Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon began life as a Star Wars pitch, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story already proved the great potential the director’s next movie has. Snyder’s Netflix sci-fi movie Rebel Moon commenced production in late April 2022, with the project to be a two-part sci-fi epic filmed back-to-back. Though only a general outline of what Snyder has planned for Rebel Moon is available, it’s not hard to see how it could’ve fit into the Star Wars pantheon had it been greenlit in its original form.
In Rebel Moon, a colony in another galaxy faces the conquest of the galactic warlord Regent Balisarius (Rupert Friend). This leads a young woman named Kora (Sofia Boutella) to recruit warriors from neighboring planets to help the colony in their stand against the invasion. While Snyder has reworked Rebel Moon to act as an original story after it was declined as a Star Wars film, Rogue One probably gives the closest similarity to Snyder’s modified version of Rebel Moon among existing Star Wars movies.
Rogue One takes place just before Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, and focuses on the ragtag group of rebels stealing the plans for the Death Star in order to give the Rebellion an edge against the Empire. The basic plot of Rogue One puts the Star Wars anthology film at more of an arm’s length relationship with the main franchise. The general synopsis of Rebel Moon suggests it would have been much the same had it been made as a Star Wars movie, while Rogue One‘s characters also exemplify the strategy in Snyder’s approach. Other than the tertiary but very memorable villain role of Darth Vader, Rogue One is largely removed from the core Jedi and Sith elements of Star Wars. Its protagonists are more ground-level rebels and warriors like Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), and Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen). By all outward appearances, Rebel Moon seems to be centered on protagonists of a similar nature.
The description of Sofia Boutella’s Kora reads as a reluctant heroine forced to adopt the mantle of a leader in a trial by fire. Ray Fisher’s Blood Axe also sounds like a similarly formidable warrior as Chirrut Imwe, and reinforces the idea that Snyder’s force of heroes assembled against Balisarius is focused primarily on very human rebel heroes. Other characters like Balisarius and General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) carry the same intergalactic military aura that’s a staple of Star Wars, while the conflict itself seems to have similar stakes as that of Rogue One.
The entire team’s sacrifice in Rogue One‘s ending also displays another potential commonality with Rebel Moon. Snyder’s well-known predilection for killing off major characters suggests a strong likelihood that more than a few of Rebel Moon‘s will meet such fates. Of course, none of this means that Rogue One should be viewed as an exact template adopted by Snyder for Rebel Moon. Snyder’s doubtlessly gone out of his way to shed the film’s Star Wars similarities for Rebel Moon to tell its own story without being overshadowed by one of the biggest monuments in all of sci-fi. Even still, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story showed that Snyder’s standalone approach would’ve made Rebel Moon a very strong entry in the Star Wars franchise – with Rebel Moon even better outside of Star Wars.
