Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire

Here we are again, another Netflix original Zack Snyder film. The last time we found ourselves in this predicament, it was with Army of the Dead, a film he shot with an old broken lens that made everything blurry. And inadvertently created a drinking game of taking a shot every time a dead pixel popped up on screen. Most of the film is very dark so you’ll spot them pretty easily and there are many, so you might die of alcohol poisoning.

This time however Zack Snyder seems to actually be trying, as Rebel Moon is something he’s pretty passionate about. Or at least his own cut of the film. Which we’ll get into because the guy can never seem to make the movie he wants and is constantly making excuses for them. No Snyder cut for Army of the Dead, I see.

Zack Snyder has already confirmed that the version of Rebel Moon currently on Netflix, the version I watched, is the inferior version, with a 4-hour R rated cut on its way, making me feel like I’m wasting my time even reviewing this movie, because I sure as hell feel like I wasted my time watching it.

I feel like a lot of my issues with the movie will be addressed in the longer cut, as many of the issues this version has is mostly story and character based. AKA, things that maybe can be fixed with a longer runtime.

It’s still a Seven Samurai rip off, but at least maybe the extra 2 hours will help round out all of these paper thin, forgettable characters we are introduced to and quickly forgotten about.

We spend like 30 minutes introducing this Tarzan-like character as he trains a giant hawk horse dog. But later on in the movie they pan over to this Tarzan guy and I’m like who the hell is this dude? Where did he come from? Completely forgetting about the boring 30 minutes we spent with him flying his giant hawk around, like a scene from The Phantom Menace.

Zack Snyder managed to toss all these crazy visuals at you and none of it is memorable. This is not a movie that sticks with you, it’s barely a movie you remember after each scene ends.

The story is hurried, cramming as much as they can into 2 hours. Characters are introduced randomly and forgotten about. Important plot points are rushed over, making the plot at time not make any sense.

And then there’s the PG-13 rating. We got a rushed story and boring ass characters, but at least give us some cool fun violence. Nope, can’t have that either.

It was reminding me a lot of the new Dune in that aspect, where people would get slashed and stabbed but not a single drop of blood would be seen on screen. So, it makes the action, literally the only thing a film like this has going for it seem flat and boring.

The plot is also very simplistic, boiling it down to what if they did, Seven Samurai but in the Star Wars universe. But Disney was like… no thank you.

So, he went to Netflix and replaced Empire with Motherworld, boom new original IP. That’s pretty much all he really did to differentiate the two.

Lightsabers? Nah, we’ll keep all that.

Droids? We’ll keep’em.

Star Wars Cantina? I mean, you gotta have characters visit something. Leave it in!

Star Wars isn’t the only thing it was reminding me of, as Warhammer 40K very clearly inspired Zack Snyder as well. Motherworld might as well be The Imperium. Their weapons are also very much something taken from 40K too.

What isn’t are dick ships. We open the movie with a giant vagina opening in space and a dick shaped ship flying through it. Yeah, that’s all Zack Snyder there, baby!

We get the obligatory story breakdown, narrated by Anthony Hopkins who is also the voice of this film’s version of a battle droid. A character that just randomly shows up and is completely forgotten about.

We are then introduced to our main character Kora, who lives on a farming planet that worships hedonism. Gotta bang to make them plants grow, y’all!

Kora is an ex-soldier on the run, she did something in the past that has put a target on her head. We don’t find out what that is in this movie, maybe more is explained later in other films. However, you can pretty much guess what it was with flashbacks.

She was the bodyguard to the Motherworld princess who possessed supernatural powers like healing, even bringing the dead back to life. She and her whole family also end up being assassinated, I wonder by who…

Kora has now blended well into their little farming village, plowing the fields and screwing burly dudes who look a lot like Hugh Jackman.

That’s when Admiral Noble shows up to their planet, searching for rebels called something stupid… Bloodaxes, I guess was their name.

While on this planet they also take it upon themselves to seize their supplies. Admiral Noble kills the chieftain and leaves some men behind to make sure the villagers do what they are told.

The milkmaid… or I guess since she only milks water, I guess she’s the water maid catches the eye of some of the soldiers.

She warms up to the battle droid named Jimmy. Wait, really, it’s just named Jimmy? He has a more detailed background than anyone else in the film, as all droids put down their weapons when the princess died, refusing to fight anymore.

Anyway, the soldiers attack the water maid and Kora has to step in and stop them, killing everyone in the barn.

A young soldier also helps out, but he’s just another character that shows up and disappears from the film.

Now that the soldiers are dead, that means doom for the villagers, so now they have no other choice but to think of a way to fight them.

Kora goes off planet with Gunnar who has the biggest crush on her. She takes him with because he has done business with the rebels before. Rebels she hopes will join their fight, taking on the Motherworld army.

Along the way they run into Kai, a smuggler who totally isn’t a bad guy. It relies on us having seen Star Wars and know who Han Solo is to be tricked into thinking otherwise.

He takes them to other planets where more potential allies are, in hopes of grouping them up for capture, to collect the large bounties on their heads.

They meet Tarak, the Tarzan looking guy who trains a giant ridable hawk. You know what would have made this scene better? Advert expectations. So, the crew goes to find this guy, who we don’t learn until like the end of the movie he’s a prince. Why wait until the last minute to drop this knowledge? Fuck if I know!

But they got to him to join the crew, he can’t because he’s paying off a debt to the asshole who runs this ranch. He makes a deal that if Tarzan can tame this girl dog, he can go free. But if he fails everyone becomes a slave.

So, my idea would be you think pretty much how the scene unfolds but instead the bird just ups and eats him, so now our crew are taken as slaves, giving them a chance to work together to fight their way out of the situation, something! It would have been funny, unexpected, a chance for our gathered characters to bond over something to form a more cohesive crew… Nah, let’s just spend 30 minutes of him acting like a Jake Sully from Avatar.

