Film review: Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire

Hello readers! This review has been brewing for a while. I watched Rebel Moon – Part One soon after it released in late December, and the film has been lingering in my mind for all the wrong reasons. Let me be clear from the outset: Rebel Moon – Part One is not a good film. It is shallow, derivative and entirely predictable, but if you are truly starved for 134 minutes of braindead entertainment, I suppose you could do worse.

Warning: this review will contain spoilers. But believe me, even if you haven’t seen this film, you have already seen every character, location and plot point that it contains.

Overview

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is a space opera that for legal reasons couldn’t advertise itself as Star Wars fan fiction. It is directed by Zack Snyder, and if you have seen any of his other films (Dawn of the Dead, 300, Man of Steel, etc.) and are wondering if Rebel Moon will be any different, don’t get your hopes up: it isn’t. Indeed, many people might take comfort in quite how familiar and unsurprising this film is. Rebellious, it is not.

The story follows the journey of two farmers as they hop from planet to planet, trying to form a band of elite warriors who can defend their tiny village from hungry imperial troops. Along the way, we discover that one of the farmers, a young woman called Kora, has a murky and mysterious past. This is revealed to us in a series of flashbacks made all the more murky and mysterious by Zack Snyder’s critical misunderstanding of how to use depth of field. The plot takes our characters on a journey, but at no point do we have any idea of where they are going, or why. They just end up on various planets, where they stand in the blurry background as some random new action hero does some random new action sequence, usually in slow motion, and often with their shirt missing.

If all you want from a film is some good guys fighting some bad guys, then you have come to the right place. The action sequences are solid, even if slow motion is overused, and the bad guys are indisputably bad. They kill innocent squid people, dress like space Nazis, and have an insatiable appetite for raw grain. And to top it off? Their leader’s preferred form of attack is to hit people with a big stick.

Unsolicited flashback incoming! The origins of Rebel Moon.

This film is part one of a two-film deal with Netflix, which is possibly why so much was set up and so little was explored. This is only half the story! According to The Hollywood Reporter, Rebel Moon is based on an idea that Zack Snyder had back in the 1980s, when he was at film school (presumably taking detailed notes on how to focus on only 5% of the screen at one time). However, the BBC claim that he dreamed it up when he was 11, having just seen Star Wars. Whatever the case, it would appear that this project has been lurking in Zack’s head for quite some time, making it something of a passion project. Which explains a lot.

All the way back in 2012, Zack Snyder pitched an early version of his vision to a producer at LucasFilm, suggesting that it might be a Star Wars story. This never took off, because Disney bought Star Wars just a few months later, and didn’t like the idea of R-rated Jedi hijinks. A few years down the line, and he tried to pitch the idea as a TV show, where a new warrior was added to the team each week. However, Netflix eventually decided that he should make two films with a joint budget of $166 million, in the hope that this would set up a wider universe for future instalments.

In some ways, I wish that Rebel Moon had been a TV show. As a two-hour film, the plot felt disjointed. The story lurched from planet to planet, never spending long enough in one location to explore any of the characters in detail. Had these adventures been separated into individual episodes with their own narrative arcs, they would have been self-contained and structurally sound, with valuable breathing room. But what do I know? I’m not Netflix. You can bet that this was a commercial rather than an artistic decision. Speaking of which…

Derivative and uninspired

Every element of Rebel Moon – Part One is something that you have seen before. Clearly, we can’t expect any media to be truly original, what with there only being seven storylines rehashed since the start of time, but Rebel Moon sets itself apart by making a concerted effort to mimic other media.

The start of the film is an information dump, read out by Anthony Hopkins, but you can actually hear the yellow, slanted text scrolling through your own brain. As a one-off homage, perhaps this opening would have been fine – but a lore-heavy information dump is rarely the best start to a film. Star Wars is one of the worst, leaving audiences feeling as if they are speed-reading revision notes before an exam. In Lord of the Rings, we at least get visuals of the nine rings being distributed, but in Rebel Moon, Zack Snyder borrows the worst of both worlds. The Hopkins monologue is coupled with distracting visuals that are entirely unrelated, showing a spaceship popping through a wormhole. All we can be expected to remember is the general gist – that there is an empire chasing down rebels – and this hardly needed to be explained.

The real opening to the film, which actually has lasting impact, is a shot of Kora ploughing a field against the backdrop of a big, red planet. This is actually pretty cool, and it is also where all originality ends. The plough is pulled by a horse that is not a horse (it’s NOT), because it is actually an alien, and spent three hours in horse make-up getting a plastic plate glued to its nose. The same level of effort wasn’t afforded to the other creatures on this world, of which we only see a single herd of basic deer. Are deer native to this moon? Did the humans bring them here from Earth, if Earth exists? Why does everything have four legs and a spine? We will never know.

