Summary
- Property Master Brad Elliot reveals the approach to deg weapons technology in Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon, including differentiating the technology of different planets and cultures.
- Elliot discusses the design of the "Beetlejuice chair," a restraint device used by the Imperium, which unfolds like transformers and can sever spines, making it a key tool for catching and transporting people.
- The article highlights the creation of props and technology for Rebel Moon, including currency, documentation books, gun designs, and the use of molten lava-like weapons that generate heat and have a unique aesthetic.
Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon is the launch of Zack Snyder's newest Netflix universe, and Screen Rant learned all about the creation of the movie's weapons and technology in our interview with Property Master Brad Elliot during our visit to the Rebel Moon set in October 2022. Brad revealed the approach to deg the weapons technology, differentiating the technology of different planets and cultures, and revealed how much trouble he had deg a gun too big for Zack Snyder.
Rebel Moon is actually two movies shot back-to-back with Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire arriving December 22, 2023, and Rebel Moon: The Scargiver arriving five months later on April 19, 2024. Thanks to the scale of those two movies, and possibly more to come, Elliot's role in developing the look and feel of Rebel Moon's weapons, technology, and other props provides a big look behind the scenes at what audiences can expect when Rebel Moon arrives on Netflix.
Brad Elliot: What is your focus? How can I help be a guide to that?
What's cool? What's the cool stuff.
Brad Elliot: Yeah, so this is kind of the biggest thing we have to an elephant. This is our Beetlejuice chair. So this is a restraint device that the Imperium uses. They come out of these crates, sort of unfolding like transformers, and sort of use their speed and agility to actually go and grab people. They're very articulate. When this is going to be on camera, it will be all CG and moving around really well. And then people get sort of restrained into these things. Their hands are locked down, their chests are locked down, their heads are restrained. And when you want to make somebody docile for transportation, you take one of these devices and you cock it, and you put it into the back of the chair, right at their upper vertebrae.
Oh, that'll do it.
Brad Elliot: And smack. And now you sever their spine. So they're not going to be in trouble anymore. So this is one of the main tools of the Imperium to sort of catch and transport people. We call it the Beetlejuice chair because Zack kind of had this idea that it reminded him of a little bit of a couch that was walking around from Beetlejuice at one point before we even refined the design. So that's there. And I suppose maybe we'll just do a loop. We can start over here. We have some articles of the priests of the Imperium. So when the Imperium goes out to do anything, they like to document it. And that's what this book is. You have scribes who are theoretically like conscripted at the age of five or something ridiculous and just made to learn to write perfect Imperium calligraphy as fast as they can so that when you have Noble and his group and they're about to subjugate a world like the quality of the air is noted. The breeze is talked about. It is a copious sort of documentation that then follows around so that the Imperium knows exactly what they did. And it's really quite a beautiful book. The frame there is once you subjugate a ruler from – and by subjugate you take that bone staff and you cave in their skull. And after you sift through their brains, you use that pair of pliers. You take one of their teeth and push it into this frame, into that clay area there that's not quite full. And this is going to have – we don't have the picture yet because we haven't had our portrait made. But there's going to be a portrait of the king and his daughter in there.
Lots of brain stuff.
Brad Elliot: It's a Zack Snyder movie, so…. We also made a currency for the film. So we have our own set of points here. We did – these are the hundreds. This is ten. And these are our pennies for one. And we have a lot of scenes where people have to buy things and pay for things. We have gambling. We have all kinds of stuff like that. So it's a meager collection of coins but we've made it work for the entirety of it.
Is that eagles and wolves and –
Brad Elliot: Yes, these are all sort of images of the Imperium. So this is an image of the slain king which is on all of the money on one side. And then we have these different images. This is more of a religious image of the king that invokes sort of the greater power. The wolf carries its own meaning. We have our own Imperium block font down there. And this I believe says the price is death is what the inscription underneath the wolf is there.
How long has it understood that the Imperium has been in power?
Brad Elliot: I think this is about four years since – well, the Imperium has been in power for a time immemorial. The king and his reign ended about four years ago and now we're in the Regency of Belisarius. That's the transition there. In fact, the king was released from his mortal coil by a bunch of stabbing, much like Caesar. And you see the knives over there. Those are our royal knives. And then some scrolls on the table which we are going to be using as the articles of surrender for a flashback scene with Kora. And we needed something for the text so we decided that the articles of surrender that the Emperor gave on – I can't which flagship it was back in World War II, but these are the articles of surrender for Japan to the United States, just translated.
Oh, really?
Brad Elliot: Yeah. In these scrolls of surrender. We try to dress up all of our foreign – all of our other worlds. So we have a character named Tarak and we first meet him at his father's funeral. And so he's on a big funeral plinth holding that scepter as sort of a royal burial scepter. There's Toa where Eris comes from, which is what this next little collection over here is with the brand and this blue critter in the cage, the books. And a knife. And we built this royal rifle for Toa. So that is one of the first non-imperium guns you'll see. And we tried to find a really nice balance of something that looks familiar but doesn't look like it's out of any other movie.
Is it like gunpowder and projectile?
