence of communal labour is contrasted with what we see of the inner workings of the enemy dreadnought, with a clear reference to the class strata of Titanic whereby workers in the engine room shovel coal into great raging furnaces. Above this is some kind of spectral angelic computer, evoking Evangelion among other things, bound in a position of sedate submission as Kora installs explosives across its broad forehead, eyes flickering to light with the interaction. In the flashback, the senators of this Empire are aged and grotesque, the old stereotype of the Prussian noble, as they endorse Balisarius’s antiquity-themed coup. Old men of the future, in command as ever. There’s something pathetic in Noble’s repeated assertion that capturing Kora will win him a place on the senate — for all his love of the society he represents he is extremely blinkered about how it loves him.

    Notable by their absence, not compared to Star Wars but compared to the mode of nearly all modern genre films, are the quips. None of the characters of Rebel Moon are a Chris Pratt type and thank the heavens for it. There’s a confidence in the world of the film and the actions of the characters within it that liberates them from having to do the ritual ironic disavowal that pervades modern films. The villagers do not proclaim “oh damn!” on seeing the second wave of troops marching towards them because the villagers are in fear for their lives. The setting is taken seriously, and not just as a sort of pastiche the people within it are performing — the most obvious example of which being the world of The Marvels, where the planet of the sad refugee people is but a hop from the planet of people who just have to sing and dance all the time and so on. Rebel Moon is refreshingly straightforward: the soliders are competent and well-disciplined, the officers obey orders even if they disagree with them, and sensible decisions are made about tactics throughout. It’s a small thing, but it means when we then see Noble personally go on a trench warfare murder spree it’s exceptional rather than ludicrous. George Lucas always insisted that Star Wars was for children, and the comedic incompetence of the Stormtroopers was a reflection of that. Rebel Moon, with its R-rated director’s cuts hanging like phantasms in the distance, does not have such a commitment.

    Special mention to Ed Skrein’s face, even more of a skull mask here than in the first one.

    With hindsight it may turn out that Snyder’s peak of creativity and collaboration was his trilogy for DC, and he won’t seek out such intimate, introspective work on the grand canvas again. It may be that among fans there is much handwringing and disappointment over his experiments with cinematography and writing and the other elements he has, until now, sought out talented partnerships for. It may even be that unlike stablemate Michael Bay, Snyder never sees a broader reappraisal among critics as an auteur (with the concept more out of fashion than ever). Rebel Moon Part 2 currently has 18% on popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Love and Thunder, a movie without a shred of the craftsmanship or soul that is present here, has 63% and is certified ‘Fresh’.

    Believing as many people have that critical consensus will build a universal (American) canon liberates a person from the tyranny of choice. There is no risk of feeling your taste to be inadequate when there is an objective numerical measure of its accuracy. But if the numbers are a fantasy, and the consensus was only ever a reflection of contingent aspects of production and not a guiding factor at all — if The Shawshank Redemption or Citizen Kane or Everything Everywhere All At Once is not in fact the greatest film of all time, certified as top of the list— then every person is in danger of being a philistine. This is a troubling thought. But more troubling is the idea that, captured by engines that only feed back to us what we already like, we end up with nothing but attempts to recreate the MCU. For as much as I don’t hate these films, we end up with The Marvels or Madame Web or Wonder Woman 1984 or Thor: Love and Thunder. Films made by committee, with artistic endeavour a secondary concern. As Snyder himself put it in a recent interview, we end up with the Happy Meal.

    The shot composition is showy all the way through, but they really have fun with Jimmy.

