‘Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire’ review: Zack Snyder’s Star Wars ripoff is a trap
There’s something insidious about a bad movie that has a lot of bonkers stuff in it. In the words of Admiral Ackbar, who is not in this Star Wars ripoff, “It’s a trap.” Because you’ll hear about all the odd baubles of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, and no matter how much I warn you that they are thrown together in a dull and frustrating way, you won’t believe me.
Jena Malone as a vengeance-seeking spider woman? Charlie Hunnam as a hipster douchebag space pirate? A burly prince who hates shirts so much you might assume his parents were murdered by them? A robot named Jimmy who is voiced by Anthony Hopkins? A ripped villain who loves Nazi aesthetics and tentacle porn with equal measure? “What’s not to love?” I hear you wondering. So, so much!
Truly, Netflix’s latest ploy at big-budget genre thrills is nowhere near as fun or daring as bad-but-good movies like Winter’s Tale, Jupiter Ascending, or even Cats. Worst of all, it’s boring.
Zack Snyder’s Star Wars is a bore.
Originally pitched to Lucasfilm as a Star Wars movie and understandably rejected, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon trods very familiar terrain, beginning with a humble but hot farmer who — despite their reluctance — is destined to be a major figure in the rebellion against a fascist interplanetary regime. While the names and lingo have been changed to avoid lawsuits, this movie still feels so close to George Lucas’s copyrighted universe that Snyder is practically daring Disney’s legal team to sue.
Rather than an opening crawl, Rebel Moon lays out its exposition dump in a long voiceover from Jimmy (Hopkins), who explains that an evil empire is gobbling up the resources of unsuspecting planets while smacking down rebels that work to stop them. Then, Snyder plops us down on a vulnerable world of dirt farmers, where a stern-browed Kora (Sofia Boutella) warns her neighbors not to trust the soldiers whose massive ship has begun ominously hovering above their fields. Sound familiar?
Deadpool villain Ed Skrein comes on the scene as Admiral Atticus Noble, and from his SS-like military gear to his menacingly sharp smile, he is clearly anything but. His army of invading baddies predictably bring violence, but because this is Snyder’s version of Star Wars, they also bring a very clear threat of rape. There’s a crass and tedious sequence where every soldier but one giddily gears up to sexually assault a local girl (Charlotte Maggi), who might have a name but is chiefly defined by being beautiful while carrying water.
Thankfully, Kora and some unlikely allies stop this assault through battle. However, to defeat the reinforcements sure to come, the peaceful villagers need to bring warriors to their defense. So, Kora and Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), one of the hot farmers who has a crush on her, set out to round up a crew. That process makes up most of the movie, roping in familiar figures like a disgraced general called Titus (a criminally underused Djimon Hounsou), disillusioned samurai Nemesis (Doona Bae), the imposing but actually noble revolutionary Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), the aforementioned shirtless prince called Tarak (Staz Nair), and Kai (Charlie Hunnam), a space pirate who’s like if Han Solo came from Girls‘ version of Brooklyn.
It’s not just the archetypes of its heroes and villains that borrow hard from Star Wars. It’s also the requisite cantina scene with quirky alien critters, the vaguely Western plotline with sci-fi flair, the gentlemanly droids (which won’t be called droids), and the lightsabers that might be generously relabeled as laser cutlasses.
From there, Snyder just heaps in other influences, ranging from the spear-versus-spaceship play of Avatar to the names in Legend of Korra to the fashion of Vampire Hunter D and the psycho-sexual tube-play of 1984’s Dune. And while the too-muchness of all that might have made for an exciting and rich pastiche, there’s so little connective tissue between these things that Snyder’s vision instead feels like a lazy collage, stealing from richer, original genre works.
Snyder hits all his pitfalls with Rebel Moon.
While the influences are as varied as the settings in this universe-trekking war drama, all of it is painted with Snyder’s signature color scheme. Grim grays and greens coat empty fields, a bustling port city, spaceships, and palaces. Accents of orange and red come in sweeps of violence, from explosions to the swath of a red lightsaber — sorry — laser cutlass. This color scheme flattens these worlds, as does Snyder’s grating reliance on CGI backdrops that feel false, even when Snyder’s cinematography is otherwise picturesque.