The first quarter of the film unfolds in a village that is not a Viking settlement (it’s NOT), because some of the houses have electronic sliding doors. The people in the settlement are also not Vikings (they’re NOT), despite worshipping multiple gods, speaking with pseudo-Nordic accents and playing traditional European folk music. Any similarities with our world are coincidental and entirely unexplained.

We then get to meet the soldiers of the Motherworld, which for copyright reasons is certainly NOT a galactic empire. The main baddie is English (but NOT), and the henchmen baddies are South African (but NOT) because stereotypes. Then, when our characters visit the nearest spaceport to start their adventure, they enter a seedy cantina that is certainly NOT a hive of scum and villainy (although it definitely is), and here, they meet a Cadbury selection box of aliens who are virtually all humanoid with wrinkles, growths and/or blue skin. These are the poor people who flew too close to the make-up department.

When we suddenly leave the Rebel Moon and go to other worlds, the derivatives only grow stronger. We meet a long-haired shirtless fellow who certainly isn’t anything like any Zack Snyder shirtless fellow you have seen before (he’s NOT), and he tames a giant, feathery hippogriff creature who certainly isn’t Buckbeak (because this one is black and in space). After this we meet a woman who wields laser swords that are definitely NOT lightsabres, who fights a spider with a woman’s body that is definitely NOT a Dark Souls boss.

Shallow and infantile

Clichés are not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, a bit of cliché fantasy or science fiction really hits the spot; for example, I haven’t heard anyone complaining that Baldur’s Gate III ticks all the fantasy trope boxes – instead, this is seen as a bonus. What really controls the heart and soul of any production is the depth and care that goes into its characters and worldbuilding, no matter how tropey these might be. Rebel Moon had no depth, and when this is paired with its derivative plot and characters, the whole film rings hollow.

For example, let us examine the ‘culture’ of the Viking (NOT-Viking) village. We are introduced to them on a night when they are celebrating the harvest. Quite why they are doing this is puzzling, because they are clearly midway through ploughing the fields and sowing the seeds. However, they are celebrating the harvest season nonetheless – and in order to leave us in no doubt regarding their backwards lifestyles, Zack Snyder decided that the way they should express their devotion to their gods is by having sex. This is an R-rated Star Wars fan fiction, remember? It must have sex references.

Unfortunately, Zack Snyder’s desire to make a ‘grown-up’ space opera takes Rebel Moon to lower lows. Its handling of sexual assault is particularly problematic. Early on in the film, the not-imperial-but-imperial troops kidnap a teenage girl, and our protagonist is forced to step in and rescue her, thereby revealing herself to be a gun-toting girlboss. This isn’t an infeasible scenario by any means, but the manner in which it is set up feels cheap, unsubtle, and unnecessary. Like everything else in the film, audience expectations are relied upon to do the heavy lifting, and the repercussions are left unexplored. The girl is set up as prey from the beginning, and her only purpose in this story is to be a stepping stone on Kora’s journey. Again, using tropes as old as time doesn’t have to be problematic, but the execution is critical. Handling matters as serious as sexual assault in such a shallow and infantile manner is simply offensive.

This callous shallowness undermines every minute of the film. We don’t get a chance to root for any of the characters, because they aren’t given enough opportunity to reveal their personalities or motivations. Having a protagonist with a murky past is fine, so long as we are intrigued by their actions, or have a good sense of their morals. We get nothing substantial from Kora. As for her band of warriors, they are little more than names – if you can even remember those. Two of them get an opportunity to show off their skills (only Mr Shirtless, tamer of the Emo Buckbeak, and Ms Laser Sword, slayer of Space Quelaag), but the rest are just picked up after brief conversations. We aren’t given the impression that they have any incentive to join the crew – they only tag along because the plot demands it. Once they are in the team, they don’t interact or help to recruit subsequent members. Instead, they hang around in the blurry background like a guest NPC in your party.

Downright stupid

The other fatal flaw of this film is that it is downright stupid. The entire plot revolves around a need to protect one tiny village from an army of hungry soldiers – but why would such a situation ever arise? The Motherland (NOT empire) soldiers demand grain from the villagers (NOT Vikings), but the fields are clearly empty, and even if they were brimming with crops, this massive force could hardly rely on one village. We could assume that they have visited every village in the region, demanding the same thing, but this is never explored. We have no idea how isolated this village is, or who governs it. We are given no information regarding the economic state of this moon, or how many people live there. If this one village is the best way for the imperial army to feed itself, it’s a miracle that they have survived this long.