    Snyder’s work is unique and particular, and fervent in its earnestness. Despite all the homage and pastiche and the readily apparent melting pot of influences, Rebel Moon is an original sci-fi universe in an age of adaptations and sequels. Snyder, who once helmed the major competition to the MCU, knows the folly of trying to reproduce it. Even the clumsy sequel hook here is only that, a sequel hook. It’s not the work that destroys all the critics and haters — but then we had that one in 2021 and it didn’t last anyway. It’s just another decent movie by Zack Snyder. Perhaps for his next one he will take a leaf from erstwhile creative partner Christopher Nolan and leave genre behind entirely. Oppenheimer brought the intensity of a Batman film to historical biography. Perhaps Snyder could bring the rich visuals of Rebel Moon to philosophical fiction. Or perhaps he will keep producing these grandiose micro-epics for as long as Netflix will pay him. All things are possible.

    I would be sad to never see another film like Rebel Moon and I don’t know if another director is likely to make one. Everything’s filthy, the lens is constantly trained on the narrowest plane of interest and there’s a healthy, satisfying thunk to every noise and interaction. It’s not a new Star Wars — it may be that nothing can be a new Star Wars, nothing can be a new MCU, nothing can be a new Taylor Swift. But it’s an enjoyable movie by a director who is always pushing his own limits. The lousy division into two parts, the held-off pair of Director’s cut, the fancy lenses and lingering shots of grain and such may not be to everyone’s taste. Few things are. Cynics will sneer at the simple truisms like “connecting with people will help you break an addicition” or “mutual respect can bring people from different backgrounds together”. But Rebel Moon is authentic and honest in a way that will overcome all cynicism to those who care — an inimitable talent for reaching people that Zack Snyder shares with Swift — and that alone is more than enough to save it.

    Kora and the engineer share some kind of moment here. The scene I’m most looking to see extended.

    If you appreciate my writing, watch my video essay Sixteen Attempts to Talk to You About Suicide Squad. Then watch my video essay The Fanatic. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews. Thanks to Jimbot and Jamie Faith for feedback.

  • Release of the Ayer Cut

    This is an additional coda to Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’, my 2020 video essay about the movie Suicide Squad.

    17. (October 2021, ahead of announcement of a new Director’s cut for Suicide Squad)

    What are we?

    There is an importance to making art and art is important; making quiet, personal art, making large mass-market art. It’s the nature of the movie-making system that to paint on the largest canvas you have to compromise to commercial interests, commercial brands, ‘intellectual property’ — and the corrosive influence of that term has burned away more culture than any ‘modern mythology’ could hope to restore. But what comes out is still art, sometimes pop art, sometimes crass art, sometimes art we appreciate and sometimes art we don’t.

    Making art — making meaning — and showing it, or not showing it, saving it or destroying it. These are universal experiences. Showing art to each other is how we come to understand ourselves in relation to another human being. We cannot communicate directly, brain-to-brain. We only have words and images, and we use them to tell each other things we don’t even know we know.

    This goes some way to explaining the sense of natural justice to hearing that someone has prevailed against the machine and had their authentic vision made available, however much the nature of a collaborative artform means that the idea of any one ‘vision’ is illusory. It was right that the world got to see Blade Runner without narration, it was right that Ken Russell’s The Devils was liberated from the censors, and it was right that Zack Snyder got to release his Justice League. If this list is of films by directors with a fairly homogenous demographic, it is only because relief for this injustice, like so many others, is distributed unfairly. But that does not make any individual case less unjust.

    Which is all to say that it is as important that David Ayer gets to have his cut of Suicide Squad as it is when an indie musician releases a treasured album or a writer submits their first essay. It may not even be ‘good’, whatever ‘good’ should mean. It has probably come about as the result of some tedious bean-counting exercise; such is the world we live in. But we should celebrate that on the largest scale there is an affirmation that it is good for people to be able to create and release art for its own sake, and for the sake of creative integrity.

    I closed out my last essay by saying that “Suicide Squad is over, for now.” Somehow, against all odds, Suicide Squad has another attempt to explain itself.

    Editorial note: Contrary to rumour at the time, there was no announcement and Suicide Squad did not get another attempt to explain itself.

    Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’ is also available in written form.