Flasz On Film

I have recently become fond of – despite my better judgment, mind you – snacking fried cheese, which is nothing more than what the name suggests. It’s cheese. And it’s fried. Crumbled into bite-size bits, bagged and priced just between printer ink and high purity cocaine. And apart from the fact it is the literal embodiment of umami combined with the addictive quality of crystal meth, it is now also a good enough hook for me to bite into Zack Snyder’s most recent movie, the second part of his Star Wars-adjacent saga Rebel Moon.  

I see you’re still discombobulated as you’re probably wondering how anyone is to connect snacking on fried cheese as a concept with Zack Snyder’s bro cinema. Sit tight. There’s more.

Ever since discovering this savoury snack (courtesy of Serious Pig, by the way), I have wondered how it came to be because thus far my only exposure to this unhealthy goodness had come in the form of accidentally creating it while frying a cheeseburger in a screaming hot cast iron skillet. You know what I mean, don’t you? You flip a burger, press it down gently with your spatula and then place a slice of cheese of your choosing on top, hoping that the cheese would melt just well enough right as the meat comes up to temperature. You’re not always successful because it’s easy to overdo the cheese loading or misjudge the time required to finish cooking, either of which will lead to the melted cheese coming into contact with the pan. Which is where it undergoes the magical process of caramelization resulting in bits of that cheese becoming brown, brittle, salty and delicious.  

Now imagine that someone looked at that process and decided to optimize for cheese by removing the burger altogether and just frying a hefty amount of cheese in the pan until all of it turned brown, brittle, salty and delicious. Thus, a great snack was created: loaded with salt, awash in umami and harbouring just enough protein to give yours truly an excuse to eat it as an “alternative to crisps” which are mostly carbs. Nevermind the calories, the fat, the salt, let alone the fact it takes but one dose to get addicted to this snack. It is literally heroin for former fatties.  

But get back on the ground, Jakub. How does this relate to Rebel Moon?  

Well, imagine Zack Snyder’s cinema as a burger. In fact, imagine a movie in general is a burger. A burger as a culinary construct is a microcosm of our dietary needs, slightly twisted out of balance by your own proclivities. Nevertheless, in its most native state, a burger is a construction comprising of fried beef or a suitable equivalent thereof (for those who scoff at animal products), a bun, a slice of cheese or equivalent, at least one sauce and a medley of vegetables, at least one of which is green. Therefore, your basic burger is a combination of protein (meat), animal fat (cheese and sauce), carbs (bun), and fibre (veggies) with some salt and vitamins smuggled in there for good measure; and in its most balanced form it stands as a respectable, albeit high-calorie meal. It’s fine to have one on occasion. It won’t kill you.  

Now, imagine Zack Snyder is a chef at a burger joint and his particular take on a burger involves stacking calories on top of that basic construction. You have your double burger. You have some triple-extra cheese and caramelised onions. Some chipotle mayo. Hell, have a fried egg on top for that creamy richness. Now, those Snyder-burgers balloon in calorie content and can no longer be seen as a suitable meal for anyone wishing not to have a triple bypass before they hit forty-five. They’re still OK as a treat, but you should maybe lay off breakfast on the day, or perhaps go extra hard during your next gym session. Snyder-burgers can never be considered even an approximation of an acceptable meal. They are unhealthy by design. But they are also delicious. And delicious Snyder-burgers (which also look great in Instagram photos) get the burger restaurant predominantly and overwhelmingly rave reviews. They please crowds in ways spinach ravioli could only wish.  

That’s more or less how I see Zack Snyder’s cinema as a whole: stylistically rich, dense with umami flavour and rather effective in the moment… while also quite unhealthy and almost completely incompatible with a balanced diet. And it’s fine, by the way. I’m not going on a crusade against the Snyder-burger any time soon because I recognize that every now and again it’s OK to let it go and have an extravagant burger, knowing full well it’ll take three days to clear your digestive tract and that the next few trips to the bathroom will be treated as emergencies. A small price to pay.  

However, ever since Justice League and the subsequent release, under the collective weight of demands from Snyder-burger zealots the world over, of the Justice League Snyder Cut, things changed for good or for ill and Snyder discovered that people cheer more profusely when he adds umami and calories to his creations. So, he optimized for fried cheese so much that his newest burger is truly difficult to down in one sitting without risking a heart attack in the process. Rebel Moon (both episodes) are therefore unnecessarily bloated with hand-to-mouth worldbuilding spoon-fed to you in sequences that are slowed down so much that you could go for a pee break, come back, and they would still be happening. This is what happens when you give a filmmaker who is already keen on self-indulgence a completely free reign. He will make a four-hour movie, divide it in two and then audaciously advertise an even longer “director’s cut” as inbound, as though to imply these two films fell short of what his original vision entailed.  

