There’s a lot going on in this movie at the meta level, i.e., conceptually, and symbolically of things in real life, etc.
I'll take a different spin on this.
Some stories need a very specific format. For example, Enders Game. It's basically impossible to try to condense that kind of story into a 3 hour film. It's even worse if you tried it in a two hour film. Because of the raw logistics ( finding young actors to fill all those roles, now try to do that over the range of a multiple season TV series and film it fast enough to not get trapped by the kids growing too fast on you, that's not even beginning to deal with the huge mess that is trying to cast the film in the first place, it's tough enough to find one great young actor, try finding a dozen....), you'd be forced to animate it.
Enders Game can work. As a TV series. That's animated.
My take on this is Snyder would have been better off long term starting Rebel Moon as an immersive video game. Then using that a "pressure test" for the concept overall. And based on it's success or how fans react, then push for a feature film or a trilogy.
Remember The Titans is canned Oscar bait. It's constructed in a way to be review friendly / accessible / lean into Hollywood's actual day to day culture. Peter Berg's Friday Night Lights is a pure guys movie. It's a film for guys and it's instructive to young men on the struggles of growing up and facing your own masculinity. I will agree that Snyder gets a lot of immediate and automatic vitriol. If he made films more like Remember The Titans, he'd get left alone more. But he makes guy movies that don't apologize for being guy movies. So some of the criticism he gets is too far over the top that doesn't address the actual film. However, Rebel Moon is far too character heavy and plot heavy in this format.
There is a good story here. But not packaged as such.
Nearly everyone love the first Predator film. Iconic in every way. But it would suck as a TV series. Suck in ways people can't even imagine. You can have the same cast, same director, same story, and if you tried to drag it out for three full season at 12 episode each, the story would crash and burn.
Rebel Moon has narrative problems because it has structural problems. Those structural problems exist because it's IMHO not in the proper format. But there is a good story here. Snyder needs to operate in the constraints of the format in place. They exist because they operate as guard rails for fundamental storytelling. The guard rails exist to maintain a narrative's marketability through function. In essence, Snyder could have just made this way easier on himself from the beginning but still had the opportunity to tell "his story"
Basic rule of the industry - The "game" is hard enough on it's own if you do everything the fundamental way. No need to create your own problems on top of that.
I enjoy a lot of what Snyder has done, but he often doesn't help his own cause logistically. Whether you agree or disagree, I'm giving you a hypothetical viewpoint of how a potential investor will look at all this before deciding to jump in and help finance one of Snyder's projects. From that angle, it moves beyond whether Snyder is being persecuted or not. Just being honest.
