Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child Of Fire

Released: 22nd December
Seen: 25th December

Here’s the hottest of my hot takes regarding recent trends in cinema. Zack Snyder has changed from being an interesting director who took chances into possibly one of the most boring directors out there. What makes him boring, at least to me, is that he seems to think every film he touches has to be some edgy, dark, gritty adult tale no matter what the context. This works when he does films about Zombies, something where being dark and gritty actually can work, however, when he tried this with goddamn Superman it started the ball rolling on the utter destruction of the DC cinematic universe. Now he’s turned this dark gritty edgy lens to another beloved property that’s primarily aimed at children, Star Wars… and god damn it, Rebel Moon just kind of sucks.

Rebel Moon (AKA Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child Of Fire, a dumb title I won’t be typing again) starts on a strange planet called Veldt (I assume one from long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away) where a little village has grown up growing grains which they occasionally sell to people. When a militaristic empire comes through to claim their grain, the people of the planet rebel against them led by a young girl named Kora (Sofia Boutella) who has a history with the empire that she’s now rebelling against and wants to lead a small group of her villagers to fight the Emperor and his henchmen, a man clad mostly in black who is covered in scars and could probably do with wearing a mask of some kind to protect himself. There’s a fight, a guy with a cool spacecraft who might help them but also might be willing to sell them out, more fighting, some rape threats, and even a whole bunch of slow motion because why fucking not? Basically dark, gritty, edgy Star Wars

When I say that this is nothing but a dark, gritty, edgy Star Wars movie, that’s a literal accurate description. Rebel Moon started its life as a pitch for a new Star Wars film that Snyder made around the time that Disney bought it and when Disney inevitably said “No, we don’t want a dark gritty version of Star Wars full of rape and torture”, Snyder took the idea and locked it away until someone would let him make something close to it. So he filed off the serial numbers from his original idea, changed a few names, and boom… he made a dark Star Wars fanfiction film and it sucks. It just flat-out sucks in ways that it honestly should be hard to fuck up, but that’s just what this film does. It can’t help it, it’s how Snyder works.

For starters Rebel Moon has all the stuff that’s now a depressing standard element of Snyder’s work, namely his determined attempt to be dark and gritty… which means everything has to be filmed in a dull colour palette, there are loads of pointless violent deaths happening that’s just meant to be edgy for no reason and every now and then a woman might be either almost raped or threatened with it. That’s how you do a dark and gritty film right? You just make sure it looks like you filmed the entire thing in a land where colours are banned and every 5 minutes someone has to be assaulted. Well according to Snyder it is, and it’s fucking painful to sit through. Even with a PG-13 rating (which will come back later on), it feels like this is pushing at the edge lord audience who somehow enjoy Snyder’s twisted nihilism that is just a chore to sit through.

Not helping matters is how Rebel Moon feels like it was hacked to pieces from a longer film and then pushed to the 2-hour mark through gratuitous use of slo-mo (a trick that Snyder will use in every film no matter how pointless it is)… well, it feels like that because that’s probably what happened since we now know that there will be a director’s cut of this coming out next year. Yes, he is clearly trying to recreate the Snyder Cut movement that people online have had to deal with for the past several years, except last time it happened naturally due to him being removed from the Justice League project, this is just cynically playing to his fanbase. The problem is this hurts the film, it’s been made intentionally worse for no justifiable reason. No one was stopping Snyder from releasing the cut he wanted to put out, that’s why Netflix handed him a budget in the first place so actively choosing to put out the worse version so they can hype up the director’s cut later feels shitty.

Make no mistake, this version of Rebel Moon is the worst version of not just Rebel Moon but of a Star Wars knockoff. Its world-building is non-existent, possibly because the film was originally meant to be a part of a different world and when they made the alterations to the character names, they forgot to create a new world to put everything in. Every one of the many planets we visit just look the same, a variation of the brown colour palette that makes this film a chore to watch because nothing interesting is happening in the frame. You can see every little thing they stole from Star Wars, from the obvious Light Sabers to the obvious Han Solo standing to the obvious Kylo Ren analog. It’s not subtle what they’re doing, it was more subtle when the After franchise pretended they weren’t about Harry Styles. At least then they changed their personality so much that all you had left was “hot guy with tattoos”, Rebel Moon can’t even be bothered to go that far to make their shit look different. 

Just for fun let’s pretend we live in a world where Star Wars didn’t exist and Rebel Moon was a wholly original creation that wasn’t just an obvious ripoff… it’d still suck. It’d still be full of boring characters played by people who think that their characterization should begin and end with ‘muscles’ and be shot by someone who clearly wants to hide the film among the foliage. There’s no real excitement, no reason to root for the main characters because we barely know them and everything is just so pointlessly grim that you can’t have fun with it. It’s not an overstatement to point out that every female character either gets threatened with rape or is clearly at high risk of it at some point, you almost cringe when a new character is brought in because they just feel like they want to do a rape at any second. It’s not just dark, it’s depressing. 

There isn’t any hope here, it’s grim and edgy and not at all fun. This isn’t to suggest you can’t do edgy shit, hell one of my favourite films last year was Terrifier 2 which is about as edge lord as you can get but it also knew you needed to have levity, it could push for the extreme but it had to be done to get a specific reaction. You should be shocked or horrified or so appalled that you laugh without meaning to… there’s none of that in Rebel Moon, they push for grim dark shit because that’s all that Snyder wants to do and he’s unable to have any fun with it. It’s just so dull to sit through, you watch this film try all the darkest tricks it can think of, it’s seconds away from just calling you a slur if that’ll get a rise out of you but it’s so transparent in how hard it’s trying that it never works. 

For the record, if you do actually enjoy this film then that’s fine but we all know that a portion of its viewer numbers are just Snyder Cultists desperate to prove their dark edgy Superhero movies were the best and to somehow make the Snyderverse happen at Netflix. That’s why it’s doing good numbers, a fanbase watching on loop trying to meme another movie out of a studio because it worked last time with the Snyder Cut, they managed to rig that stupid Oscar Movie Moment vote a few years ago to make Justice League seem like the best moment ever, they want that to happen here.

Rebel Moon is bad, it’s just very fucking bad. It’s not fun, there’s nothing to latch onto, it’s meant to be the opening episode of a full franchise but the problem is that there’s nothing here to give a single solitary fuck about. Why care? Why care about anyone in this movie? There’s nothing here to care about, I can get a much better version of this by just finding a copy of Star Wars: A New Hope and putting it on. Hell, if I want a dark adult Star Wars, I still have access to The Last Jedi which actually tried to tell an adult story with real consequences and actually challenged the audience a little… the only thing that’s challenging about Rebel Moon is that it’s a challenge to sit through and finish it.

Rebel Moon is just not worth it, but of course there’s going to be more and Snyder’s fans will defend this as better than Star Wars because that’s what the discourse is now. So yay, in a few months we can pretend this franchise is worth a damn again… hell, maybe it’ll be funny and they’ll have someone reveal themselves as Kora’s secret father, why not since we’re stealing everything else of value!