Having landed in a village with no crops, a handful of soldiers are left behind to ensure that all the promised grain is given over. However, this seems entirely pointless. It will be weeks, if not months, before the grain can be harvested, during which time the soldiers will loiter around doing nothing. I’m not quite sure how seasons work on this moon, because it is never explained, but it seems likely that some village in the opposite hemisphere would have had crops ready for harvest – and that would have made a much better target. Better still, the soldiers could have visited a part of some other planet where the grain was ready to be consumed. It is vanishingly unlikely that this tiny village is the only place that they could find any grain. This is science fiction, after all; in fact, why couldn’t they have a farm on board their ship? The only limit here is a limited imagination.

One of the most irritating plot holes materialises at the end of the film. In a plot twist that everybody saw coming, we learn that the random guy from the bar of scum and villainy was actually evil all along. He was only helping Kora to find all her limited-edition warriors because he was trying to fill in his bingo card and collect the biggest bounty in history. All the warriors have bounties on their heads, and he hands them all in at once, which leads to the Motherworld of all information dumps. The character’s backstories are read out to us as they stand immobilised like plastic action figures – giving us the best and most unintentional shred of symbolism in this entire film. Only the simple farmer remains free, and the big bad English baddie orders him to kill Kora because of emotional tension (apparently).

The simple farmer is handed a death device, and we are told that he has always loved Kora so this will be difficult for him (oh no). In that instant, he uses the death device to set her free, because it turns out that the death device also functions as a key. How did a simple farmer know this? Clearly, a man of his talents is wasted on farming. And why did the English baddie give his prisoners the key to escape? He is clearly a moron.

My final major gripe is that the dialogue is consistently diabolical. Nothing sounds natural, but neither does it carry wit or charm. There are certain words and phrases that are an obvious crutch, my personal favourite being the overuse of the word “everything” to emphasize greed and power. In the first minute of this film, we are informed that the royal bloodline “consumed everything” on their home planet, which is why they colonised the galaxy. Later, when the Motherland ship appears in the sky, the village leader asks Kora “what do they want?” and she replies “everything” – because “grain” might not have sounded so imposing. At the end of the film, the little baddies are trying to resuscitate the main baddie by blasting him with electricity, and some guy says “hit him with everything!” in dead seriousness – which actually made me laugh for the first time in 134 minutes. I can only hope that “everything” is actually this universe’s equivalent of “the force” and has genuine canonical relevance, because otherwise this is just very funny.

My final complaint is about the LGBT+ inclusion in this film. Clearly, the guys at Disney don’t want too much gay in their Star Wars, and so Zack Snyder decided to sprinkle some into his R-rated fan fiction. This would be quite an innovation, except that the gay character is some creep in the bar of scum and villainy whose first act is to sexually assault the simple farmer. Nice going Zack.

An opportunity missed.

I think the reason that Rebel Moon – Part One has annoyed so many people is because it feels like such a missed opportunity. How often does someone get given $166 million to produce a brand new space opera, free from the shackles of Star Wars? The opening of this film held a lot of promise, even if it remained in familiar territory. We have a quiet village trying to survive at the fringes of a rebellion against a huge empire. This is the prime setup for world-building, as we head into the unknown alongside a simple, ignorant farmer. However, the story is muddy from the start, and all hopes for meaningful world-building are dashed as soon as the plot starts lurching from planet to planet.

A few minor tweaks could have made this film so much more cohesive. A clear end goal would have worked wonders; for example, if Kora had set off with the clear aim of finding the Bloodaxe rebellion, the path would have felt firmer. Instead, we only bump into the Bloodaxe rebellion after meeting a long chain of shirtless muscle men and spider ladies, at which point they are just another pair of randomers, and meeting them means nothing. This film is dragged down by its pacing, and giving the characters motivations and goals could have elevated it to something good.

Final comments

There were plenty of aspects of this film that I wanted to enjoy, but I just couldn’t. I don’t mind tropes provided that they are served up with sufficient charm and care. However, this film was running critically low on both originality and thought. The one aspect that I almost respect is the decision to have the antagonist use a big stick as his weapon of choice. That is a decision so stupid and brazen that it actually managed to evoke surprise – unlike every other creaking component of this lacklustre affair. I want to know how the big stick would have held up against the laser swords, because it held up pretty well against laser bullets. That thing is clearly imbued with space magic. But I digress.

In summary…

Rebel Moon – Part One left a lot to be desired. I doubt that anyone out there will be buying a Netflix subscription just to see this film, but millions of people will probably watch it when it pops up in their “recommended” section. It is highly forgettable, and certainly nothing to write home about (even if I managed 3000 words). Hopefully Netflix will continue to stump up money for science fiction stories – and hopefully they will send their money to someone with fresh ideas, who can capture them with genuine care and consideration.