Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire released on Netflix on December 15th, 2023, burdened with an overly-long title and an unfortunate lack of cohesive plot or characters. Rebel Moon represents Snyder’s long-awaited crack at a space opera, packed with sneering villains and epic CGI battles, endlessly hyped by Snyder’s fanbase, but ultimately doomed to be remembered as yet another generic, shallow, derivative, and utterly forgettable film.
There’s something almost impressive about the level to which Rebel Moon draws inspiration – or to be less charitable, steals – from other movies and franchises. It opens with narration setting up the world’s lore over a shot clearly reminiscent of Star Wars, before introducing us to our protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella), a peasant with a mysterious past on a remote farming planet. Her agrarian idyll is soon interrupted by the arrival of Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein, victim of one of 2023’s worst movie haircuts), commanding a warship sent by the Imperial Motherworld to seek out and destroy a rebel cell in the sector. The imperial troops need food and supplies to continue their search, and Noble demands that Kora’s village sell them the wheat they require. This is the inciting incident for the remainder of the movie, as Kora’s village refuses, resulting in Noble’s troops cracking down and taking the grain by force. The remainder of the runtime is occupied by Kora’s efforts to gather a team and take back her village. Rebel Moon’s plot essentially boils down to a riff on Seven Samurai in space, ending in a semi-climactic battle between Kora and Noble and a cliffhanger to set up the upcoming Rebel Moon: Part Two.
Where Rebel Moon truly falls short is in Zack Snyder’s writing. Its derivative visual elements, uninspiring color grading, and bland CGI could all be forgiven with a good script, but competent writing is nowhere to be seen in Snyder’s sci-fi epic. The supposed ensemble cast of characters barely have an ounce of development to share between them, and every scene in the movie follows roughly the same pattern – Kora and company arrive on a new planet (likely with a yellow or blue color filter), they encounter a new ally, a dull action sequence with far too much slow-motion ensues, and the ally joins their crew to stand in the background for the rest of the film. Repeat five or so times, capped by grain disputes and an overly long fight scene, and that’s essentially have the experience of watching Rebel Moon. Barely anything interesting happens, and you find yourself at the end regretting the two-plus hours of your life that can never be reclaimed.
No discussion of Rebel Moon would be complete without addressing its highly derivative elements. As mentioned above, the story takes far too much from both Star Wars and Seven Samurai, but those are not the only cases of uninspired material this film has to offer. The setting is a sloppy mess made from bits and pieces of Star Wars, Dune, and the Warhammer 40,000 settings, and even the film’s visual aesthetic borrows heavily from the aforementioned franchises – as well as scenes, imagery, and other elements lifted from Firefly, Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, Starship Troopers, and practically every other major piece of science fiction media from the last thirty years. The few parts of its visual aesthetic that aren’t taken from another sci-fi property are inspired by an odd mix of historical periods and cultures ranging from ancient Rome and the Victorian period to Napoleonic uniforms and fashion that looks straight out of World War II. Even the Monty Python’s Flying Circus Spanish Inquisition sketches are not safe from this film’s appropriating eye. If anything in Rebel Moon looks interesting to you, odds are it’s lifted from something else that did it better.
These aren’t the only flaws with this movie. For a modern epic space opera, it looks genuinely terrible, and the tiny scale of its sets belie its $166 million budget. Anthony Hopkins, like the rest of the cast, is woefully underused. Towards the beginning of this movie, there is a completely unnecessary scene in which a group of soldiers attempt to sexually assault one of Kora’s fellow villagers, a scene that adds nothing to the movie and uses sexual violence and implied rape to get a cheap reaction out of the audience. Snyder using violence against women as a plot device for easy shock value is sadly not new, and it is apparent that he still hasn’t learned not to objectify this very real, very harrowing trauma. In Rebel Moon, all of Zack Snyder’s worst tendencies as a director and writer take the front seat. It is derivative, shallow, callous, boring, and overall, not worth your time. Those two hours could be spent watching something far better, and it is doubtful (though not impossible) that the four-hour, rated-R cut Snyder is threatening to release will improve upon it. Watch Star Wars instead. Watch Dune. Watch anything else – you’ll thank me later.
1/5 STARS