Rebel Moon is bombing at Rotten Tomatoes as the critics have destroyed it, and the more fans that see the movie, the more the Audience Score drops.
The Rebel Moon Rotten Tomatoes Score is at 23%, one point better than Zack Snyder’s worst-rated movie Sucker Punch, and the Rebel Moon Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score is now at 66%, dropping six points from just two days ago.
I also blasted the flick in my own Rebel Moon review as the movie is complete trash.
World building is getting sacrificed?
Then it was learned that Zack Snyder actually first filmed his R-rated Director’s Cut, and cut from that the PG-13 version Netflix originally asked for. Zack said things are so different from his original version compared to the PG-13 version that his Director’s Cut is “almost like a different movie. It’s almost a different universe.”
Now we hear from the writer, Kurt Johnstad, Zack Snyder’s 300 writer, who responds to the bad reviews (sorta). In another mind-blowing response, Johnstad says that when they first tried to cut back on the Zack’s 200-page mega script, Snyder didn’t like how it cut back on all the world development and character building and that version didn’t interest him (which is the exact problem everyone has with Rebel Moon Part 1!).
Via Variety:
Zack Snyder said he originally wrote “Rebel Moon” as a single film. How did splitting the film into two parts impact the structure of the story?
When we had that 200-plus page script, that was the story that Zack wanted to tell. We tried cutting back and sundering through the script. It got down to like 136 [pages] and Zack just read it and was like, “All of the world building is getting sacrificed here, and all the characters are taking a hit. We need to find a solution because this version of the movie isn’t interesting to me.” The challenge was to go back to the big draft, and then how do we make two movies? I really thought they were only going to make the first movie, and we would just have the second movie on a shelf sitting there, just like, “In success, we’ll get to do that one day.” And then Zack convinced them, “I’m gonna shoot both movies back-to-back,” and [Netflix] went for it.
An original story?
Johnstad is also asked about the bad reviews, but he says he doesn’t read the reviews. However, he still responds to them when asked about influeces in Rebel Moon such as Star Wars and if the influences should be apparent or if Rebel Moon should be looked at as its own thing:
But then there are things that just become their own thing. Zack is trying to do something very different here that really hasn’t been done in a long time. This isn’t an IP. This is an original story. It’s being created by hundreds, if not thousands of technicians. That’s a really bold thing. He as a filmmaker takes big swings on every film, and it’s fun to watch somebody who has enough confidence, internally in himself, to take those kinds of swings in the material that he puts out there in the world.
So Johnstand says Rebel Moon is an original story, but another big compaint people have about Rebel Moon is that it not only rips off Star Wars but many IPs including Seven Samurai, Lord of the Rings, Dune, Game of Thrones, A Bug’s Life, Warhammer, Titan AE, Inglorious Basterds, Harry Potter, Avatar, etc.
There is a difference between being inspired by something, but scenes in Rebel Moon come off more as being a blatant rip-off. When it comes down to it, the story is just plain bad. Also as I went over in my review, when they edited the R-rated version to come up with the PG-13 version, they did a horrible job with the editing. What’s bizaare, according to what Johnstad first said above, is they knew about it.
