Having already made a sizeable TV mark with popular franchises like “Stranger Things” and “Squid Games,” Netflix obviously wants its own in-house epic “Avatar” or “Dune” sci-fi blockbuster franchise for the cinema (irony not lost here). Having made a home for director Zack Snyder, post-short-lived DC Universe, with “Army Of The Dead,” they’re clearly banking on the filmmaker’s latest effort, “Rebel Moon”—a big blustery and fabulist space opera in the vein of “Star Wars”— and to be the next big thing. Unfortunately, the lifeless and superficial “Rebel Moon” is anything but and direly announces itself as a turgid, dead-on-arrival non-starter right from the jump.
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Once conceived as a” Star Wars” movie with elements of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and then refashioned back into an “original” sci-fi film, the bare bones of that story remain, minus George Lucas’ touchstone elements (though many of them still here, barely disguised). But “Rebel Moon” is beyond just deeply shallow imitation; it completely lacks inspiring ideas, making for an exceptionally tedious and flat experience despite the broad, ambitious canvas it is drawn on. It reads and feels like a studio cable directed down to exec, “We need epic space opera, stat, green light, easiest ready-to-go option, stat.”
All of Snyder’s worst grandiose impulses towards the overwrought, the overblown, and the self-indulgent—see the abysmal “Sucker Punch,” which “Rebel Moon” honestly rivals for the title of his worst movie— are entirely on display at all-time, perhaps trying to cover for a slight, rail-thin threadbare story that fails ever to engage.
“Rebel Moon” begins with a “Star Wars”-like crawl, only this time, it’s done in a long-drawn-out narration by Anthony Hopkins, whose solemn voice is perhaps meant to provide gravity to some convoluted backstory about the corrupt government of the Motherworld (clearly a stand-in for the Empire) and some, “wut, huh?” gibberish about the “Imperium” and other long-winded historical events that happened in the past. Perhaps because of so many derivative, previously baked-in Lucasfilm elements substituted for something else, the presumptuous “Rebel Moon” constantly makes the lethal mistake of assuming the audience has an investment in this galaxy far away).
From there, it tells an immensely basic and boring story that’s not deeper or more complex than recruiting random good guys to fight bad guys. Kora (Sofia Boutella), a stranger with a mysterious past, is welcomed into a farming community on the Moon of Veldt. Soon, the malevolent Admiral Noble (a one-note of cruelty Ed Skrein) and his army visit this off-world to sniff out rebel forces that have made life difficult for the Motherworld (“Oh no, they’re suddenly here!” everyone essentially moans when an imperious-looking shadowy ship blocks out the sun). Ultimatums are made about delivering grain harvest (zzzz), a military occupancy begins, and soon, Kora and the one kind of brave Veldt farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), go on a mission, ala ‘Seven Samurai’ to enlist other dissidents to join their cause.
But monotonous and uninspired in every turn, “Rebel Moon” fails to hook the viewer early, and thus, the longwinded adventure to add new members in the fight against the imminent Motherworld return is exhausting and excruciatingly mind-numbing.
“Rebel Moon” feels like a feature-length pitch deck and lavish, colorful storyboard brought to life. It has scale, size, visual grandeur, and spectacular pop-fantasy razzle dazzle on hand (think “Lord Of The Rings” and “Guardians Of The Galaxy” fused with some Frank Herbert), but nothing else. It’s like a visual proof of concept that lacks compelling characters and an engaging story and thus feels shockingly empty and soulless.
Netflix clearly gives carte blache, and Synder runs with it, crafting a two-hour mediocrity that can barely justify its runtime and yet still insists to its viewers it warrants a sequel (spoiler: it most certainly does not).
A mish-mash hodge-podge of sci-fi tropes, borrowing a little from fantasy movies like “Dune,” on top of its recycled George Lucas ideas, “Rebel Moon” is reminiscent of some of the most throwaway and disposable films of this ilk, bringing to mind, “John Carter Of Mars,” “Terminator Genisys,” “Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets,” and Frank Miller’s “The Spirit,” a similarly visually ambitious, but narratively insipid movie.
Snyder discovered trashy fun and surprisingly entertaining elements to his aforementioned Netflix zombie film, “Army Of The Dead,” but this film reroutes him back to the days of self-seriousness.
Snyder’s worst films are always humorless, pretentious, and grim, and this unfortunate propensity is exasperatingly glaring here. There’s no joy, vim, or sense of playful wit that’s so key to many classic blockbusters. Every moment of the self-important, oppressive movie is airless and melodramatic, and the entire cast plays every histrionic scene so painfully pompously and somber (all the incessant trademark Snyder slow-motion and speed-ramping to imbue hyper-violent action moments with weight only exacerbates how sweaty and vacant the entire affair is). There’s all of one joke in the film—a bleak moment where a hero essentially says “good job” when a giant hawk kills its evil master (this entire sequence and tangent are brutally leaden, longwinded, and unnecessary).
The film’s arrogant, unearned self-confidence is off the charts and sometimes nearly embarrassing in the way it’s so clearly self-assured in its vision and yet lacks self-awareness about how hollow that vision is. “Rebel Moon” plays out like an interminable trailer for each character it introduces to the fight— Doona Bae plays a cyborg swordfighter who is the obvious stand-in for the “kickass” Jedi that was present in the original script. In that regard, Snyder’s film is essentially just a tiresome collection of “here’s the latest badass” sequence they’ve drafted with almost no convincing rationale ever given as to why they would risk their lives to save some random farming town other than phony do the right thing platitudes and unpersuasive monologue entreaties.
Filled with supporting players that don’t do much, Djimon Hounsou, Charlie Hunnam, Staz Nair, Ray Fisher, and Cleopatra Coleman among them, there’s not one stand-out, and no one fares very well with all the ponderous acting and stiff dialogue.
“Rebel Moon” is so uninvolving that its conspicuous problems stand out even more. There’s such a mess of disparate, conflicting and incongruous accents even within people supposedly from the same villages (Corey Stoll and Hunnam can’t even seem to get theirs straight from scene to scene). World-building and design-wise, nothing feels congruent either; again, it’s just a jumble of haphazard styles. Whereas “Star War” managed to convincingly create a universe that melded vintage and futuristic elements into one aesthetic and made you believe they could co-exist, “Rebel Moon” fails at exactly this same execution. The farmers look like they’re plucked out of age-old Hobbiton eras with backwood technology, the villains borrow Nazi iconography, and some “Dune” elements are reappropriated. Still, when spaceships and blasters appear, it feels deeply implausible that all these elements cohabitate in the same universe. Politically, despite an evil oppressor at its core, Snyder seems as libertarian/outsider-ish as ever, characters often alluding to being out of step with “both sides” of the ruling forces in this galaxy.
Titled in full, “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire,” part two, “The Scargiver,” arrives in the spring of 2024, and one assumes there’s no way that anyone would pay for it—given this disastrous first installment—had it not already been shot. However, a sequel to a story that can barely sustain one movie underscores the fundamental problem (and how aggressively uninterested the audience may be in more). ‘A Child Of Fire’ is essentially one or two strained acts agonizingly stretched and overextended over one movie and given far too much free rein to indulge in protracted tangents the movie does not deserve. At the risk of being more uncharitable, honestly, who approved this thing? “Rebel Moon” is nearly unwatchable and one of the most stunning misfires of this scale in quite some time. [D+]
