There’s no joy to be found in hating a director’s entire body of work. On a long enough timeline and with strong enough scripts, any director can find their niche and produce a good film or two. This hope prevails in the hearts of optimists who, having seen glimmers of gold within the shit-mine that is Zack Snyder’s oeuvre, find themselves hoping that one day, he’ll make something truly excellent, even if it’s terribly dumb and full of gratuitous slow-motion. Largely shackled by comic book adaptations and franchises for the better part of the last 20 years (besides 2011’s Sucker Punch and 2021’s Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves, of course), the idea of Snyder doing his version of Star Wars felt promising. Perhaps, with just a little bit of grace, the much-maligned filmmaker could at last take all his stylistic quirks and urges and create a universe befitting the fawning adoration granted to him by internet movie bros.
It’s cynical to say that “It’s the hope that kills you,” but in the case of Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire, it’s just too fitting. All films reveal something about their maker, and in the case of Rebel Moon, it reveals that the issue was never that Snyder was being held back by having to adapt the work of others. The reality is that the best parts of 300, Watchmen, and Dawn of the Dead only exist because Snyder was being kept on a leash. His disciples will argue that the comparative qualities of each so-called “Snyder Cut” of any of his films show a history of executive meddling ruining his vision, but really, his director’s cuts only serve to make lackluster films more Snyder-flavored, without making them good.
If you’ve seen Star Wars, Seven Samurai and A Bug’s Life, you don’t need to watch Rebel Moon. Snyder has been upfront about these inspirations in interviews, but despite the overwhelming obviousness of their influence, it’s hard to say whether Snyder or his co-writers (Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, whom he worked with on 300 and Army of the Dead and their sequels, respectively), understood what made those films work. We watch soldiers of an authoritarian empire land on the backwater moon of Veldt and do some textbook-evil stuff (beat an old man to death, try to rape a young woman, abuse their own robot helper, demand the farmers of Veldt give up all their crops), but their actions are too on-the-nose to be menacing. We watch our heroes, Kora (Sofia Boutella of The Mummy (2017) fame) and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman, better known as Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones) slowly collect other rebels, but none of them are compelling enough for us to even remember their names or anything about them once the film changes focus to another planet and another rebel.
This is the epitome of “tell, don’t show” sci-fi, where every character speaks in chunks of wooden exposition, every person and place thoroughly explained at other people, even if those people would already know everything being said. In one particularly egregious late-film scene, the villain of the film (and likely the series) rattles off facts about Kora to her face. This kind of thing happens repeatedly throughout the movie, making almost every interaction feel like a tedious slog. This is one of the easiest pitfalls of the space epic: You end up needing characters to deliver a lot of dialogue meant for the audience, not for the people in the film.
This expositional necessity feels encoded within the film’s DNA — every scene is designed to introduce us to the myriad characters recruited to the rebel cause, but Rebel Moon doesn’t care about why we should give a shit about any of them, stopping at assuring us that we should care. When it’s time to meet blacksmith/beast-tamer Tarak (Staz Nair, also of Game of Thrones fame), we watch him get the better of a griffin. The cyborg swordsman laughably named Nemesis (The Host’s Doona Bae), is introduced via swordplay, when she defeats an angry spider-woman (inexplicably played by Jena Malone). Even our aforementioned villain, the overwhelmingly Nazi-coded Atticus Noble (Deadpool’s Ed Skrein) is too laughably evil to be interesting. And when we’re not getting infodumped upon, the writers serve us groanworthy, flavorless gunk like “They believed in their cause, what better thing to die for?” or “Home — never had a place to give the word.”
Essentially nothing about Rebel Moon works — even when the film stumbles onto something bordering on interesting character or environmental design, it’s undercut by just looking lifeless and sterile, even in natural settings. The one thing that Snyder should be able to do in his sleep — give us cool-looking fight sequences — instead feels like a joke played on the audience, a murky barrage of slow-mo and bland, toothless violence. Watching some comically evil Space Nazis get their brains blown out by a robot voiced by Anthony Hopkins won’t change the fact that the Snyder we find on Rebel Moon couldn’t frame a shot to save his life, which is a death sentence for action scenes, and spells doom for smaller moments that happen outside our view for seemingly no reason.
As the first installment of an (at least) two-part story, Rebel Moon feels like it devoted all its energy in setting up part two (The Scargiver, due out in April), but totally forgot that, typically, movies only get a sequel when enough people like the first film. Snyder’s clout and name recognition is enough that Part Two was essentially a foregone conclusion, and it’s clear that Snyder and his co-writers thought to themselves, “It’s fine! Part Two will be where all the really good stuff happens, once we know who everyone is!” The end result is a half-assed, half-baked, half-finished schlockfest that leaves you struggling to imagine anybody — even the most die-hard Snyder apologists — finding enough value in it to want to give away another two-plus hours of their precious lives to its sequel.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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