Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Hi. My name is FeastMode and I'm a sci-fi junkie. After watching this movie, I'm ecstatic to have witnessed the creation of this beautiful sci-fi world. I'm immediately invested. I want more. Now. There are a few things you should expect from a Zack Snyder movie: 1) Stunning visuals. This entire movie is sci-fi eye candy with high levels of imagination. 2) Amazing music. Of course it's by Junkie XL. He has done many of Snyder's other movies. 3) Lots of BEASTLY slow-motion shots. Some people complain about him overusing it. Not me. So many of those scenes give me goosebumps, especially with the music playing. I was dreading having to wait a year or longer for the next one. But it's scheduled for April 2024!!! I. Can't. Wait. (2 viewings, 12/21/2023, 4/17/2024)

A purely visual spectacle, and not even a great one at that, hidden behind a muddy filter. Every scene is farcically derivative of Star Wars, Battle Beyond the Stars, Warhammer 40K, Turok, and many other, better sources. Boutella just isn't credible leading lady material, characters are zero dimensional points, it's gratingly expositional, and the action scenes are comically ineptly choreographed, burdened with jump-cuts and slow-slow-slower-motion. The plot is a series of "And then, and then, and then" fetch-quests that seem like an episodic TV show, crammed into a badly edited 2 1/4 hours that feels much longer. And it ends with a jarringly pointless "To be continued". But... why, film, why? Why continue?

The Zack Snyder fanboy cult is legion. That's fine. Every crowd likes their own kind of music. Objectively this is what Snyder produces: gritty, dark, unhappy, overly serious, tedious stuff. Most of its average, with a few exceptions. But there's always cool stuff to look at. The usual Snyder-verse effects are on full display: long establishing shots, fight scenes using slo-mo and speed shifting, and massive objects being viewed by terrified onlookers. He's kind of a poor man's Villaneuve. The rabid followers can say what they want about "The Snyder Cut" Justice League, but the reality is there's no broad market for unrelentingly dismal sludge. Why isn't there a Judge Dredd movie coming out soon? Or another Punisher film? Dark and too serious isn't fun to spend money on. Especially when it's not all that new. I do have to laugh though, at all the media hacks that are pissing and moaning about how derivative this is. And it is. But it mostly feels that way because Snyder wrote a script for a stand alone Star Wars story and was told by Lucasfilm (or maybe it was Disney) "thanks, but no thanks". So he went to the streaming giant that loves to produce expensive projects so they can cancel them before they can develop any traction. This is that script brought to life. Or death, as Netflix may have it. It's not nice to hammer on creatives. But I for one am sick and tired of the waif-ish 90 pound girl warrior movies that have been all the rage lately. And while Boutella (Kora, the protagonist in Rebel Moon) was excellent as Jaylah in Star Trek Beyond, I'm over it. Other than Gunpowder Milkshake (which was hilarious) it's all a bunch of BS. I don't care if Maggie Q or Daisy Ridley (both decent actresses btw) are in it or not (they aren't in this, in case you're confused), it's stupid. It was bad enough when Arnold, Sly and Bruce were ignoring the laws of physics in their various franchises, but we're all a little more savvy now and wouldn't buy that stuff from them in today's market either. But maybe I'm wrong, because there are now 4 Expendables movies in existence. God save us from the people who are buying tickets to those. The review of the performances? Boutella? Strictly two note delivery. Honsu? Not bad, dour and angry. Hunaam? Possibly the most nuanced. The plot? Star Wars excuse aside, it's a mess. The preposterousness of engaging with their Seven Samurai recruits at moments when each is faced with a crucial test is just lazy storytelling. The villains? One dimensional and very unconvincing. One, the most visible, a bizarre space nazi foil, is so predictable and poorly written that he could be dropped into any of a number of other films. The other? The supposedly all powerful Big Bad who apparently has the power of life over death is a comic book trope of a villain. Evil for evil's sake. And the dumb resurrection of the former by the latter begs the question: how do you threaten a subordinate that you just brought back to life? And instead of original visuals, Snyder dips deeply into the visually obscene as replacement for creativity. Here's a thought: (which the trailer for Part II indicated might really be a thing) the very last image is of a rogue droid, having gone "wild" after killing one of its "masters", standing up in a field, wearing a crown of deer antlers. Now that would/will? Have been (might be) a story worth exploring. There are much better choices to spend two hours on. Watch Rogue One, which at its core, this movie wishes it was. It's free to subscribers now, so have at it. Can't wait to see those reviews pour in.