Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child Of Fire

It’s like Star Wars… but for adults, Mom and Dad!

When a colony on the far edge of the galaxy is threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Motherworld, they send a young woman with a mysterious past to find some warriors willing to help them take a stand.

The story behind this film is that Zach Snyder (Dawn Of The Dead ‘04, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole) pitched this idea for a Star Wars movie, but that it was “too bad ass” for the Star Wars franchise, so he changed some names and details and sold it to Netflix.

But the reality is… Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child Of Fire is nothing but a bloated and bombastic Frankenstein’s monster built out of repetitive slo-mo fights, awkward exposition, obvious homages, ready cliches, and some overly-familiar tropes. It is the definition of sound and fury signifying nothing, and worst of all, it’s dull. Really, in the end, the film at best only serves to remind us that it’s too bad Snyder isn’t a DP for an amazing director shooting an amazing writer’s script, because this shit here is just… Seven Samurai filtered through a heavy Dune/Star Wars lens, which is like filtering water through Kool-aid.

So…

Kora is an outsider, a troubled soul with the weight of dark secrets riding heavily upon her beautifully sculpted brows, but she has found a simple peace living here amongst these simple farm folk. They’re good salt of the earth stock, these simple Amish Space Vikings and their simple town of Veldt, which means “a wide, grassy plain found in southernmost Africa” and she’s content with this good life, on this good earth, a simple life of growing things with her hands. There’s a purity to it that she feels in her soul… a freedom…

Look how content she is!

Unfortunately, she is also a child of war, running from a dark past…

Because of this, Kora fears love, she fears comfort, so she always stands apart, feeling like the outsider she is… which is good, because soon enough, that past catches up her. And the bad guys that do show up are just straight up Space Nazis, led by a man made out of pure Space Nazi concentrate, a man who is armed with a shillelagh and a star destroyer, and he has come to The Shire looking to be a big meany.

“In ten weeks, I’ll return, and take your grain! Or else… BWAH-HAHAHAHA!”

Ten weeks! Oh shit, it’s the final countdown!

(Kick-ass Synthesizer plays)

When the main Space Nazi then leaves to go Nazi-around space for ten weeks, he leaves behind a platoon of Space Nazis as a garrison. Those guys are a bunch of crew-cut-having, guffawing jerks, who apparently enjoy two things… being mean to people, and then laughing about it. Bad news for them though, because Kora has had all she can stands, and she can’t stands no more! In a scene reminiscent of Kenny Roger’s 2nd best song, The Coward of the County, Kora gives in to the person she truly is, the one she thought she had buried long ago underneath all that good tilled earth.

Pro-tip: If you’re the 13th guy in the room and you’re watching some svelte little monster lady tear through your squad one by one like some kind of crazy ass murder-ballerina, by the time she reaches guy number 10, you should already be out the back door and fucking gone.

Anyway…

As a result of Kora having kicked some Space Nazi ass a little too hard, the town has no choice now but to fight, so Kora and Farmer Brown are sent out into the galaxy to find a small group of uniquely-specialized warriors willing to take on the most likely thousands of soldiers stationed on the massive planet-killing Star Destroyer hanging in low orbit overhead, threatening their planet.

Classic Seven Samurai plot, but with a lot more slow motion.

A lot.

That’s Rebel Moon, a generally overly-declarative, clunkily-written, too-long, self-serious bit of genre fluff cobbled together out of the pale shadows of better sources, and too willing to use “sit down, and let me tell you a story” moments, in a tale where things mostly seem to happen only because the film needs it to, not because of any specific narrative reasons.

And while I’m usually a pretty big fan of a film’s “getting the band back together” sequence, this one was missing a vital piece… which is a specific reason why any of them are even joining up in the first place, and I’m talking about other than the fact the magnificent seven can’t be magnificent if there aren’t seven of them. Surprisingly, the ridiculously named Bloodaxe siblings were the only ones shown with a legitimate reason to join up.

I did like the look of all the aliens, weapons, and ships in this whole too-beige endeavor, but… it all feels so unfocused. Obviously, a lot of thought went into the design’s minutiae—most of which is obscured by the muddy color palette—but for all the film’s exposition, not to mention how much it prefers to rely on us recognizing the source material it draws from in lieu of doing any actual world-building, there’s no cohesion to this universe. There’s no way of understanding where any of these places are in relation to each other, either physically or in political/historical context. There’s no sense of this grand history we are repeatedly told this galaxy in turmoil has, not even when you allow for the fact the story takes place in a time where the Empire’s hold on its glory has grown much more tenuous. It all feels so disconnected, like a bunch of random pieces all awkwardly held together by the presence of a few reoccurring characters.

On top of that, everything, the events, the relationships, the conflicts, it’s all so unearned. I mean, yeah, sure, I get it… the simple farmers are the good guys, and the Space Nazis are the bad guys, no problem, but there’s no real emotional connection to any of it. It’s a lot like watching a football game between teams you don’t care about, so you just root for the one wearing your favorite color. Sure, it’s great if orange wins, but do you really care if they lose to green?

Hooray for generic badassery, I guess?

Besides, let’s be honest here, those simple space farmers, those good salt of the earth folks, they aren’t actually good guys if they were okay with the Space Nazis as long as the Space Nazis left them alone…

On the upside, at least this time out, the film seemed a little more focused than Army of the Dead did, but it still has a lot of the same issues, which I guess are just “Snyder” issues. Once again, it feels like this film is a first draft that really could’ve benefited from an heavy outside editorial hand.

Plus, story-wise, this film has the same problem that a lot of the myriad Seven Samurai riffs do… they made the bad guy too big. When it’s just a gang of marauding bandits, then seven badasses and some angry farmers seem like a reasonable option, but when it’s an intergalactic empire? Against a handful of badasses and some angry farmers? Then it just seems dumb. Yeah, they may win the one battle rolling around in the dirt in slow motion, but how could they possibly win the war? One orbital bombardment later, the story ends with a smoking crater.

Anyway, after two hour and fifteen minutes, which certainly felt much, much longer, the “End of Part One” end credit really felt more like a threat, then it did a promise of a satisfying coming resolution.

Two thumbs down… in slow motion, lit by the light of a burning conflagration, as the clarion call of the trumpets swell dramatically, obscuring the thunderous cacophony of the explosions in the background.