REBEL MOON: Who's Afraid of Space Sex?

Zack Snyder's space opera hints at cosmic themes of fertility and sexuality, then buries them in a generic action film

Happy Valentine’s Day, and a deep thanks to you all for being here. Read on for all things Rebel Moon, complete with printable Valentines! ❤️🩷❤️🩷

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When we say “it’s a miracle this movie got made,” we’re usually referring to the good ones. We think of films whose genius could have easily been lost to mundane obstacles of funding, timing, or studio resistance — masterpieces almost consigned to early graves, which by divine grace and their own artistic merits saw the light of day.

But what — as Daniel Kaluuya’s character asks in Nope — do you call a bad miracle? A film (or “multi-media franchise”) that seems to get made in spite of itself? A bland screenplay and concept nevertheless granted a nine-figure budget?¹

Rebel Moon is that latter kind of miracle. It fascinates me that this film exists; I’ve watched it three times now, and each time it grows weirdly more compelling. On first watch, it’s the standard IP™ pablum that defines our moment: vapid, full of superficial Worldbuilding Tidbits and Stuff Blowing Up. But, by grace of Snyder’s huge, ambitious tastes, it’s also hefty and pretentious; it aspires to mythic themes that never quite cohere. The more you re-watch, the more you notice the vestigial (or vaginal) traces of deeper lore at play; fossils of some better, weirder, sexier film buried under the action-franchise vibe. (Maybe the forthcoming R-rated cut, allegedly an hour longer, will deliver.)

Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire opens with an imperial spaceship, The King’s Gaze, ploughing through a wormhole. This “dreadnought of the Motherworld” lands on the titular moon, where an idyllic farming community has been living in peace and harmony. Evil general Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) demands the entirety of the community’s next grain harvest, condemning them to starvation; he augments his threats with murder and promises to return in a few months. In response, badass loner Kora (Sofia Boutella) decides to scour the galaxy for rogue fighters to defend her adoptive home. Along the way, she enlists a series of motley mercenaries, including a sword lady, a beastmaster guy, and Djimon Hounsou playing the same role that he played in Gladiator. There’s a resistance movement; they resist things; Atticus Noble hunts them down; it ends with him and Kora punching the shit out of each other on a generic Star Wars planet. Everyone I know who’s seen it hated it and also wants the sequel (Rebel Moon: Part Two: The Scargiver) injected into their heart with a three-inch needle now.

Me and fam at Olive Garden being told the wait is 40 minutes

I mean, how does one even respond? To lines like “What happened to honor!” and “The biggest fear we face… is fear of ourselves”? Character development is nonexistent, and we spend precious little time getting acquainted with each new hero as they join the ragtag team. There’s a grimdark rape threat every 10 minutes or so, of the most awfully-written kind (“I’ll split this sapling myself,” leers Rape Guy at a defenseless girl, whilst shoveling some sort of chewy space snack into his mouth). Rebel Moon feels more like an outline, feverishly drafted by Hollywood Intern/Sci-fi Nerd Guy/Aspiring Screenwriter No. 573 under a crash deadline, than a real screenplay-turned-movie that Snyder has allegedly been planning, drafting, and workshopping since the 80s.

Ed Skrein hams its up as the evil general Atticus Noble (he’s so, so babygirl in this! with a little face tattoo!), making the best of what material he’s got. Sniveling, dandyish, and sadistic, he’s much more of a presence than Kora or her compatriots: Rebel Moon commits the capital sin of making its villains, extras, and disposable lowlifes far more interesting than its heroes.² (Noble also has a sex squid, but we’ll get to that.) The cinematography is bonkers: lens flares and slow-motion deployed during inexplicably banal moments, never timed with the action (two people punch each other; they fall down; then slow-mo kicks in). Actors run glacially towards us as the CGI embers of meaningless, interchangeable planets swirl around them. Snyder is an expert at crafting sublime, important images, but here, it feels like he struggles to know what to emphasize, which images should be important ones (this gun? this snowflake? this doorknob?).

Historically, Snyder has always required some sort of mythic framework — a comic, a novel, something beyond corporate IP™ in se — to guide his grand, primordial aesthetics. That’s why his adaptations tend to be so good. He is profoundly interested in huge questions of myth, art, canon, deconstruction, reconstruction. In ancient Greece, Zack Snyder would have been an Iliad reciter, or a sculptor of Olympic athletes. In medieval Russia, he would have been an Andrei Rublev. If he had gotten to adapt The Fountainhead as planned, his epic compositions and Übermensch imagery would have at least made sense. But can our entertainment world give him that anymore? Grand inspiration, heroes’ journeys? Can his epic sensibilities win out against the dopamine lure of nerdbroism — a creative mode that has, over the past 10 years, subsumed and trivialized even the word “epic” itself?

The answer is not really. Rebel Moon can’t transcend what it ultimately is: a sci-fi franchise™ made in 2024, whose only purposes is to fill space on a platform and enable further iterations. Snyder’s vast, Romantic style looks excessive when it’s lavished on such dorky, action-figure characters: it’s like watching Caravaggio do Corporate Memphis, or Wagner do melodic math. I love Snyder as an artist; I respect that he goes so damn hard in this. But the material just isn’t there.

