Denied the opportunity to make an official Star Wars movie, director Zack Snyder tossed together his own knockoff space epic, complete with a remarkably similar story about a farmboyfarmgirl from a distant world who joins a rebel alliance to take down an evil galactic empire. In addition to other direct plot lifts and familiar recycled World War II imagery, by the time Rebel Moon introduces a stoic samurai/monk character with glowing laser swords, it feels like Snyder is overtly taunting the Lucasfilm and Disney copyright attorneys: “Oh, you don’t want me touching your precious I.P.? Well, kiss my pasty white ass. Come at me, bro!”
Since debuting on Netflix just before Christmas, Rebel Moon: Part One has scored some of the worst reviews of Snyder’s career – which is saying something for the guy who made Sucker Punch. Much of that reaction has been exaggerated, or critics piling-on to kick an easy target while he’s down. In truth, the movie isn’t quite that bad. But make no mistake, it’s not particularly good, either.
| Title: | Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire (or Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire, as Netflix writes it) |
| Year of Release: | 2023 |
| Director: | Zack Snyder |
| Watched On: | Netflix |
Never exactly known for either his originality or his subtlety, Zack Snyder at least cannot be accused of lacking ambition. Beyond just Star Wars, the first half of his two-part, four-hour (yeesh!) sci-fi pastiche mashes together elements from plenty of other recognizable properties. It’s a little Starship Troopers and a little Indiana Jones, a lot of anime and video games (especially Wing Commander), and even a touch of Harry Potter for the hell of it, shamelessly built off the plot structure of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai.
Sofia Boutella (from Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek: Beyond) stars as Kora, a seemingly simple girl from a rural farm community on an obscure moon at the ass-end of the galaxy. All Kora wants from life is to plow the fields and wistfully sniff the dirt while all the farmboys vie for her attention, particularly Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Sadly, this idyllic life is interrupted by the intrusion of evil Space Nazis, who arrive to take all the commune’s crops, kill their leader, and violently gang-rape their little girls, as is the customary behavior of evil Space Nazis. Because all the farmers are complete pussies who have no idea how to put up a fight or defend themselves, it falls entirely to Kora to single-handedly spring into action, punch, kick, shoot, and generally murder the hell out of a whole squad of Space Nazis while Gunnar looks on with a mixture of horror, amazement, and suddenly sticky pants.
As it turns out, unbeknownst to most in her own community, Kora is actually a former badass super-elite Space Nazi commando who ditched the Empire and hid out on the farm after she realized that Space Nazis were, like, bad, or something. Now she’s one of the Empire’s most-wanted fugitives. With her having just killed a bunch of them, the other Space Nazis aren’t going to be too happy with her or with the farmers when they come back on their big spaceship at the end of the month. Before that can happen, Kora and Gunnar will need to head out to their local spaceport (a wretched hive of scum and villainy), hitch a ride off-world with a charming scoundrel smuggler, and recruit help from a ragtag band of rebels, in the hopes of defeating the Empire and saving the galaxy.
Aside from Boutella and Huisman, other notable roles are filled by Ed Skrein as the evilest Space Nazi, Charlie Hunnam as the Han Solo surrogate with a Scottish accent, Djimon Hounsou and Ray Fisher as rebels, Doona Bae as the lightsaber-wielding monk lady, Jena Malone as a spider, and two-time Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins as the voice of a robot named… Jimmy. Yes, really, Jimmy.
As redundant as this may be to say given that we’re talking about a Zack Snyder movie, Rebel Moon: Part One is quite dumb and derivative and kind of dull. The dialogue is awful and so is most of the acting. Splitting the story into two parts makes the first half feel like a TV pilot just setting up the next episode. It has tons of filler seemingly present for no other reason than because Zack Snyder wanted to make a four-hour Seven Samurai clone but had no idea what to fill those four hours with. Officially, the total running time for Part One is 2hr. 13min., but the movie is basically done before the 2-hour mark. It has four or five extraneous ending scenes after that and the credits come up at 2hr. 4min., which leaves nine solid minutes of credits.
All the action scenes are filmed in Snyder’s trademark speed-ramp technique (slo-mo/regular speed/slo-mo/regular speed/slo-mo/etc.), overdone to a tiresome extent. Some of the CGI visual effects are pretty decent, while others – a lot of others – look really crappy, late 1990s/early 2000s quality.
Despite the bad reviews, and despite Zack Snyder going out of his way to undercut the premiere of his own movie by promising an ultra-edgy and hyper-violent director’s cut that he’ll release in the future, Netflix insists that Rebel Moon: Part One has been a stunningly huge hit for the streamer, with more views in the first week than there are people alive on Earth to have actually watched them. Of course, that’s typical hyperbolic marketing from Netflix these days, where every new piece of content to debut on the service is the biggest hit in the entire history of the streaming medium – until the next thing, that’s even bigger.
I won’t claim that Rebel Moon: Part One is the worst movie I’ve watched recently. Honestly, it’s a passably entertaining time-waster for the most part. It’s also entirely frivolous and forgettable, and if Part Two were to be canceled today and never released, I’d shrug it off without feeling even the slightest bit of disappointment or regret.
Video Streaming
Netflix streams Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire in 4K HDR at an aspect ratio of 2.40:1. The picture is generally sharp, but Zack Snyder made a really weird decision to shoot significant portions of the movie with half the frame deliberately out of focus for some silly artistic reason that only makes sense in his brain. That comes on top of all the other parts of the film that have been overall softened to blend with the rudimentary CGI better. On the other hand, the HDR grading is very nice, with strong contrast and vibrant highlights from laser blasts and explosions. Colors are also vivid.
The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is plenty bassy, and has lots of effects zinging through every speaker during the action scenes, but is pretty dull during scenes without action. The droning musical score is a real snoozer that sounds terribly flat and compressed with little to no dynamic range.
The movie has a few scenes with subtitled alien dialogue. Although all subtitles technically appear within the 2.40:1 image, the bottoms of letters dip into the lower letterbox bar just enough to be annoying for viewers watching in Constant Image Height projection.
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