Then there is the swordswoman who fights a giant spiderlady with her lightsabers which she doesn’t turn on for some reason until later in the fight. Her motivations are also unknown as once again her backstory isn’t told to us until the very end of the movie.

Next, the great military strategist commander from the Motherworld army, now in exile and has become a gladiator. Do we see him doing anything a gladiator would do? Like maybe fight in an arena? Nope!

All everyone does in the film is talk about how great of a strategic thinker he is. You hear it constantly from our good guys to bad. Then at the end when a winning strategy might come in handy, all he does is literally just grab a gun and fire is wildly. Who knew an infant with a gun could also be a genius military strategist as well.

Once everyone is rounded up, they track down the rebels, whose leaders are a pair of siblings named Darrian and Devra.

Devra hates the idea of helping the farmers as it seems like suicide. While Darrian agrees to go with them, taking a handful of soldiers with him.

They head off back to Kora’s world but first they make a pit stop to dump off some cargo Kai is carrying. Not knowing this is a trap, they capture or kill everyone that doesn’t have a bounty.

My first thought was this is where they’re going to have their final showdown? The platform is kind of just in an empty space.

Admiral Noble shows up with his men, but Kora is able to get free, also freeing the others.

This is such a lame fight and ending to the film. It’s basically a shipyard with supply boxes everywhere on a platform that’s just hanging in the night sky.

It was like he ran out of budget, so they just filmed the sound stage with no background.

Kora actually manages to kill Admiral Noble. But with a bit of necromancy, he is brought back and questioned by the evil new ruler, who raised Kora.

Oh, Darrian died by the way and most of his men, all but a single soldier. Now Kora and her 6 samurai go back to her farming world, I guess to wait for the rest of The Motherworld to show up for revenge.

And that’s where this half ends.

I really don’t want to see a longer version of this, hell, I really don’t want to see the second half, which I guess comes out sometime in April. So, expect a review for that when that gets released.

I am hopeful that that version will be better. No idea if there’s a longer uncut version of that as well. It was like Netflix told him to do a 2-hour PG-13 movie and he brought them 4 hours with an R rating instead.

This seems to be a pattern for him. I can’t really be angry with Netflix releasing this mess of a movie in the state that it’s in.

Rebel Moon is a total mess, with so little time spent on any of these characters. You get told about them instead of seeing anything for yourself.

There is zero connection or commendatory between the group. You see every twist coming like Kai double crossing them. There’s absolutely no reason for him to be helping Kora at all. They set him up as this lovable rogue like Han Solo, but there’s no reason that I saw for him to stick his neck out for this group other than turning on them for a reward.

The slowmotion in this is also the worst it has ever been implemented by Zack Snyder, as it seems random with very little to do with style or the story.

No dead pixels this time filling the screen, thank god. But it has that same dark color palette that made his Superman DC movies so popular. Very dark, very drab.

There are some interesting visuals here. There’s a lady the film has been showcasing a lot of in promos and trailers, this black horned lady, who is in the movie for maybe a second as the camera passes by.

A lot of the action was just flat and boring. I don’t know if that has something to do with the bloodlessness of it or what. But this is Zack Snyder, the one thing he’s good at is delivering on the action.

The best thing this film had to offer was Admiral Noble, a drug addicted, tentacle sex monster having psychopath. He was fun, and maybe the most fleshed out character in the whole bunch.

Gunnar the guy Kora takes with her on her mission is so bland and milquetoast that he basically fades away into the background with every scene he’s in.

Kora, maybe there’s something there, but in this movie, I didn’t see it. She’s kind of your stock girl boss who can kick anyone’s ass no matter what. They give you the abridge version of her background, getting taken as a young girl and raised to be a soldier where she falls in love with some random dude who dies, then becomes the bodyguard to the princess.

Her ship crash lands on that farming village and that’s about it. She just farms for 2 years until soldiers show up.

I don’t really find the story, or this world Snyder has created all that interesting. It’s basically derivative of other things you’ve seen before like Star Wars, like Warhammer, like Dune. It isn’t really doing anything original, especially if the introduction to these characters is just a Seven Samurai rip off.

I really don’t know what to rate this. As it is, the version currently on Netflix, it’s a SKIP. It is mostly a solid RENT, however knowing that a different cut of the film, it makes this version pointless to watch.

And there’s no way I’m going to review the longer version like I did with his Justice League film. So, what you see is what you get and what he gets sadly is a SKIP.

I do however feel this longer, uncut version will get a higher rating, as his Justice League film did. I don’t know what the future for this new IP holds. I know Zack Snyder has mentioned wanting to expand to TV shows and video games, but honestly there isn’t much here, so I don’t really know how well that will work out for him.

I’m sure this will have its fan base, as Zack Snyder usually does for some reason. His fan base sucks. They even tried to defend Army of the Dead, so that tells you how much those people should be taken seriously.

I loved Watchman, another film that has a longer more uncut version of. But aside from that, he doesn’t have much to really be amazed by. I enjoyed 300 for what it was at the time. I liked his remake of Dawn of the Dead a lot as well.

Thing is, he didn’t write those films. Everything Zack Snyder has written has be absolutely terrible. The guy is no writer and no one seems to be able to tell him that.

He’s very clearly a talented director with a style and eye for cinematic scenes, but story… characters… that just isn’t in his wheelhouse. I’d really wish he’d step aside and let the others whose names are listed do more of the heavy lifting.

I hope Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver will be better but I’m not betting on it. Wait, also, what the hell is a Rebel Moon? There’s nothing in the movie about it. Is that also in the longer version? Do we have to get to the second movie to find out what the title of the movie means?

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