When a colony on the edge of the galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius, they dispatch a young woman with a mysterious past to seek out warriors from neighbouring planets to help them take a stand.
Rebel Moon or Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child Of Fire is directed by Zack Snyder. A film that I've been pretty excited about for awhile. This is sort of a passion project for Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad (one of the other writers of the film), it's very clear the film has a ton of inspirations such as Star Wars, Dune, The Last Samurai and many others. So it's very disappointing to see just how much of a mess and disjointed the movie is.
Before I start I do want to acknowledge that yes an extended cut is coming out in 2024 similar to Zack Snyder's Justice League cut. We'll cross that bridge when the cut releases but for now I'm reviewing the movie as what it is right now. Anyway let's get to the review.
The performances and the visuals are what pushes the movie to the finish line, Sofia Boutella is a fun protagonist who does give a solid performance and Anthony Hopkins while not getting a lot of screentime still manages to land a touching impression on the viewer. The rest of the cast aren't particularly noteworthy but none of them turn in a bad performance.
The visuals are fantastic, if it's one thing that Snyder has always been great at it's making his films visually appealing and that absolutely applies here. Even if we don't know much about Rebel Moon's world it's truly beautiful and really does make you want to explore the place, it's huge in scale and the attention to detail in a lot of areas is very creative there's many striking moments that standout as well.
Unfortunately that's where Rebel Moon ends for me, the characters on paper are interesting they are very neat looking design wise but don't have the character development to make the viewer care about them. Something that's very noticeable here is the characters appear, get to do a couple cool things and then are put aside as characters who stand around until a fight scene starts. This repeats throughout the movie and it's a huge shame because you want to learn more about these characters but the movie doesn't give any strong development.
The same can be said with the world building, while yes the world itself is very neat to look at. Once again the movie unfortunately doesn't give the world the proper development it needs, it really leaves the viewer in the dark a lot of the time and not in a good way, I still do very much like the look of it and It does make you want to explore. But at the same time I want to actually learn about it, it's all very vague and loses the viewer very quickly.
Finally there's the villains who are pretty by the numbers, Ed Skrein does a fine enough job in the role. But there's just nothing here that makes the viewer care about this guy as a villain.
Overall Rebel Moon has its moments but it's mostly a huge misfire, can this be fixed with the director's cut? Will the sequel that's coming out next year be better? I guess we will cross that bridge when we get there, but for now this is a huge mess.
Rebel Moon is available on Netflix.
4/10 D+
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