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When Rebel Moon was ramping up, it seemed laden with potential. Snyder was dropping tantalizing updates, and the centrality of sex to his concept was one of the film’s main selling points. His eyes lit up in interviews about it; his Heavy Metal inspiration was getting buzz. Even amongst the Snyder-cynics that I knew, there was a stir of interest: were we finally getting a big-budget space movie with sexy people doing sex?

If so, it would have been a welcome change: the dearth of sex and sexual desire in tentpole films has been a topic of discussion for a long time. You might have come across Raquel S. Benedict’s seminal essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One is Horny,” which I can’t recommend enough. In her analysis, Benedict muses on the visual sterility that pervades most modern movies, indeed our whole visual culture: stern, austere bodies; a complete lack of libido; a sense that even superficially “sexy” characters never want to be touched. Audiences, too, have less interest in sex than ever (remember the absolute bafflement with which the Internet recoiled when Rey saw Kylo shirtless in The Last Jedi? You had to be there). The same is true, I think, of filmmakers. During my time as a script reader, I quickly realized that the nerd guys writing these genre films have largely left behind organic horniness for things like female characters (Igrayne!) or masculine power fantasies (Indy!). Instead, there’s just a cold libido for The Franchise: is my concept cool enough? are there enough references to other cool things that cool directors like? did we draft enough cool backstory? will it become The Cool Movie with the Spinoff Shows?

We needed Rebel Moon to save us. And by God, with that first shot, I thought it would. A tiny, masculine ship peeks through a gaping vulva in the heart of space; the thing has labia, fluttering softly in the cosmic wind like some anemone at sea. It’s the eternal mandorla, the vesica piscis, Hildegard von Bingen’s seam of creation. More importantly, it’s adolescent — as vulgar as it is earnest, visually offensive. As we watched, people were shrieking. That is good. In an ideal world, a blue space vagina would be fanfare for more wild images to come, a promise that Zack Snyder was finally unleashing his aesthetics on a project that was truly out-there and unfettered.

time dilation

But alas, we never see anything like it again. The motif dies as quickly as it’s introduced; no further mandorlas appear, even as the ships continue to fold through space. Snyder has claimed that the portal’s shape is tied to the “mythology of the Motherworld” — but, like, where is this mythology anywhere in the movie? What do any of the characters have to say about it? When does anyone ever discuss how it feels to penetrate the orifice of space, submerging in its dark, mysterious matrix? You can’t just edge us like this, Snyder! Je refuse!

This becomes a pattern for the rest of Rebel Moon: motifs appear, and then are dropped before being explained or visually elaborated. You get the sense that there’s this grand ur-myth afoot about space and fertility, but its contours are so faintly sketched that it barely seems present at all. Which is a shame, because if there ever was a sci-fi premise worthy of some serious Golden-Bough-type symbolism taken to Snyderly extremes, it’s this one:

• a rocky moon in the vacuum of space from which human beings have somehow coaxed agriculture and reproduction

• a princess — the eponymous Child of Fire — with the power to create life from non-living matter

• a huge, Oedipal, death-cult empire determined to control, deform, and extinguish any independent life it encounters

This concept could be a tremendous space opera. It’s deep and mythical, yet also lends itself to the flamboyant, sexual aesthetic Synder sought to pull from Heavy Metal. It’s the kind of narrative that seems reasonably (if ridiculously) suited to imagery like space vulvas. There’s a clear metaphysics, a clash of nature and perverted nature, void and life-force. But all of this gets crowded out by the pew-pew action movie of it all.

Farmville

Take Kora’s village, for example. They seem to follow some space-viking religion that venerates human sexuality within a larger flow of cosmic life. Their chieftain (or “father”), Sindri, encourages them to fuck at the spring festival, since “loud sounds of pleasure summon seedlings to sprout.” They work their farms without robotics, because “doing the work by hand connects us to the land.” We are shown slow-motion shots of spilling grain, because Grain Is Important and symbolizes life. Kora sniffs the dirt, because that’s what farmer characters do. But all of this is telling, and not showing — we can’t internalize whatever sexual cosmology they hold, because their world just doesn’t feel sexual. Even as they talk about “pleasure” and “thrusting,” the visuals remain immensely sterile; Kora sniffs the dirt without emotion, the festival lights are cold and grey, the landscape looks dry and mealy, everyone seems vaguely pissed or awkward. Compare this to the feast scenes in The Northman, from which Snyder seems to be drawing inspiration: lambent fire, loose hair, wine dripping off lips, couples of all sexes laughing and fondling amongst the trees. Say what you will about The Northman; you could at least believe that the characters who talked about fucking actually fucked.

