Michiel Huisman and Doona Bae in Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire.Crumbling under the weight of its own visionary grandiosity, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is a series of amazing-looking sets and costumes and effects looking for a story, characters, emotion — really, anything that might raise the pulse. Maybe part of that is due to the fact that this, like so many other movies nowadays, is a Part One — subtitled A Child of Fire, which could mean that the real fireworks will come in the next installment. But the film’s constant missed opportunities suggest otherwise, as it lumbers from uninspiring set piece to uninspiring set piece with little drama, charm, or personality.
The background of Rebel Moon actually presented some cause for optimism. Director Snyder apparently pitched the idea initially to Lucasfilm as a Star Wars project. They said no, but he made it anyway — for Netflix, changing little more than a few proper names along the way. That’s a great Zack Snyder story; I may not love the man’s movies, but I do admire his doggedness.
The film even begins in Star Wars–y fashion, with some belabored narration from Anthony Hopkins giving us the portentous backstory of the Mother World, a planet of decadent kings and queens who used up all their resources and now send imperial dreadnoughts into the far reaches of space to mine and plunder other worlds. Of course, in George Lucas’s original Star Wars movies, such opening information (presented as an onscreen crawl) occupied a middle ground between pomposity and cheese, their florid portent tempered by the fact that they were, in the end, giant words flying through space to the operatic strains of John Williams brass. Those opening crawls announced the kind of movie we were about to see: sincere but playful. Here, the opening voice-over also announces the kind of movie we’re about to see: self-important, confusing, clichéd.
Snyder’s story is a variation on Akira Kurosawa’s assembling-a-ragged-team-of-warriors saga The Seven Samurai — a premise already borrowed by films ranging from The Magnificent Seven to A Bug’s Life, not to mention Roger Corman’s infamous 1980 sci-fi film Battle Beyond the Stars, itself a Star Wars rip-off. But no matter; it’s a sturdy premise, which is why it tends to work. This time, the person doing the assembling is Kora (Sofia Boutella), a young refugee hiding out as a farmer on the planet Veldt. Her life is upended when her small village is visited by imperial emissaries led by the fascistic Admiral Atticus Noble (a deliciously reptilian Ed Skrein), who promptly kills the local chief and announces they are seizing the village’s grain harvest. Kora, who we soon learn has a past connection to the highest rungs of the Mother World, runs off with her guilt-ridden farmer friend Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) to try and assemble a small army to fight off the invaders.
One reason why the Seven Samurai setup works is that it allows for a diverse set of characters who can be introduced in creative ways and then interact with each other in entertaining fashion. Snyder has done one part of this work, as our heroes travel to eye-popping new planets and moons to recruit their champions. We meet the statuesque, disgraced aristocrat Tarak (Staz Nair) on a farm where he’s being held captive due to a gambling debt, and where he has to tame a giant winged creature called a Bennu. We meet Nemesis (Doona Bae), a grieving sword master, as she fights a pissy, baby-stealing spider played by Jena Malone. General Titus (Djimon Hounsou), is a disgraced former military leader who once turned his forces on the Mother World; we find him collapsed, drunk, and ragged, at the entrance of a massive gladiator coliseum.
There isn’t nearly as much action in the film as one would expect, however — precious little gladiatin’, for example, despite that impressive-looking coliseum — and when there is, it’s filmed in that hyper-slow-motion style that Snyder loves so much. Perhaps he feels it gives these characters a sense of mythic grace; that’s how it worked in 300 (2007), the hit that made his career and helped kick off the modern action speed-ramping craze. But as it did in some of Snyder’s superhero movies, the slo-mo overkill actually renders a lot of the fighting less impressive and surprising. At that speed, everything starts to look the same. Even Boutella, a former dancer who has given some physically exhilarating performances in films like Kingsman: The Secret Service and Climax, winds up looking like a generic action-movie lead in Snyder’s hands.
The director does deserve his share of credit for how visually impressive all these environments are, not to mention the fascinating design of the various creatures that populate them. Besides the human spider, there’s a glowing, tentacled parasite brain that speaks through animated corpses and pale, grasshopper-faced kings and all sorts of variations on orc. Even the occasional cutaways reveal fascinating-looking bits of costuming and makeup.
But all that makes the letdown that much greater when most of the vignettes in the film are resolved with little drama or interesting conflict. Tarak basically wrangles that Bennu with just a bit of fuss, in a flying sequence that’s a pale retread of similar scenes from the Avatar movies. After a nice shower and a brief bit of complaining, General Titus is pretty much ready to go. After Kora tries to convince rebel leaders Devra (Cleopatra Coleman) and Darrian (Ray Fisher) to join their fight, Darrian gives his soldiers a rousing speech before asking for those volunteering to step forward. It feels like the kind of stirring scene we might see at the climax of a film in which we actually got to know these people. Here, these are faces we’ve never seen before. Without any prior context, Darrian’s speech comes out of the blue, and the stirring score and dramatic staging all feel like a huge miscalculation.
And then … the movie basically ends.
Now look, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is hardly the first or worst offender in what has now become a pandemic of films that have been split in half and thus feel like all premise and no payoff. But when the setup itself is this dull, the lack of payoff stings that much more. Ideally, by the time A Child of Fire ends, we should be invested in these characters and eager to see more of them. Otherwise, what’s even the point? I think back to the original Star Wars (the one from 1977, the one we’re now supposed to call Episode Four: A New Hope). I remember how excited I was to discover Luke and Han and Leia and Chewbacca and the two droids, how fun it was to spend time with them even before that film’s climactic space dogfight. If Star Wars had ended before the big attack on the Death Star, it would still have been Star Wars; it would still have been life-changing for an entire generation. And now consider Rebel Moon and, uh, these guys. Who are they? Why should anybody care what happens to any of them?
Of course, the original Star Wars itself is a pretty high watermark for any movie, even a good one, to live up to. And maybe Snyder will deliver something exciting at the conclusion of his fake Star Wars saga. But right now, the only reason I might want to see Part Two would be to feel something, anything. Because Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is, in the end, just a nice-looking, lifeless slog.
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