Rebel Moon: The Director's cut, 2/10
I'm lumping these together as one whole, because I want you people to know what i suffered through. I already loved to hate the original Rebel Moon movies, so I jumped at the chance to rot my brain for a whopping 5+ hours of this shit. Does the longer runtime benefit the movies? Yes. Does it make them better movies? Yes. Are they more fun to watch as a result. Fuuuuuuuuuuck no.
This is pretty much exactly what I was expecting: Zack the Hack Snyder delivers the most pompous, self-important, gratuitous, overblown and least original sci-fi pile of dogshit this side of Mars with the director's cuts. Like you'd expect, the movies benefit only in the most marginal of ways from the longer runtime: some of the plotholes are smoothed over, some of the character stuff gets a little more depth, and some of the worldbuilding makes the tiniest bit more sense. But for me the joy of these movies was specifically how little sense it all made, so what's left is a massively pretentious, overly bloated cannon blast of shit. The stuff that was hilariously awful is still present, but it's diluted down due to being much more spread out from all the gratuity: more slo-mo, more tits, more gore, basically none of which serves or benefits the story.
The characters, despite having the better part of the length of the LOTR trilogy to flesh out, are still as flat as fucking cardboard. The worldbuilding still makes you ask questions every goddamn scene. The shock value and writing are still juvenile and shallow as all hell. The universe never rises above being a $2 ripoff of Star Wars, Warhammer 40k and Dune. The visuals are possibly even uglier this time around: bafflingly, some of the backgrounds that were out of focus in the original are now in focus, and it makes for a wildly incoherent viewing experience. The utterly inexplicable fish eye lens used in a ton of scenes still doesn't make a lick of sense. Speaking of which, neither do the fucking subtitles. This has to be some sort of record, where 2 movies have a total of 4 subtitles, and none of them make any sense. I never got the idea what the fuck "A Child of Fire", "Chalice of Blood" or "The Curse of Forgiveness" were supposed to refer to. "The Scargiver" I can at least understand a tiny bit, but it's still shallow and pretentious as fuck.
Everything bad from the original versions is still present, so I'll try to be positive and focus on the stuff that works at least more: the worlbuilding is a bit more cohesive this time around, and gives at least an inkling of a justification for why the universe works like it does. There are occasional bits of character building that at least hint at some sort of arc. So marginal improvements across the board. But that just means the hilarious awfulness is mostly replaced by crushing mediocrity and boredom, which is even worse as a viewing experience. Zack Snyder still has the depth of a petri dish as a writer, and it's made worse by how self-serious this colossal pile of feces is. The staggering amount of extended runtime (close to 50%) is used for the most pointless, gratuitous, utterly meaningless shit you can imagine. There's still zero group dynamic, still zero characterization, still no sense of why these characters have decided to come together. The dialogue is still pretentious, juvenile and massively self-satisfied at the same time, like every line is supposed to bear huge significance.
It's absolutely godawful in every respect. It's not even funny bad, it's just really fucking boring. It's irredeemable, irreparable, fundamentally broken. I want Zack Snyder to get blacklisted for life after these movies.