Rebel Moon
On Thursday night, I, along with the Snyder faithful, stayed up to watch the debut of Rebel Moon: Part 1 – A Child of Fire, Zack Snyder’s sci-fi opus based on a rejected Star Wars pitch that he turned into his own original universe.
Netflix has done a huge amount of promotion for this, a blockbuster holiday release that when I logged in, took over my entire homepage in a fullscreen ad in a way I’ve never seen for anything they’ve released. Critics were already blasting the film, saying it was among Snyder’s worst, but I have genuinely been looking forward to seeing what he came up with as I found the trailers engaging and yes, somewhat hype-inducing.
But…Rebel Moon is not good. At least not this current, clearly bastardized version Netflix released, purposefully holding back an simultaneously filmed and edited Director’s Cut that adds much needed running time and unleashes R-rated action. While it’s entirely possible the film still may not be great with that cut, which Snyder says is “a whole other universe,” this version? This version is awful.
Things open fairly well. I enjoy Sofia Boutella as the lead of this, as she’s been a standout in past work I’ve seen her in like Kingsman, and I think she deserved a big turn like this. The premise of her hiding out in a village after a life of war and bloodshed, only to have it come knocking at her door, perhaps isn’t the most original, but it works. For a time.
Things take a turn when we get to the film’s first major action scene, and the PG-13 butchery begins. Boutella walks in on some would-be rapist soldiers and starts slashing with a woodaxe. Then a knife. Then acquiring and firing a bunch of guns. Not a single drop of blood is spilled in this entire sequence. It genuinely looks like it was digitally erased from this sequence. A guy gets his throat slashed and grabs it and…nothing. There are of course ways to do PG-13 fight scenes that don’t need to be overly gory, but the way this is shot was clearly meant to be gory, but they scrubbed it clean and chopped it into bits. At least two other major fight scenes in the film are similar, but this first one is the worst offender.
Rebel Moon
The rest of the film suffers from the PG-13 cut not necessarily because of a lack of swears or nudity or gore, but because of whatever happened to the runtime here. After Boutella’s Kora leaves home, the pacing of the film goes absolutely insane, blasting forward at a thousand miles an hour. The plot becomes assembling a crew of heroes and rebels to fight back against the evil invaders in a way that doesn’t channel Star Wars necessarily, a cantina scene and proto-lightsabers aside, but is just…quite literally Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven. Like, it’s not an homage, it just is those things. In space.
That could be fine, but again, the pacing. We are constantly introduced to new characters with perhaps three lines of context about why they’re being chosen, then we’re thrown into sequences like a shirtless, Tarzan-looking guy riding a CGI griffin around, or a swordswomen suddenly fighting with a spider demon creature in a cyberpunk city. Some of these characters, like her, Nemesis, played by the excellent Bae Doona, seem like they could be genuinely interesting. She has perhaps five lines in the entire film.
This is the main problem, there are too many characters introduced too quickly who contribute too little. They keep introducing new ones literally every ten minutes in the middle of the film, and then they promptly say nothing for the next forty five minutes as other characters are recruited or we get Kora flashbacks. This leads to bizarre situations where we meet Charlie Hunnam’s Kai, don’t hear from him for close to an hour, then something happens to suddenly make him the center of the entire climax of the film.
I know everyone says that Snyder’s director’s cuts are too long, but this is a two hour film that legitimately needed at least three hours. And probably another three hours in part 2, I’m guessing, which means this could have just been a TV show. Spending an episode on collecting each of these heroes, learning about them, hearing from them, and integrating them into the storyline going forward could have worked. These are great actors. These are potentially interesting characters. The film, because of baffling, self-inflicted time constraints, barely gets a chance to use them.
Rebel Moon
Despite the damage done by this neutered cut, there are still some things I certainly like about Rebel Moon, or at least that intrigue me. The overall universe is potentially cool, and there are moments like when an alien in a bar uses an unwilling human host to communicate, or when a villain is hooked up to a bunch of tubes and transported into some sort of odd dimension to speak with the movie’s Big Bad, that I genuinely believe this could be a explorable, original sci-fi world.
I think some of the performances are solid, particularly the main villain played by Ed Skrein, even if the film throws anything approaching subtlety out the window by dressing him like a literal SS officer. Boutella has potential as an action hero lead. Hunnam was charismatic for his limited screentime. I would watch an entirely separate movie about Doona’s Nemesis to learn what her deal is.
But none of it comes together. And the excuses being made, that I have to watch part 2, or obviously the director’s cut will be better, don’t matter. You need to present what you have as a coherent product, and this is not it. I absolutely believe things would have gone better had they just used the longer, bloodier cut. I do doubt that with the dialogue in this script it would have elevated the film to great, but still, it wouldn’t be this bad.
I’ll watch part 2 in four months (another bizarre decision). I’ll watch the director’s cut whenever that decides to grace us with its presence. But even as someone who likes Snyder’s films more than most people, this, in its current form, is a mess.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