I fail to see that. All I recognize is a business-minded filmmaker attempting to woo his burger-hungry audience for another round of calorie-dense feasting, this time with guardrails off and with a requirement to sign a waiver before sitting down. Just to make sure nobody gets sued when you die on account of having too little blood in your fatstream.  

But that’s neither here nor there.  

The movie at hand, the second part of the Rebel Moon duology and a likely progenitor of a franchise nobody really asked for, is an epitome of the Snyder-burger. It’s a high-calorie festival of hyper-stylized visuals, superfluous worldbuilding and unnecessary plotting that somehow redeems itself with the final act that offers an intriguing take on what you’ve seen beat-for-beat in Star Wars (1977) as well as in The Force Awakens. Nevertheless, the point still stands that the movie should not exist at all, just as the Snyder-burger with a triple patty, caramelized onions, a fried egg, fried cheese on top and enough chipotle mayo to drown a small child should not exist either. It’s an abomination and my logical brain insists that both A Child of Fire and The Scargiver are the director’s cut of what could have easily been titled Rebel Moon after having ninety minutes of its running time trimmed away to furnish a more socially acceptable blockbuster format. 

Do I need to sit through a ceremony where each character gets a flashback? Do I need to sit through another dinner chat where everyone gets another opportunity to narrate their uber-stylized backstory? Do all these flashbacks need to be speed-ramped and slo-moed to the extreme? Do I really have to sit through a scene where Kora/Arthleais (Sofia Boutella) relives her past trauma, which involves space Nazis assassinating a space Caesar? I probably don’t. Also, it is likely nobody needed a string quartet to provide diegetic scoring to that scene either. In slow motion, no less.  

But it’s not that I’m surprised these scenes are in this movie either. I honestly expect a certain kind of spectacle from this filmmaker. I came here to have a Snyder-burger, not a kale salad and I’d be way more surprised if the second chapter to an already bloated and overweight spectacle replete with indulgences and hyper-stylizations looked like a Kelly Reichardt movie. I have already resigned myself to a whole weekend of suffering on the toilet in the wake of having that Snyder-burger and, goddamit, I’ll have my Snyder-burger one way or another!  

It is a bit much, though, come to think of it.  

The movie truly takes an hour to get going as Snyder lays the foundations for what surely promises to be an extended universe of Rebel Moon-branded properties, only occasionally throwing in an interesting-looking visual or a motif. But it eventually gets off the ground as the space Nazis come back to confront the assortment of space farmers, space renegades, space cowboys and space barbarians and Snyder settles into his groove you might recognize from 300 or Man of Steel. The destruction served in this Star Wars-adjacent finale, which should give any genre fan a well-deserved déjà vu, is rich, stylized, complete and – expectedly so – fun in the moment of consumption. Also, it is completely disposable as it fits stylistically pretty well with  any cinematic cutscene found in a triple-A video game.

Therefore, I don’t think I can just leave you with a recommendation. Rebel Moon comes with a health warning. You can’t just watch this movie without watching the previous part, so it is an investment of over four hours that you need to complete the experience. It’s a massively intimidating Snyder-burger. Multiple patties. Plenty of condiments. Loads of cheese. Caramelised onions. A single fried egg just under the crown. Onion rings on the side. A side of thick-cut skin-on chips. Salty. Rich. Fatty. Full of umami. An epic meal… that will (I repeat: will) give you the runs. But it will be fun for at least a moment… once you abandon all dignity, grease yourself up to your elbows and guzzle down what’s in front of you as though there was no tomorrow. 

Name of that burger? A burger this magnitude needs a name. Everyone who has ever visited a burger joint knows at least that much. 

Can’t decide. Maybe as the subtitle suggests – The Scargiver. Because it will give you stretchmarks if you’re not careful with it.  

Now, my watch begins for that director’s cut which will combine two Snyder-burgers into one mega-indulgent display of umami richness with absolutely no health upsides and a serious risk of shaving a few years off your life expectancy. Bigger. Longer. And Uncut.

I shall pre-emptively call that incoming Snyder-burger… Rebel Moon: The Bedsoregiver.