Bereft of new ideas, beholden to silly slo-mo shenanigans, let it be known that writer/director Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is only truly harmful to those of us who care about proper punctuation.
Netflix appears to have it as Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire. Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB have it as Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire. What in the em dash is going on here? Where does the colon belong?! That’s a weird question to be asking, given that a subset of Snyder’s fandom is so toxic they almost certainly have their heads in the orifice necessary to locate that organ.
Punctuation contemplation is more thought than anyone else has invested in anything involving Rebel: Moon: Part: One: A: Child: Of: Fire. That joke was low-hanging fruit, but this is pretty much Low-Hanging Fruit — The Movie. And that’s okay sometimes! Hodgepodging together various elements of the timeless epic monomyth and throwing in some mildly original element, like say a wizard wand, can be pretty profitable! J.K. But not really.
The problem is that Snyder didn’t throw in anything even mildly original. He literally pitched Star Wars executives on a redundant Seven Samurai in Space “idea” that was remade as recently as season one of The Mandalorian. When they passed, Netflix gave him eleventy billion dollars to do it anyway, without using Lucasfilm intellectual property. There are still glowing space swords, intergalactic governmental oppressors who shop at Nazi Gap, and even problematic parentage. Everyone must applaud the restraint Snyder showed in not introducing a tiny-but-powerful character who speaks backwards named Adoy.
If you find yourself saying “A’doy” frequently, you won’t be alone. The entirety of Rebel Moon’s first installment would be a minutes-long montage in most movies. Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), a galactic Goebbels, shows up to a small farming planet and says “feed our army or we’ll kill you all.” This doesn’t sit well with Kora (Sofia Boutella), who has a complicated past she doesn’t like talking about. Do you think maybe she’s good at killing stuff? Kora and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) skip around the universe picking up antiheroes to assist the farmers in fighting the fascists. That’s right, the whole stinkin’ thing is the “I know just the person we need, if only they’ll agree to help” scene from a billion other better films. Snyder, notoriously addicted to slowed motion, has reached his zenith by making an entire movie out of a montage.
It’s not a movie, actually. Legally, sure. Technically, yes. But realistically? No. This is the introduction to characters like Nemesis (Bae Doona), Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), and Titus (Djimon Hounsou), which are names given to characters by actual grownups. There’s also a robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins named Jimmy. He wears a set of antlers at one point. Nothing really happens, other than the group is assembled. The fight at the end is so wholly inconsequential that it really only serves to finally reveal who are main character actually is. It feels like a prequel to a movie series that doesn’t exist.
However…
Snyder’s unique visual flair is quasi-irresistible. The recycled parts from better stories gin up just enough interest. The unoriginality doesn’t hit as offensive, just lazy. And although everything feels like a video game cut scene that introduces playable characters…they would probably be fun to play with? Again, to be clear, this is not a movie. It isn’t even really the first part of a movie. It is a live-action adaptation of the cast of characters. The biggest fear here is that streaming services without concerns about theatrical experiences who are content to blur the line between TV series and movies are producing mushy messes that don’t work as either content form. If this is the next step in the degradation of cinema, wow is it hilarious that the horseman of the apocalypse…is Zack Snyder.
Grade = C-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Gissane Sophia at Marvelous Geeks Media says “It’s hard to decipher who we’re meant to trust and what relationship we’re meant to invest in here. In no way, shape, or form does Rebel Moon Part One feel like it knows what it wants to be.”
Siddhant Adlakha at Joy Sauce says “While it avoids Hollywood’s penchant for orientalism, and instead uses its designs to create an explicit anti-imperial and anti-colonial text, it fails to live up to both its eastern and western influences, and exists only as a mal-formed piece of marketing for something better.”
D.R. Medlen at The Mary Sue says “Rebel Moon puts the Snyder spin on a space epic and delivers a wild ride from start to finish. It’s not Shakespeare, but it sure is fun.”