Zack Snyder is world-building once again with Rebel Moon. This time the 300 and Justice League filmmaker is creating not just one world but a sprawling menagerie of planets, full of cyborg warriors with molten-metal swords, giant half-humanoid arachnids, and ancient robots that seem to have emerged more from medieval times than the future. The new Netflix space saga that Snyder directed and cowrote extends far beyond the verdant orb of the title. That moon is actually one of the more modest worlds. It circles an immense gas giant at a distant edge of the galaxy and is populated mainly by farmers. It's nowhere special, but it’s about to change the balance of power in this fictional universe.

While any sci-fi extravaganza naturally features copious digital effects, Snyder also used his estimated budget of at least $166 million to manifest as much of it in real life as possible. In a Santa Clarita canyon just outside Los Angeles, a full-size abandoned starfighter decays not far from what appears to be an idyllic Scandinavian-style village, complete with clusters of homes, shops, and barns, as well as a stone bridge arching over a crystalline river. (Team Snyder also built the river.) Vast fields of actual wheat sprout from desert hardpan never meant for such lush growth, but Snyder insisted on real crops for his farmers to harvest and defend. Just over the rocky hillside sits another Rebel Moon set for a larger community known as Providence that looks like an Old West metropolis.  All of these are just locations on the moon of the title; there are other worlds beyond. 

This story, which Snyder has been mulling for more than three decades, focuses on outcasts, malcontents, and refugees from many disparate planets who join forces to rise up together against a punishing authoritarian government. As in real life, uniting so many different factions is easier proposed than accomplished, both in the story and behind the scenes as multiple plotlines entwine. In every way, Rebel Moon is a heavy lift.

“I’m a glutton for punishment. I don’t know why I always make an ensemble movie. I can’t wait to not do that. But in the meantime, of course…I love it,” Snyder says. He feels that constructing his worlds in real life makes the otherworldly feel more immersive. “This movie was me going, ‘Of course it’s a space opera, but let’s not lens it that way. Let’s lens it in a more intimate way, so that the sci-fi elements feel more grounded.’ We’re not always saying, ‘Look at how big our spaceships are or how weird our planets look!’ That happens, but it happens as an organic part of the world you’re in. You’re there, and so the things you see on that journey are not forced upon you or spoon-fed to you.”

Snyder shares these thoughts while sitting in a tavern built on the port city set, sweating profusely as he directs a gunfight sequence. A network of overhead pipes creates a thunderstorm that transforms the desert dust into pools of sticky mud while the heroes and villains blast at each other. When we spoke last summer, Rebel Moon was about halfway through principal photography, with more than three months to go. Snyder couldn’t have looked giddier. After an excruciating, combative experience building the DC superhero universe for Warner Bros.—and then seeing it scrapped—Snyder has finally found a studio that has given him epic trust to match its epic funding.

Debuting on Netflix on December 22, Rebel Moon is not just one movie—it’s already a saga, with plans to split the film into two parts. (That makes the $166 million price tag, estimated from California tax filings, a two-for-one bargain at around $83 million each.) The second part's release date has not yet been settled, but Snyder wants it to follow closely on the heels of the first one. “It won’t be long after. Netflix can do things that a traditional studio can’t do as far as how close together the movies are released," he says.

Also arriving at later dates will be more explicit, harder-edged cuts of the two movies. The first version of Rebel Moon to hit screens will be a fantasy adventure “that anyone can enjoy and watch,” Snyder says. The later cut will be strictly for adults. “I think for fans of mine and people who are ready to take a deeper, harder dive, that’ll be fun for them,” he says.

It’s already fun for him. “Originally, the script was one movie, but it was in ‘Zack form,’” says his wife and longtime producing partner, Deborah Snyder. “It was 172 pages.” Typically, a page of script equals a minute onscreen. So Rebel Moon was shaping up to be approximately three hours long—which worried Netflix film chairman Scott Stuber. “Stuber was like, ‘On the service, under-two-hour movies really do better for some reason,’ even though you’ll binge-watch a series of eight episodes,” Deborah Snyder says. “Zack said, ‘If you ask me to make this less than two hours, I’m going to lose all the character. You won’t care about these people. It’s a character story about how people can change, and redemption, and what are you willing to fight for…’ So he said, ‘What if I give you two movies?’”

