While I’ve never understood the devotion some have to Zack Snyder’s singular and melodramatic vision, I’ve never been fully on board with out and out trashing him instead. For example, I genuinely believe that his remake of Dawn Of The Dead and his amusingly overblown adaptation of Frank Miller’s absurdly muscular 300 are cinematic experiences to cherish while there are treasures to be found scattered within the likes of Watchmen, Man Of Steel, his version of Justice League and Army Of The Dead. On the other hand, virtually everything else he’s made has well and truly gotten on my tits with his obsession concerning skewed heroism and out of control style rapidly becoming more and more annoying the more unfettered freedom he gets.
Well now it’s time for him to turn his overly theatrical style onto Star Wars as Netflix has allowed him to take his original pitch dir a movie set in a Galaxy far, far away and construct a titanic space opera all of his own that doesn’t have to play by Disney+’s rules. So does his venture into the great beyond bring out the best in him, or is his trip into space lacking the proper atmosphere?
In a faraway galaxy, on a simple farming planet, we find Kora; a woman with a mysterious past who has been taken in by the peaceful people of planet Veldt, but there’s a sneaking suspicion that the life she’s left behind has finally caught up with her when a huge warship from the militaristic empire know as the Motherhood appears in the sky. However, it seems that the Motherhood has been through some interior upheavals as late as they’ve resumed their warlike ways in the wake of the assassination of their royal family and as a result, the sadistic Admiral Atticus Noble has arrived to claim all of their produce in order to feed his men for the war effort. Having something of an intimate past with the Motherhood, Kora knows that Noble will utterly destroy these kind-hearted people if she doesn’t do something, so alongside ambitious farmer Gunnar, she sets off to locate the Bloodaxe siblings, the freedom fighters the vicious Admiral is searching for in order to recruit them to her cause.
On the way, they bump into roguish smuggler Kai who claims he can connect them to other, disparate warriors who would happily join their cause to stick it to the Motherhood and in fairly short order they manage to enlist nobleman turned blacksmith Tarak, who has the gift of going all Dr. Doolittle on animals, a laser sword twirling peace keeper known as Nemesis and the former general known as Titus who has since fallen on hard times.
However, as they get close to locating the Bloodaxes, one of their number may not be as helpful as they first seem…
While dismissing the first episode of Rebel Moon as merely “Star Wars for edge lords” seems a little reductive, it’s tough to discern what exactly Snyder was aiming for with an expansive space opera that feels worryingly small. Following George Lucas’ path of heavily referencing Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, he seems so utterly convinced that he has his audience firmly in the palm of his hand, the director seems to think he doesn’t actually have to try to make a single one of his derivative characters, or their quest, stand out at all. While he gives each damaged and scarred character their own scene to establish their obvious bad-assery, the second it’s time for them to become part of the ensemble, they suddenly have nothing of value to contribute. Take Tarak, a bare chested blacksmith who impresses with the ability to tame a huge cat/bird creature like something out of How To Train Your Dragon, but then immediately has zero impact the moment he joins the team – or cyborg swordmaster Nemesis who looks like she’s stepped right out of Vampire Hunter D and earns her stripes by fighting a spider hybrid with the face of Jena Malone, who remains almost mute once her time in the spotlight is up.
Aside from the highly familiar architypes the film uses to populate its cast, the plot also feels overwhelmingly familiar, but while that isn’t always a problem, it’s somewhat disappointing how close Snyder does cling to Star Wars and instead of subverting Lucas’ towering brainchild, merely flips the script in the most flat ways possible. The dastardly Motherworld is allowed to be far more Nazi-ish than the Empire could ever hope to be with the movie dropping in the odd scene of Ed Skein’s villain perpetrating the occasional brutal act in order to hold focus on what an absolute bastard he’s supposed to be. Elsewhere the director attempts a rug pull by having a famous Star Wars archetype sudden turn into a duplicitous shit and he further attempt to show how edgy he supposedly is by having the good guys carry red laser swords and not blue or green. However, all this does is kind of show off that he doesn’t understand Star Wars as much as he didn’t truly get Superman as once again he forgets that all the murk and darkness is just drudgery without the light.
However, most annoying of all is the fact that the first installment of Rebel Moon suffers from quite probably the worst case of “part one” syndrome I’ve ever seen because even after over two and a half hours hours of screen time, it never truly feels that A Child Of Fire ever gets going even though all the acres of Slo-Mo and passionate score seems to indicate that the movie is cooking hotter than a barbeque on Venus. However, Snyder sees genuinely unable to grasp the fact that even though he may have had these characters living in his head for years, that doesn’t mean we’re simply going to fall in love with them soley because we’re supposed to and moments where the score swells and a character heroically sacrifices his life for the greater good are undone by the fact that we’ve only been introduced to them barely ten minutes ago.
Still, despite that fabled visual eye of his still having less colour in them than a zebra convention at the North Pole, Rebel Moon is still a remarkably gorgeous place to visit thanks to some superlative costume work and some cool looking spaceships. The peaceful village where we first meet Kora has a distinct Nordic feel to it and an informant in a sleazy bar turns out to be a chatty, brain-leeching parasite that spills the beans via its human host, but as dazzling as it all is, nothing really feels especially original and as a result, the whole thing feels like a slightly more coherent Jupiter Ascending.
However, a closer look at Netflix’s streaming schedule reveals the real problems that lurk behind Rebel Moon’s flamboyantly grim visage and in a couple of months, Netflix will stream the director’s cut of the film which Snyder has already described as “a totally different movie”. Now my question is, why is there a director’s cut at all when the lack of a large cinema release means that the running time of a film, no matter how sprawling, is no longer an issue. Why would a director hamstring his own cut of a movie in order to release a longer cut months later when we could have just had the more complete version all along?
As a result, we’ve only gotten part of a story that, itself, is only part of a story (ancient Anthony Hopkins voiced robot, Jimmy, is an utter non-starter) and as a result Rebel Moon feels incomplete, slow and, worst of all, boring that makes sitting through a second one (or even the director’s cut of this one) feel as enticing as a blind date with Jena Malone’s spikey spider woman.
Rebel scum.
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