“Rebel Moon” star Sofia Boutella made headlines earlier this month when she told Vulture that critics bashing on Zack Snyder‘s space epic impacted her emotionally. The same wasn’t exactly true for Snyder. The writer-director recently spoke to Empire magazine ahead of the second “Rebel Moon” film coming to streaming and said he doesn’t have much of a reaction to the negative reviews for “Part One.” He seems a bit perplexed over how anything in the first “Rebel Moon” could warrant such hostile reviews.
“I don’t really have a rebuttal to the reviews,” Snyder said. “For whatever reason, the reaction to my movies is very polarizing, and it always has been. The movie, it doesn’t seem like there’s that much in it that would warrant such visceral responses.”
“Rebel Moon” started as a “Star Wars” pitch that Snyder originally offered to Lucasfilm. The film stars Boutella as a former soldier who recruits warriors across the universe to fight back against the evil Imperium when her farming colony is threatened.
“I always thought that I was fully armed to take on those punches, and then I read the critics that came down on ‘Rebel Moon’ and it really affected me,” Boutella said about the extremely negative reviews. “I’m just gonna be honest about it. I feel like I’m carrying it for everybody that cared so much about this project, and that’s what affected me. Not the way I look. If anything, I’ve been pretty lucky and people like my work in it, but the movie was criticized.”
“It really affected me for all of those who put so much heart, tears, and sweat in this project,” she continued. “It’s hard to see something being demolished to that extent. I’m proud to have been part of it, and if there is no more ‘Rebel Moon,’ it will be a very important part of my life that I will defend forever.”
In addition to the upcoming second “Rebel Moon” movie, Snyder is also said to release R-rated director’s cuts of each installment at a later date. He told Empire magazine these cuts have “all the gore and the hard R-ness and the nudity and the violence and crazy shit. They’re insane. It’ll be interesting to see what the [critics] say about the director’s cuts. That’s a different kettle of fish.”
Snyder’s first “Rebel Moon” movie has a 21% on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman called the film “insanely derivative” in his review, saying it “knocks off ‘Star Wars’ and a dozen other sources … It is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only.”
In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, Snyder championed Netflix’s business model when it comes to releasing movies like “Rebel Moon.” He said the film earned around 80 million to 90 million “views” so far, which he equated to mean that more people probably saw “Rebel Moon” than Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which grossed $1.4 billion at the box office last year.
“Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver” is scheduled to release on April 19.