If that gamble pays off, there may be many more Rebel Moons to come. It all starts with that nowhere world covered in fields of wheat.

The moon of Veldt is a David facing down the Goliath of the Mother World, which has amassed abundant wealth, political power, and an immense army. Veldt is nowhere special—until the rulers of the Mother World decide to seize it as a breadbasket. 

“They land in the village to say, ‘Listen, you guys will be our local food source while we’re tromping around this part of the galaxy. So how long till the harvest comes in?’ The villagers are pretty much stunned by the brutality, but they don’t realize what level the Mother World’s ready to go to,” Zack Snyder says. 

A newcomer named Kora (Sofia Boutella) rallies them to resist rather than roll over. She has been hiding on this moon after fleeing from her own role within the leadership of that oppressive government. (That’s her abandoned starship out beyond the wheat fields.) “The Imperium comes down, and they want to take the women and take the children and they need more soldiers,” Deborah Snyder says. “They’re going to take their food. And [the villagers] go, ‘Look, we can bargain with them.’”

The fugitive hiding in their midst is the only one who knows how foolhardy that is. “Kora used to be in the Imperium, and she’s like, ‘Guys, this ends badly for everybody,’” Zack Snyder says.

Boutella sees the character as a symbol for the way people ignore or run from the problems in their lives, until they can’t anymore. “She knows the guilt that she’s been living with, and the first step of her redemption is doing something about it instead of going away,” says the actor, best known for Atomic Blonde and playing the title role in 2017’s The Mummy opposite Tom Cruise. “I think that, as much as it is sci-fi, it’s a very human story,” she says.

This humble moon of Veldt is a greater danger than anyone realizes because the Mother World’s grip on its empire is secretly weakening and slipping. “They’ve conquered the universe, they’ve scooped everyone into the empire, and they’ve had to make individual deals with the different leaders of the different worlds. You can imagine how complicated that is. A lot of rulers felt like they made a bad deal, or that their fathers’ fathers made a bad deal. They begin to push back,” Zack Snyder says. “It’s more whispers at first. We’re right on the edge of revolution, and if our villagers are successful, the example of that could spur an even bigger revolt.”

Since these Veldt farmers can’t possibly fight the Imperium alone, Kora sets off with a mercenary starship pilot named Kai (Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam) to find help, since his Tawau-Class freighter is necessary to get them off-world and back again. It's not a ride built for comfort. Very little in Rebel Moon has a high gloss. 

“It’s more of a dieselpunk world than a steampunk world,” Snyder says. “There is a sort of higher-energy source than gasoline, since they have a way of jumping across vast swaths of the universe, but the technology hasn’t really changed in quite a while.” Snyder’s universe has become a stagnant one, in part because of the dictatorship weighing down on it and siphoning its resources.

Kora has only a few months to assemble her fighters before the Mother World’s forces return to Veldt to collect their harvest. “The advantage that they would have is, they could set a trap for the Imperium,” Snyder says. “A lot of times, if you’re fighting in a guerrilla war, you don’t know where the bad guys are going to be. But in this case, you know in nine weeks they’re going to be right there. So they could set a pretty insane trap for them. Of course, it all goes sideways. But that’s the initial plan.”

Kora is joined by Gunnar (Michiel Huisman, of Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House), a handsome but meek farmer she has befriended. While the pilot Kai has seen a lot of fighting and knows the back channels to various other guns for hire, Gunnar is naive about the world outside his village. He knows a lot about wheat, though. “There’s a scene where Charlie says, ‘What do you do in the village?’ And Gunnar goes, ‘Well, I’m in charge of the harvest. I catalog seeds.’ Charlie’s like, ‘Oh…okay,’” Snyder says. “In a lot of ways, the whole village, they have a slightly naive view of what the Imperium is capable of. They don’t think they’ll just be murdered by them.”

Together, Kora, Kai, and Gunnar recruit the most fearsome, calculating, and deadly warriors they can find on other subjugated worlds. Snyder spells out some of his inspirations: “It’s The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, The Magnificent Seven—anytime there’s either a village or a town that is threatened, that needs a gunfighter to come and do the dirty work that the townspeople can’t do.”

The first thing the village needs is a general capable of commanding the fighters the group hopes to assemble. That leads Kora to General Titus, played by Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Guardians of the Galaxy). “She finally tracks him down at this coliseum on a sort of gladiator planet, where he’s drunk and sad and doesn’t want anything to do with anybody,” Snyder says. “She’s trying to convince him to join up. There’s events that happened to him in the past that made him have to leave the Imperium and actually become an enemy of the Mother World. That scarred him.”

