Usually, I like to write about stuff I like. But sometimes it can be therapeutic to rant about stuff that one does not like. Today and tomorrow I am going to indulge in a bit of ranting about two movies I saw last year that I did not care for.
The first of these movies is Zack Snyder’s latest Netflix movie, Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire. This is an original sci-fi film, although it does not feel like one. It borrows heavily from just about every major sci-fi movie ever. The most obvious examples are Star Wars and Star Trek, but if you look closely you’ll see DNA from Avatar, Dune, Alien/Aliens, Blade Runner, Guardians of the Galaxy, and probably loads of others.
Netflix
And while it is not automatically a bad thing to take inspiration from previous films, Rebel Moon makes the critical error of not doing anything original or interesting with any of the concepts from those other films. Instead, it takes a whole bunch of random stuff from all those movies and tosses them into a blender, and then turns that blender on to the highest setting without putting the lid on the blender first. The result is a mess, a near-incoherent hodgepodge of cliches without any sense that Zack Snyder understood what made those other films good in the first place.
I am usually hesitant to place a film’s failure at the feet of one individual because films take a lot of work from a lot of people to create, but in the case of Rebel Moon I am putting the blame squarely on Zack Snyder. He directed, co-wrote, and co-produced the movie. He also came up with the story and was the cinematographer. It’s his movie, and therefore it is his fault (although maybe I can also blame his co-screenwriters for not being able to turn Snyder’s incoherent story into anything resembling a meaningful whole).
The main character is Kora, formerly a fearsome warrior for the Motherworld, now living a peaceful life on a farming planet. Everything is fine until an evil Admiral for the Imperium shows up and demands that the villagers give the Imperium their excess grain. He then kills the village leader and leaves some of his soldiers behind to oversee the harvest and make sure that the villagers don’t try anything fishy. For some reason, the soldiers he leaves behind are (with one exception) violent sociopaths who promptly try to rape one of the villagers. Kora intervenes and kills the soldiers, and then leaves to recruit people to help them defend the village against the Imperium.
Or something.
If you’re wondering what the difference is between the Motherworld and the Imperium, good question. To be fair, the movie probably explained this at some point and I just forgot, but this movie’s lore is so boring and generic that I don’t care. It is immediately evident that Rebel Moon is a tired rehash of Star Wars.
After Kora leaves the village, she and a buddy of hers basically spend the rest of the movie hopping from planet to planet meeting other wacky characters and getting them to join their…resistance, I guess? One of the biggest problems I have with this movie is that it never feels like the characters have any real goal in mind, they just go from planet to planet and there are a few action scenes and then they go back to Kora’s home planet and then the movie ends. The sequel is coming out in a few months and for the sake of completion I’ll probably watch it, so there might be a follow-up to this post in a little while.
The movie has no characters that are worth giving a toss about and the plot is paper-thin. It never feels like anything is at stake, and it was a source of endless frustration to me that the protagonists never moved with any sense of urgency, it’s like they’re on an intergalactic sightseeing tour or something. They’re not heroes, they’re tourists. In the first Star Wars, Luke and Obi-Wan have a solid goal, which is to rescue Princess Leia. In the process they meet Han and Chewie and discover the Death Star and join the Rebel Alliance and so on and so forth. There’s always a goal, and that goal has stakes and consequences and a real feeling of urgency and immediacy that Rebel Moon lacks entirely.
Rebel Moon also feels like a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too. The movie is rated PG-13 but it feels like Zack Snyder wanted it to be R. The main villain, the evil Admiral, uses a stick or a cane of some kind to beat people to death (he treats the stick with a sort of reverence that led to me thinking of it as the Holy Beating Stick, used to administer Divine Beatdowns), but every time he starts to beat someone’s ass with it the camera pulls away and just shows him swinging like a madman. The effect ends up being more comical than frightening. The villains are sadistic and cruel but the movie never commits to showing their evil and constantly hedges its bets.
And the protagonists are just so, so boring. They’re all cardboard cutouts of characters from other movies, and there is no reason to care about any of them. There’s one guy who is introduced with a long and pointless scene where he rides a creature that reminded me of Buckbeak the hippogriff from Harry Potter, and this guy is buff, shirtless, and had long hair, so I called him Bronan the Brobarian. What was his real name? I dunno. There’s another character who fights a weird spider monster who was abducting children for some reason. What was her name? I dunno.
Some of the visuals in the movie are pretty cool, and there are a handful of decent action scenes, which play to Zack Snyder’s strengths as a filmmaker. He’s a good visual stylist and he directs good action, but in terms of plot and character his movies, and Rebel Moon in particular, often fall flat. At the end of the movie, one of the characters has some dumb line about how they’ve struck a blow against the Motherworld or the Imperium or whatever, but it is a statement that rings utterly hollow.
The protagonists in this film accomplish nothing. They mess around on a couple of planets and fight a few battles, and that’s about it. There’s no sense that the characters have earned anything. The evil Admiral with the Holy Beating Stick isn’t even dead! He gets resurrected Anakin Skywalker-style to be EVEN MORE (generically) EVIL. The movie’s ending is a feeble wheeze that does nothing to get the viewer excited for the inevitable sequel.
Rebel Moon is not a good movie, and its dumb subtitle, A Child of Fire, sounds like something an angsty teenager would come up with. I’ve liked some of Zack Snyder’s previous movies but this one is just so, so bad. See you tomorrow for another bad movie!
thezombieroom 