Remember when Annie Leibovitz shot those rapturously elegant cover photos of the Star Wars cast for Vanity Fair? Those seem to be a major influence for Rebel Moon, not only in how Snyder stages his wide shots, with a seriousness and beauty befitting a perfume ad, but also in how he casts his heroes. From 300 and Sucker Punch to Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, Snyder not only favors his cool color palette but also a cast that looks ripped from runways and the pages of fashion magazines. Yes, this makes for a very pretty picture — sometimes even an awe-inspiring one. But in Rebel Moon, this is arguably more jarring than usual. Where Star Wars movies are certainly full of beautiful people, there are also plenty of characters who feel fairly ordinary, which helps ground a universe full of humans and every kind of alien, from sultry to Sarlacc to Jabba the Hutt.
However, in Rebel Moon, the characters are either gorgeous or grotesque. So, when Kora scans the cantina, Hunnam’s meticulously groomed thief is a sharp contrast to a handsy alien who appears to be made entirely of boils. (Props to the actor under the prosthetics — he was a hoot!) This disparity becomes downright comical, as even a character literally introduced covered in mud and shit will get a glamorous makeover between scenes. It’s a Snyder movie. No one can go into battle without being ripped and polished.
Maybe if Snyder’s work showed some self-awareness of this grim-glossy aesthetic, it might work. But true to form, Moon Rebel is doggedly stern in its tone, forcing its heroes into the constraints of brooding and battle-crying while gorgeous. It’s the same suffocating constraint Disney put on its 2000s princesses, limiting their facial expressions in the name of pretty. And all that makes for a film that, despite a barrage of influences, settings, and action sequences, feels flat and emotionally hollow.
Rebel Moon is at its best when Snyder goes beyond brooding.
Thankfully, not every character in this space odyssey falls into the prim framing of stunning while so serious. Pacific Rim‘s Charlie Hunnam is a deranged delight as Kai, who — though undeniably a smokeshow — piles on an Irish accent with a slew of red-flag accessories, including a man bun, a Darren Aronofsky-worthy scarf, silver chain, and what appear to be denim joggers. From the moment he sidles up to Kora at the cantina, he oozes with fuckboi charm. That energy feels chaotic in Snyder’s somber setting, which makes every moment Hunnam has on-screen exciting. Where much of the movie is predictable, his sparking charisma brings fun and spontaneity. But like many of the most intriguing characters in Rebel Moon, his role is too brief.
Elsewhere, Corey Stoll is jolly as a fatherly village leader. Anthony Hopkins is absurd yet amusing as a cerebral battle bot. Cloud Atlas‘s Doona Bae is superb as Nemesis, a dual-fisted swordsperson who lands the film’s best scene opposite The Hunger Games Jena Malone. While Bae follows the Snyder aesthetic of facial stoniness, her eyes carry remorse as she enters a fight where no one really wins. Meanwhile, Malone is near unrecognizable as a spider-human hybrid, made believable through superb special effects.
Yet from behind all of these disturbing visual enhancements, Malone delivers a gutting performance that speaks volumes, with spitted deliveries and a snarl. This sequence, set midway through the building-the-crew stage of the film, was so rich in its storytelling — from setting up the conflict on a mining planet to establishing the moral code of Nemesis — that I began to have hope Rebel Moon might pull out of its tedious tailspin. Sadly, it did not.
Instead, the movie lumbers on from one introduction of a warrior to another, bouncing sporadically back to Skein’s villain, who is either relaxing with tubes and tentacles or switching to a boring shirt and tie for the film’s anti-climactic showdown. The world-building is done in fits of heavy exposition. And sure, you know this story won’t be complete because “Part 1” is in the title. But you won’t believe how incomplete it is. We’re not talking Fast X or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, where plenty of story, character-building, and stakes are set up to thrill us before teasing an even bigger final battle in the future movie. Instead, the team gets built, has one skirmish, and then the movie is over, with a confounding leap of logic from its surviving heroes.
Snyder piles on some flashy while flummoxing imagery and last-minute exposition to set up his Part 2. But after this movie spends two hours and 15 minutes poorly establishing its characters while ripping off Star Wars more than making its own space, it’s really near impossible to care.