Another of the brawlers they seek is Tarak, a character who’s more Tarzan than space warrior. The bare-chested brawler (played by Supergirl and Game of Thrones actor Staz Nair) is in sync with nature to the degree that he can bond with a griffin-like flying beast called a Bennu and ride it into battle. Snyder wanted the members of the squad to each have a distinct style, so Tarak is inspired by Conan the Barbarian and the brawny warriors seen in the art of the iconic sword-and-sorcery illustrator Frank Frazetta. 

“When we first meet Tarak, he’s the indentured servant of this rancher, and he’s working the anvil as a blacksmith,” Snyder says. “They ask him if he’ll join, and he’s like, ‘I would love to, but I’m in debt to this guy and I’m going to honor that. That’s the kind of guy I am.’ So they figure out a way to get him to join. His backstory is that he comes from a noble family and they had a run-in with the Mother World. In a lot of ways, all the characters have a bone to pick with the Mother World.”

Another member with an axe to grind actually wields two flaming swords. South Korean actor Doona Bae plays Nemesis, a swordmaster who is partly mechanical. “These swords are powered by the gauntlets that she holds. The gauntlets are these ancient [artifacts] from her home world, and part of the rite of passage of being a warrior in her world is you have to cut your arm off, and then you put these kind of robot arms on. That allows you to wield these molten-metal blades,” Snyder says.

She inhabits a mining world that’s ruled by the Imperium, which extracts everything useful while leaving little for the planet’s inhabitants. “Nemesis is able to navigate the alleys and nooks and crannies, and she’s been sort of protecting the exploited workers of that world,” Snyder says.

The filmmaker reunited with Ray Fisher, his Cyborg actor from the DC films, by casting him alongside Cleopatra Coleman (The Last Man on Earth, Dopesick); the two play Darrian and Devra, a brother-and-sister team known as the Bloodaxes. They are galactic insurgents who have been angering the Mother World with a hit-and-run spree of attacks against the Imperium, without being especially effective at stopping its reign of abuse and terror. 

“They fight and hide. They don’t have the resources to have a pitched battle in the wide open,” Snyder says. “They’re kind of just fucking with supply lines and blowing up train tracks. That’s their kind of thing.”

The final human member of the team is Milius, played by newcomer E. Duffy. The character, like the performer, is nonbinary, so the director uses they/them pronouns when describing their backstory. Milius is a refugee from a farming world similar to Veldt—one that chose to cooperate rather than resist, and was subsequently demolished. 

“They came from a small farming village that got destroyed, and their people never really stood up. They got slaughtered,” Snyder says.

Milius wants justice for what happened but doesn’t have any special weaponry or training. Snyder says they bring something else to the team. “I think it’s heart,” he says. “That really is their specialty. In a lot of ways, they have the purest motivation to fight. Everyone else is battling some past demon, whereas Milius feels, ‘My world was destroyed, and it was very similar to this world. I didn’t get a chance to defend it, so I choose this one to defend.’”

There are even more outlandish characters who enter the fight, among them an ethereal spider-being played by Jena Malone and an ornate, centuries-old robot known as a Jimmy (voiced by Anthony Hopkins). The Jimmys were mechanical knights, relics of a bygone age, now mostly gone. This one endures in the wild, trying to merge the natural world with its mechanical form. 

Opposing these heroes is an Imperium enforcer known as Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), a volatile and cruel emissary from the Mother World with a chip on his shoulder. He serves under Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee, from 2012's Les Misérables and Hawkeye), who presides over this sector of the universe. 

Noble, contrary to his name, demonstrates his loyalty and strength with sociopathic indifference. “I’ve played antagonists at points in my career in the past, and I think when I’ve done it well, I’ve been able to add some kind of humanity and some kind of empathy to the characters. This is a bit different,” says the actor, best known for his dastardly characters in Deadpool and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

“With this character, I pointedly chose to leave humanity out of it completely for the first time,” Skrein says. “I’m not occupied with gaining your empathy. It will be interesting to see what the audience’s reactions are to it. Noble has chosen to exist outside of what he sees as the limitations of morality.”