Brad Elliot: No, we have a really interesting sort of idea for that. It's all like tanks of plasma. This is going to light up for us. So this is one that's fun because when you load it, you get all the ammo counters and then as you shoot it, they go away…So what we shoot is, think of it as a lava cork. It's molten, it's heavy, and it's about the size of a cork. So if it hit you, it would knock you over, but the hole that it would create would cauterize, if that makes sense. If it hits a hard surface like metal, it's going to hit and maybe drip a little bit, like a lava would, if that makes sense. They're either driven by these sort of tank-like magazines, and when I say tank, it means there's a pressurized sort of plasma inside of them. Or when we get to Veldt and we get to their hunting weapons, they're a little older, so they go on like a, it's still caseless, but it's like a puck of whatever this compressed material is that would then become what that is.
Nice.
Brad Elliot: We have some mining tools for when we meet Milius for the first time. They're captured and taken away from their homeworld and enslaved, and taken to a mining colony. And this is the tool that they use, they've got the mask on, the backpack, and then this sort of mining laser. Past that we have some rebel pilot helmets for Bloodaxe and that crew. And then more guns. So the first one here is for Bloodaxe, he's a really big dude, so this was almost a joke about like, How big can I make a gun? and have Zack still say yes.
Did you get him, did you ever find a too big?
Brad Elliot: No, I've never found, normally I'll do like a one that's obviously too small, one that's obviously too big, and then three in the middle, and we'll do like a cardboard cutout just to get scale. Once we decide, yeah exactly, right? But you gotta make sure you have one that's ridiculously large and one that's just too stupidly small. He's really leaned into the ridiculously large every time. So this is a rebel gun. And then we also imagine that our rebels have captured some of the Imperium weapons. So here's an Imperium Heavy that would belong to the Jimmies and the Krypteans, but also our rebels would have, if they would have killed any of those people, they would have taken their guns.
What would differentiate the rebel from the Imperium?
Brad Elliot: The rebels will hang trophies. So maybe those are some bones from some commanders that they've killed, and they decided to take a finger bone or something like that from them as a trophy. And hang it on their gun, almost like a Vlad the Impaler kind of strike fear in your enemies by showing them pieces of the ones that they've killed. And they keep those as totems or trophies.
In-universe, are these all made by the same manufacturers, or is there a different aesthetic?
Brad Elliot: I would imagine that there's a different aesthetic to most of them. The Imperium weapons are all sort of, come from a modular design…the idea behind all of our guns is that they generate heat because they're shooting these lava corks. So you'll see common language up front somewhere in every gun is going to be some kind of heat dissipation consideration, if that makes sense… But the Imperium basically have machine pistols, submachine guns, the AR, and the heavy. That's their kit.
Brad Elliot: Our technology seems to be a little clunky, that's kind of the way Zack wanted to go. So this is one of the comm units that the soldiers carry. We built it off of a trail camera for catching wildlife, because it has a really cool look already. But it feels like it could easily be a big honking radio. Defining this universe has been really tricky, because we don't want to be Star Wars or Star Trek or Aliens or lesser science fiction, let's say Oblivion or Dune. But you know what I mean, the other less well-known franchise is we're trying to create something brand new. And so that's one of the reasons we leaned into like “oh, the lava corks.” We can really use that idea to further along the design of the guns. Again, really big and chunky. But this is sort of Zack's aesthetic, is big blocky, huge powerful looking thing.
The Hakshaws who are in service to the bad guys, they have these as their binoculars, as they're looking around. With that interactive light so you know there's something happening in there, it really just makes you blind. We needed grenades, so we want them to look sort of mechanical and maybe like they're 50 years old, and still familiar as a grenade. But nothing that you've seen before…And then we have our Kryptians, do you guys know about them?
Nope.
Brad Elliot: seen any of the costumes? So the idea is that like the old soldiers who stayed with from the old regime to the new regime are now these sort of super soldiers. And whether they're jacked up on drugs or whether they just have training or they're really good because they've survived, we don't know exactly. But they carry these swords which are sort of a foil to the Nemesis swords which we'll see in a minute. And these are powered so you hit this button and this whole sword, all this metal starts to heat up to the point where if you're not wearing a glove, you're going to burn your hands. But it kind of gives us that sort of, you know, over a stronger super sharp sword where maybe if this was lit and I just put it down on the table it would go through. That was one of Zack’s things.
So a lot of molten lava kind of consistency seems to be… Is it like lava punk?
Brad Elliot: Yeah, a lot of just funky technology. They're not quite lightsabers. And they're not quite like whatever Black Widow carried that got all sparkly and crackly. But they're something in the middle.
We have our big rocket launcher for when you really have to blow something up. And then this is one of the comm centers. It's missing its camera and we just realized that our interactive screen fell through to the inside. But it gives you an idea of the level of technology. You've seen the sets, you've seen the ships, right? They kind of have that Cold War submarine feel. And so we were deg into that feel as much as we can to make sure that everything kind of has that old but new look.
Zack is really heavy on age es. He likes everything to show its age and to be as old and lived in as possible. Even that Beetlejuice chair there, you'll see it has s that aren't painted the same as the other ones. As if it's gone through something, we've had to replace those parts over time. So things show repair and wear quite a bit. Oh, this is the antenna for the comm system. Again, our technology is not like a little communicator on your chest that can talk to a ship 20 miles away. You've got to put up an array, which is kind of fun.
