Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire (2023) — What Happened Snyder? This is Awful
Rebel Moon is the latest offering from the polarizing creative Zack Snyder. It’s an ‘original’ space opera about a farming colony on a remote planet threatened by a galaxy-spanning empire and the efforts of a woman with a mysterious past to form a team of rebels to fend for their home. Divided into two parts, the first one is A Child of Fire and is available on Netflix while the second one is due to be released in April.
The movie was panned by critics and audiences alike but my curiosity won, mostly due to the story being an original creation rather than an adaptation, a remake or a sequel, helmed by a creative whose projects I have liked or loved previously. So I checked it out and gave it a fair shot… People are not exaggerating, Rebel Moon Part 1 is crap.
I was never a hardcore fan of Zack Snyder but I do like him and I enjoyed several of his previous films in different capacities, with the top ones being 300 and Man of Steel. I even joined in on the Justice League SnyderCut campaign. After the entire DCEU fiasco, it was apparent that Snyder was screwed over by the management at WB and whatever his original vision was got lost in the process. We received some hefty chunks but will never see the entire thing and that always makes me mad and sad.
Letting bygones be bygones, Snyder moved forward with a partnership on Netflix with a promise of having complete control (or almost) over his projects. Here things took a turn for the worse as Snyder’s first outing — Army of the Dead — on the streaming platform turned out to be a bad zombie experience where he not only directed it but wrote and shot it as well. I had maintained even before the undead travesty that Snyder struggles with writing even if, as is a common belief amongst his fans, he is good if not great with visuals and injecting epicness. So, it became pretty much clear writing is not his strong suit.
After experiencing Rebel Moon, it is abundantly clear he sucks at writing and isn’t particularly good at being a cinematographer either.
Having stretched the preamble long enough, perhaps because there is hardly anything to say about Rebel Moon other than it’s an awful waste of time, I’ll go over why it sucked so much.
The issue with Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire is that you don’t get any element of filmmaking executed well enough that you can get behind. Whether it’s the cinematography, the CGI, the dialogue, the story, the worldbuilding, the performances, the action scenes, or the music, none of it stood out in a positive light.
The Cinematography by Snyder had the same out-of-focus and blurry effect in a plethora of shots that you got in Army of the Dead. The lens he’s using and the experiments he’s trying do not work and the end result is unappealing and distracting. On top of that, even the shots that you expect to be good i.e. the ones dominated by CGI with more control on how to position the camera are mostly basic or uninventive.
The CGI isn’t any better. While you do get some decently-rendered vistas, spaceships, creatures and future tech, you also get a lot of middling to poorly rendered elements littered throughout the movie where there isn’t a single long stretch when the movie just looks good. Granted, the budget isn’t massive but at around 83 Million Dollars per film with a total of 166 Million Dollars for both parts shot back to back, and with projects like The Creator giving a much better visual fidelity in a similar ballpark, you expect the creative dubbed “having a keen visual eye” to produce some proper treat for the eyes as he has shown before.
To further nail the lack of entertainment, another aspect Snyder is usually credited as being good at is epic action sequences, but the ones in Rebel Moon are anything but. Often poorly choreographed with an unreasonable amount of slow motion and breaking your suspension of disbelief all the time due to plot armour and nonsensical chain of events, I was surprised to find out how lame and boring the action was in Rebel Moon. It feels like Zack Snyder created an AI of himself that created the movie and it tried its best to imitate him but failed.
The Pacing and editing are weirdly poor because it’s both rushed and slow. Some sections of the movie would go on and on without accomplishing anything substantive, bringing you to boredom, while others would rush past crucial or interesting aspects (e.g. General Titus and the Gladiator/Rome planet) without taking the time to develop the locations or the character of importance there. Messy, messy, messy.
The Performances fared slightly better but only just. Secondary cast members such as Daario Naharis the First (Ed Skrein), Daario Naharis the Recast (Michiel Huisman), Bae Doona (Nemesis), Charlie Hunnam (Kai) and Ray Fisher (Darrian Bloodaxe) have good moments here and there. They also feel better in comparison to the lead Sofia Boutella (Kora) who gave a generally poor performance. She’s fine in secondary roles that demand physicality but she cannot perform well in a leading role that requires a lot more. There are several instances where her delivery was terrible and created unintentional hilarity despite the scene being a serious one. However, the members of the cast that could have provided the biggest oomph such as Djimon Honsou (General Titus) and Anthony Hopkins (Jimmy the robot) hardly got a few lines — maybe we’ll get more of them in the sequel.
Now, all of the above problems combined can tank a movie experience significantly but you can still come out of it appreciating what it had to say. However, Rebel Moon’s biggest problem is in The Writing.
- The World Building is awful. If you stop and think about how the mechanics of the universe Snyder created work, all you see are holes.
- The dialogue is weak and sometimes abysmal, spelling everything out to you and repeating information often, with exchanges between characters that come off as childish. The script certainly didn’t go through any redrafts.
- The characterization is… well kinda absent. Most of the characters barely get to do or say anything. Besides their appearance and recruitment scenes, you’d be hard-pressed to even remember them since they disappear for vast swathes of time. And all of them are one-note. Kora (the protagonist) feels the same at the start as she did at the end. The most interesting one is Kora’s companion farmer Gunnar who displayed some decisions and traits that made him stand out.
- The ‘original’ space opera epic Story is more of a mishmash of established sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars and Dune, often downright copying elements and changing them only enough to not get sued, than an inspired take on the genre from the classic franchises one loves.
Aside from the sparse positives mentioned above already, a few more fished out from the ocean of awfulness are:
- A few shots were cool.
- A few locations were cool.
- The score by Tom Holkenborg (Junkie XL) was fine.
As I understand, a 3-hour R-rated directors cut (or SnyderCut) — some rumours say it’s 4 hours — of Rebel Moon Part 1 is to be released just before Part 2 in April. Apparently, Netflix gave Zach Snyder full control but wanted a PG-13 cut first, presumably for higher viewing numbers. Will it make a difference? Other than giving more screen time to secondary characters, I doubt it will and at this point, I don’t have any inclination to watch it. But I know that when it gets released in a few months, I’ll probably check it out because my curiosity will win, again.
Overall, Rebel Moon is terrible. The world-building is nonsensical, the story is a poor mashup of ideas taken from much better franchises, characterization is almost non-existent, the cinematography is mostly unappealing, the visuals/CGI are a mixed bag and often ugly, the acting from the lead is bad and the rest don’t do much to lift up the experience either, the action scenes are lame, and the pacing is horrible. It’s a boring mess of half a story and unless the sequel is magically radically different, I have no hope of it fairing any better.
It’s disheartening since I generally like Zack Snyder but Rebel Moon is the worst movie of 2023, beating out Quantumania and Fast X. In a bid to have his own Star Wars, it seems as though Snyder took inspiration from Disney Star Wars but at least entries like The Last Jedi have some elements that are well done; Rebel Moon has none. Even if you’re a hardcore fan, I’d suggest skipping this one. Or at the very least, wait till both parts are out — and the director’s cut — and then check out the entire story. It could aid Part 1. And if I were to rate it, I’d give it a 3/10.