Accompanying Noble are horrific masked figures known as the Scribes, priests from the religious order that dominates the Mother World. “Their purpose is, they write down information,” Snyder says. But instead of text, they use living human beings as their paper and implant memories and images into them. 

“Your DNA stores information,” Snyder explains. “You are put in stasis if you’re a page, and your body just becomes like a hard drive. The Scribes have the ability to transfer what they see. That’s how history is recorded by the Mother World. You can plug into those things later, and you experience the history as a memory. But the Scribes, of course, are manipulated by politics, and they write down only what they’re supposed to.”

It sounds like a fate worse than death, but the Mother World distributes a lot of death as well, usually by way of its Dreadnaught battleships. One such starship that looms large in Rebel Moon is The King’s Gaze. “That ship is a world destroyer. There’s, like, 8,000 soldiers on that ship. They’ve got, like, 200 dropships and 100 tanks, and it has this huge boom-boom howitzer,” Snyder says. “It could raze the surface of a planet. If they just fired on a planet for three days straight, there’d be nothing left. They do that a lot.”

Snyder knows it’s inevitable that some will label Rebel Moon as “Zack Snyder’s Star Wars.” Tonally, the Netflix film will be radically different from those set in that galaxy far, far away, but it does take place in a distant realm of space. And there is—as the title suggests—a struggling rebellion as well as a brutal dictatorship determined to crush it. “Of course those comparisons are going to be made,” Snyder says. “Anything that has a spaceship in it is going to be: ‘This is blank’s Star Wars.’ So I understand and sort of welcome the comparisons. But at the same time, I do believe that our thing is really an entirely different experience.”

Another reason he’s so accepting of the comparison is…once upon a time, even Snyder thought of Rebel Moon as Zack Snyder’s Star Wars. That’s how he pitched it to Lucasfilm more than a decade ago, just before Disney acquired the company and began making new movies.

“I was in postproduction on Man of Steel,” Snyder says. “I had heard there were rumblings about possibly doing another three [Star Wars] movies at some point. My take was that, if you just let me have the IP, I’ll make this cool movie, and I won’t get in the way of anything that you guys are doing.” In other words, his proposed film would feature original characters and a new storyline that didn’t necessarily impact or disrupt any of the existing Star Wars canon.

Snyder first met with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy shortly before the company’s sale, and he later sat down with Disney’s then studio chief, Alan Horn, after the acquisition. While Snyder felt their reactions to his idea were promising, both the filmmaker and Lucasfilm ultimately decided it wasn’t going to work out.

The story proved to be extremely portable. Since Rebel Moon was pitched as something separate from the classic Star Wars storylines, it could survive on its own if need be. Snyder committed to making more DC superhero films—Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the grueling Justice League—while Lucasfilm commissioned a new slate of films closely tied to the original Star Wars trilogy. “I didn’t really have time to do a Star Wars movie,” Snyder admits. “So it kind of worked out.”

But the idea continued to linger, as it had for decades. Snyder began to reimagine Rebel Moon as taking place in an original universe. Ironically, a similar thing happened in the ’70s when George Lucas, unable to secure the film rights to the Flash Gordon stories he loved as a boy, decided to make Star Wars in its own stand-alone world. Rebel Moon was ultimately revived as part of Snyder’s deal with Netflix, which produced the zombie heist-thriller Army of the Dead and its prequel, Army of Thieves. 

The details of the film have evolved significantly from his Lucasfilm proposal, but the core of Rebel Moon remains close to the concept he originally crafted as a student in the late ’80s. “The concept came from being at film school. I think I had a pitch class—what would be a cool idea for a movie? And I was like: ‘a defending-the-village space movie,’” Snyder says. “Only afterward, I thought it would fit in the Star Wars universe. Then it went all the way back around,” he continues. “It’s been literally on the back burner for a long time. I don’t even know if the burner was on for a lot of that time.”

Now Rebel Moon is finally a reality. There is pressure to pull off what mainstream Hollywood has lately deemed impossible: introducing an epic world that isn’t already known to audiences, and making it a hit.

Deborah Snyder hopes the project will provide a pathway to new fans who love all the things that inspired it but are yearning for something fresh. “It has a bit of Star Wars. It has a bit of everything,” she says. “It’s a little bit like Lord of the Rings, a little bit Game of Thrones with the palace intrigue. And it’s really just a lot of what’s in Zack’s head.”