Rebel Moon: A Child of Light, Zack Snyder’s attempt to do Star Wars, landed over the holiday weekend to pretty universal disdain but maybe that can all be turned around by an R-rated cut of the film that will evidently be a lot more violent, raunchy, and possibly tentacle-filled.
Ed Skrein, who plays the film’s villain Admiral Noble, told The Hollywood Reporter that the R-rated version isn’t just a few more pieces of blood and guts here and there but a “hardcore” version of the movie that pushes boundaries in ways uber-violent films like Saw and Hostile did. After saying that the PG-13 cut was made for teenager kids to be able to watch the film, Skrein went on to explain that the R-rated version is going to be something “seminal.”
“But the R-rated version, the Snyder cut, “the extended cut,” as we’re supposed to call it, has the potential to be something seminal for the older generation,” he said. “When I watch something, I just want to see something new. I don’t need to love something. I don’t need to find it perfect. I can see flaws in it, whether it’s a painting, a song, or a film, but if it’s new, then I come away and say, ‘Wow, that was great. That made me feel something.'”
He continued, “So you’re going to see something fucking new in that R-rated cut, and we’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve seen Lars von Trier push cinema to the edges. We’ve seen Saw and Hostile and all those kinds of movies push violence quite far for a commercial entity, and of course, we’ve seen what we did with Deadpool. That film pushed the superhero genre to another place, but there was still comedy involved in that. But this shit is not funny. This is fucked-up empires in space and evil human nature evolving and playing out on an intergalactic level. It’s hardcore.”
That all sounds great but it also led to one of the myriad issues with Rebel Moon, which tells the story of a band of rebels fighting against an evil empire. Zack Snyder already knew he’d be getting an R-rated director’s cut of the film released on Netflix before Rebel Moon even dropped. This leads to action sequences that are clearly cut around intended violence, scenes feeling half-finished, and a general sense that you’re not actually watching the intended movie. It’s nice for kids to have a version to watch but it delivers a film that feels half-baked.
But just how hardcore is the “extended cut?” In one of the films already infamous scene we see Noble in his bed chamber clearly about to do some very dirty things with a bunch of tentacles like he just stepped out of an adult film. That scene is going to go even further Skein explained as he laid out how they shot for both a PG-13 and R-rated film at the same time.
“… Some scenes by nature lent themselves to the R-rated cut,” he said. “There are some scenes that are not in the movie, and while we were doing it, I could have told you that they weren’t going to be in it. It was like, ‘How could you cut this scene for a 12-year-old?’ There are other scenes where it doesn’t matter and it doesn’t change whatsoever. But then there’s other scenes, like Noble’s bedchamber. I’m so messed up, because I remember that it was numbered as scene 31. When I shot that scene, I pushed it quite far in some of the takes, but they cut around it in this one. So, in the extended cut, it’ll feel different, but it was all the same takes, although I swore like a sailor in certain takes.”
