Zack Snyder lifted Rebel Moon’s griffin scene from his own unmade 300 sequel
Zack Snyder is no stranger to remixing past pop history. From rewiring zombie tropes to dimensionalizing comic book drawings to bringing DC’s Justice League to the screen for the first time, the man loves playing in other people’s sandboxes. So what was the draw of carving out his own bespoke universe with Rebel Moon, his new Netflix franchise-starter?
“I was looking for something that was really pushing the sci-fi fantasy elements to their extreme,” Snyder tells Polygon. “I think that sci-fi fantasy, at its highest level, is like the ultimate genre. You can’t go any more genre than sci-fi fantasy. You hit your head on the roof of genre when you go to that one. And so that was really what I was hoping for, to give this kind of deep genre cinema experience that can only be obtained when going to this level.”
In that way, Rebel Moon feels more like Snyder’s Sucker Punch than his stricter adaptations. The galaxy-bound drama is wall-to-wall images and influences, from its core as a riff on Akira Kurosawa’s classic movie Seven Samurai to its obvious roots as an abandoned Star Wars pitch. But where Sucker Punch is driven by grimy, adolescent impulses, Rebel Moon feels like a solar system spun together by an older filmmaker who has spent time on the development grind. The film’s hero, Kora (Sofia Boutella), zips around the galaxy on a quest to find fighters who can protect her homeworld, and each planet she arrives on feels like a different Snyder movie.
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This is not a coincidence, according to the director. Unlike, say, George R.R. Martin, who seems to lay world-building bricks for years before actually writing his fantasy stories, Snyder and his cohorts established the universe of Rebel Moon by throwing out tons of
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