What does it mean that Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon was this week sitting pretty at the top of the Netflix Top 10, other than that viewers of the app will watch pretty much anything? This is after all, the streaming service that gave Adam Sandler, the actor-producer behind such totems of modern cinema as Jack and Jill, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Grown Ups 2 a multiple movie contract as far back as 2014. One of the films that sprang fully formed from that deal like a putrid zombie hydra head was 2015’s execrable The Ridiculous 6, which boasts an impressive 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But boy was it popular – maybe these guys just know their audience.
I should point out that there is also a considerable amount of excellent material on Netflix. The streaming service often seems to be interested in movies that people are likely to watch casually (at least once), as much as those they will view a dozen times, recommend to friends and generally bind to their own personal cultural carapace for the next decade or so. Which is perhaps where Snyder comes in.
Ever since the US film-maker delivered Watchmen in 2009, it has been pretty much downhill as far as the critics have been concerned. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) made more than $800m at the global box office, but was vilified by reviewers as an overhyped, knuckleheaded, ultra violent marketing exercise that completely misunderstood superhero worldbuilding and (even more essentially) Batman himself.
Sucker Punch (2011) had earlier been called out for its obsession with style over substance, while Man of Steel (2013) and animated fantasy Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole both met with a rousing chorus of “meh”. Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire has received the worst reviews of Snyder’s career, yet a trailer for sequel Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver dropped this week, with the movie to debut in April.
Somehow Snyder, out of the ashes of the finally dead DC extended universe, seems to have built an army of slavering fans on social media who will support anything he brings to the table. This must be perfect for Netflix, which ultimately needs constant new content to encourage subscribers to keep hitting the play button, whether it’s Oscars bait or Selling Sunset. Has Snyder simply become – like Sandler before him – critic proof?
There are very few film-makers who can defy terrible or middling reviews for more than a few movies, but here is one who (other than his surprisingly good Justice League director’s cut) hasn’t really made a critically well-received film in more than a decade – yet still seems to be going stronger than ever. Rebel Moon is little more than an expensively configured, gorgeous-looking but ultimately soulless Star Wars rip-off, yet there seems to be every chance that a Netflix-backed Snyder will get to see his vision of a multimedia space franchise to rival the one once cooked-up by George Lucas becoming reality.
Even more intriguingly, last week Christopher Nolan suggested that his one-time collaborator (on Man of Steel) should be recognised as a seminal influence on comic book movies.
“There’s no superhero science-fiction film coming out these days where I don’t see some influence of Zack,” Nolan told the Atlantic, which labelled Snyder “The director people love to hate” in a comprehensive profile piece. “When you watch a Zack Snyder film, you see and feel his love for the potential of cinema. The potential of it to be fantastical, to be heightened in its reality, but to move you and to excite you.”
Nobody is denying that Snyder is capable of visually splendid segues such as the bravura extended opening of Watchmen, his eye-popping, hyper-tense, slo-mo recreation of Batman’s parents’ death in Dawn of Justice, or the noggin-boggling cosmic wonder of those early sections on Krypton in Man of Steel. But honestly, if Nolan thinks this is enough to elevate his fellow film-maker to legendary status in the comic book movie oeuvre, one has to respectfully question if the esteemed director of the Dark Knight trilogy has particularly elevated expectations of the genre in 2023.
Still, numbers do the talking and the numbers say that everyone is watching Rebel Moon. If Nolan and 24 million Netflix viewers can’t be wrong, it looks as if we should prime ourselves for plenty more neo-Jedi, ersatz lightsaber adventures across the cosmos for years to come. Perhaps, by the law of averages, if Snyder keeps making these things he will eventually deliver a good one. And if not, well that’s the thing about streaming, there’s always something else to watch.