The joyous spring festival

Only the villains in this film seem to get off, albeit in predictably degenerate ways. From a symbolic standpoint, the Imperium seems positioned as a the Bad Way to Do Sex: unlike the all-natural farmers, they augment their bodies with weird, fetish-looking tech, and their lackeys are marauding Rape Guys. Kora, via exposition, tells us that imperial soldiers are encouraged to form Sacred Band-esque pairs, subsuming their libidos into war; her former partner died this way, a tragedy given a generous five seconds of screen time. The Imperium also controls those vulva portals, which Snyder assures us play a major role in their mythology. What mythology? Who knows. You’d think the mandorla would maybe show up on their banners or their iconography or something, but it never does. We can’t determine the real nature of their sexual depravity — not from narration, not from visuals, certainly not from their actions.

My lockscreen

General Atticus Noble is a gay-coded space Nazi; of course he has a sex squid. I will defend this scene until my dying day; like the space vulva, it’s unforgettable, peak-WTF, and seems imported from another, better movie. In it, we see the naked general — he’s shredded, in a sickly, orthorexic way — suctioning himself with a bubbling hookah-cum-vacuum, before he drifts leisurely into the chokehold of the undulating fucktopus. He’s filmed from the waist-up, so we’re obviously just seeing the Ed Sullivan Show version of something far more depraved. Apparently, Rebel Moon: Part 1: A Child of Fire: The Official Novelization reveals that the tentacle monster is an artificial organism called The Twins, and it was genetically engineered for Atticus’ masturbatory pleasure. Which would have been nice to know in the movie. Otherwise, it’s an image adrift, with no dramatic context. Why is he with the squid? Is it his preference? Is there something wrong with him physically such that they needed to design a custom creature to service him? This scene gives everything and nothing.

Rebel Moon does articulate one theme well, and it’s that the patriarchal Imperium seems to have destroyed its subjects’ concepts of normal family. They’ve deified their king as the supreme father (because Freud, or — let’s be real — because Warhammer). This imperial structure is a bloated and perverted version of the village-family system on the moon, and the gross god-emperor “father” stands in contrast to the wise, nurturing village “father,” Sindri. Both Kora and Atticus suffer from deep-seated daddy issues; Kora was forcibly adopted by a general and inducted into a military cult (there’s a flashback scene in which she holds a gun to his neck while he seemingly gets off, eyes rolling back). Meanwhile, Nazi boy scout Atticus is perpetually needy, trapped in childlike dependence as he strives for the affections of an abstract father who definitionally cannot reciprocate. Skrein acts this wonderfully, always with a tear in his eye and a pathetic quiver on his lip when he mentions the “King’s love.”

Cary Elwes as the king

As it stands, we only have the incomplete, PG-13 cut of Rebel Moon. But should our hopes for the rated-R cut be that much higher? Sure, we might see sex between the characters — but would there actually be chemistry? Or sensuality? The whole universe, much like Snyder’s superhero movies, suffers from a terminal case of Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny: Boutella is in peak physical shape, but she just punches things. Staz Nair, the beastmaster, looks like Adonis but just stands there, no one so much as glances at his exposed pecs. There’s a notable scene during the village festival in which Kora glances across the mead-hall at some guy named Den (his name is “Den” because Heavy Metal, you guys!!). They exchange dead-eyed stares, and Den musters up an awkward rictus. It took me a whole rewatch of this film to figure out that these two people had offscreen sex. You’d have never guessed that this was the same director that, mere minutes earlier, was throwing space vaginas on the screen, daring us to imagine what batshit stuff was coming next.

Nair and Hounsou, chiseled and just kind of existing

As a concept, Rebel Moon promised so much fun and weird audacity. But the final product leaves me wondering: (1) how much weirdness and audacity are creators allowed in an increasingly corporatized film industry, and (2) even given complete artistic freedom, how much weirdness and audacity are we still capable of? We’re approaching two decades of a media world immersed in action IP™ stuff — two decades of nerdbros pitching cool franchises and epic universes. Maybe Snyder displayed that mandorla at the beginning because that’s all he could muster — not a coherent theme, just a momentary thrill of “wouldn’t it be cool”, strung together with a thousand other random beats of “wouldn’t it be cool.”

The R-rated version will come out sometime this year; I hope it really is as good as Snyder promises, and gives us a better glimpse at the true ambitions of his project. I hope it’s some kind of New Testament, building upon the Old and fulfilling its promises. I hope it has a full cut of the sex squid. I hope that then I will finally be able to stop thinking about what this movie could have been, instead of what it ended up as.

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Your reward for reading: Valentines!

Recommended sexy SFF:

• SNL: The Dune Popcorn Bucket

• Harlan Ellison: “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?”

• Clark Ashton Smith: “The Disinterment of Venus”

• Ruby Dixon: Ice Planet Barbarians

• Tanith Lee: Stained with Crimson

• Serpieri: Druuna: Morbus Gravis

• The Interview with the Vampire show

• Frank Frazetta phone cases (Frazetta Girls x Casetify)

1. See Amazon’s Rings of Power for something similar with a TEN-figure budget.

2. For instance, Kora briefly encounters a buglike alien that uses glowing tubes to speak through a human host [paramour? mind-gigolo?]. I’d have loved for that duo to have joined the squad.