The Rebel Moon director’s cut proves it’s franchise-worthy

polygon.com:

Let’s start with a really great part: The teeth.

It’s a beat you might not have noticed at all in the original version of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon saga. The only time we really see any up close is when the dastardly Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) gets his ass handed to him at the end of Part 1, and his knocked-out teeth skitter across the ground before tumbling thousands of feet into inky blackness. This being a Snyder joint, we see the shot in slow motion, but it reads like a hollow touch of visual flourish.

But, this being a Snyder joint with a director’s cut, it turns out to be a puff of brutal poetry that hits a lot harder in the longer version of the film. It turns out the priests Noble travels with collect a tooth from all of his victims and place them, artfully, around a portrait of their slain princess in some sort of perverse ritual.

It’s metal! The sort of wicked fun worldbuilding a major sci-fi blockbuster should have, especially when it’s carried out by guys in skull masks and red robes that mostly just stood in the background for the original cut of Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire, released last year. In the tiny close-up glimpses we got of them then, you could tell there was a lot of detail to their look, but we never really got to know their deal. That’s the beauty of Snyder’s new director’s cuts of Rebel Moon parts 1 and 2: it’s a longer gaze at a world that’s full and rich in a way the original cut never revealed. More importantly, it feels like the sort of thing you can build an incredibly lively franchise on.

The bones of Rebel Moon’s story are the same in either version: Kora (Sofia Boutella) has been living on the remote planet of Veldt amid a small farming community, hiding from some mysterious past life. But after soldiers of the fascistic Imperium show up and demand all of the village’s grain, Kora is pushed back toward the violence she was trained for, and sets off traveling around the galaxy to recruit a band of soldiers to help protect the small