“Rebel Moon -- Part One: A Child of Fire" review: The Mediocre Seven

 

“Rebel Moon -- Part One: A Child of Fire,” 2023, directed by Zack Snyder

★☆☆☆☆

Zack Snyder, the ultimate auteur of bro-ey slow motion and brooding superheroes, is in a difficult stage in his career. Following the infamous “Zack Snyder’s Justice League”, many associate him with overindulgent runtimes and an unfriendly, cultish fanbase. One would hope that he could use the opportunity that is “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire” to redeem his public image and craft an original series of  sci-fi films that take him a step forward, away from the DC fanboys and forgettable zombie flicks. Unfortunately, though, “Rebel Moon” far too closely resembles its beginnings as a rejected “Star Wars” script, solidifies Snyder as a pathological mimic, and had a longer, R-rated director's cut planned even before its release (an obvious attempt by Netflix to repeat the unrepeatable fan-generated hype around “Zack Snyder’s Justice League”). It’s almost tragic considering how much potential the colossal, “Dune”-sized budget and promise of galactic worldbuilding of “Rebel Moon” elicits, but it’s ultimately not much more than forgettable. 

“Rebel Moon”’s story structure is irksomely familiar, pulling directly from Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” and its subsequent remake "The Magnificent Seven”. Kora (Sofia Boutella), a war-hardened orphan living on the humble, agriculturally-focused moon of Veldt, is forced to assemble a team of warriors to defend her village after a confrontation with soldiers from the “Motherworld” – the imposing, Nazi-esque stand in for “Star Wars”’ Galactic Empire – leads to violent retaliation. Filmmakers inevitably borrow from each other, but it doesn’t reflect well on Snyder how blatant his influences present themselves here, especially when the most obvious ones are as frequently modeled-upon as Kurosawa and George Lucas. Proxies of specific characters, locations, and moments are so easily identified that it distracts; Kora’s arc is a flattened reproduction of Luke Skywalker’s, “Rebel Moon”’s protagonists bear striking resemblance to respective characters in “Seven Samurai”, and countless more similarities to other properties are numbingly recurrent. It’s more than just story beats, too. Snyder’s aesthetics often feel so similar to a host of video games and science fiction works that it doesn’t seem like an accident or even respectful homage, but rather a childish fanfiction crossover. When unique designs for costumes, spaceships and aliens do come along, they are high points for the film as a whole, but aren’t enough to compensate for the bore of the scene-to-scene plotting. 

What could have been “Rebel Moon”’s saving grace is Snyder’s often-maligned visual style, at least distracting from the script’s banality with gritty slo-mo action sequences and awe-inducing scale. Even those elements that have been successful in past Snyder outings are undercut here. The PG-13 rating traps the film in a box that it was not meant to fit inside; adult themes like sexuality and gore are frequently spoken about but never shown, and the laser battles that clearly intend to pack a heavy punch are cut down to their bare essentials to avoid showing a single drop of blood. The huge environments and vistas that could have been staggering don’t come close to their potential either. Snyder, who in this case acts as his own cinematographer, opts for massive anamorphic lenses that could capture beautiful on-location footage, but instead largely only captures small-scale moments on The Volume (the massive LED wall invented by Industrial Light and Magic). “Rebel Moon”’s photography looks better than green screen may have, but feels artificial, especially late in the second act when the ragtag crew visits a very blue planet whose surface is far too flat, shiny, and synthetic to feel grounded. It’s easy to feel bad for the ensemble cast, many of whom have proven themselves to be talented industry forces, who struggle with what little the writing gives them. Djimon Honsou, Bae Doona, and Anthony Hopkins are all pigeonholed into paper-thin archetypes, but still bring a surprising amount of gravitas to their limited screen time. 

If there’s anything “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire” proves, it’s that Zack Snyder is likely to find more success adapting goofier, more juvenile source material like comic books rather than the unflinching, grisly epics he clearly aspires towards. When “Part Two: The Scargiver” releases in April, audiences shouldn’t expect anything they haven’t already seen. 

 “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire” is streaming now on Netflix.