Rebel Moon Part One: A Dumpster of Fire

**SPOILERS**

Oh, Zack Snyder...you and your ‘this isn’t Star Wars meets Seventh Samurai’ scheme, what did you do to us?

I tried, I really did. The first fifteen minutes or so I thought we had something going on but quickly it all felt painfully familiar with themes and characters we’ve all seen before. We’ve got the evil Motherworld which is basically the Empire who have depleted their own world of resources and are in search of a planet that can make them sandwiches. One of the first images of them is their cylindrical ship leaaving what can only be describes as large space vagina. You be the judge. They find food makers in the village of the planet Veldt (It's not Tatouine) populated by a handful of farmers who proudly work their land and are home to our main protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella). She is a brooding, isolated twenty-something with an attitude and with that well worn stereotype introduced we now know how this is all going to play out character wise for her. And yep, turns out she’s an elite trained soldier who escaped the Motherworld after their king, queen and their magical princess daughter Issa were assassinated. Issa could apparently bring dead things back to life (not using the Force) and was heralded as a messiah to her people. Well, she’s DEAD now viewers, don’t you feel angry? Well you SHOULD because Zack TOLD us so through three minutes of TOUCHING exposition. Does this play into the narrative? Does this motivate Kora for revenge? Nope. I don’t think it’s even mentioned again. So why bloody introduce us to it in the first place if it doesn’t advance the story? Well, viewers don’t ask questions, just suck it up and move on.

We then meet our main villain, the machiavellian and painfully skinny Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) in all his nazi-esque attire and wielding a shillelagh. I guess that’s just his thing. I swear half of the cast was forced to have 2% body fat because Zack has a fetish for abs. Anyways as expected he kills the leader of the farmers and demands all of their crops despite them only being a small village. How they are to produce enough crops to feed an entire fleet is beyond me but whatever. They then leave behind a contingent of about a dozen rapey soldiers and a robot named Danny (voiced by Anthony Hopkins) who is just another rehashed version of C-3PO crossed with whatever that robot was from the abysmal Ahsoka. Don’t worry we’ll never see him again until the end of the film when he’s wearing deer antlers or some shit. Anyways Kora is ready to quit this entire stupid mess until the Swiss Miss girl who carries around a pail of water at all hours of the night gets dragged into a barn by the thugs to be raped and then it’s game on for Kora.

Do you have a sense of what comes next? Of course you do because this film lacks all subtlety or surprise. I am always amazed to watch a 100lb twenty-something woman take out seven heavily armed men three times her weight without breaking a sweat, but that’s what we get. We get the expected ramped up slow motion...but seemingly at random points that make no sense. Yeah, it’s cool to watch but totally absurd. We know exactly how it’s going to end. Yeah, she got a small assist from one young sympathetic henchman who questioned the rapey stuff but we never see him again because screw minor characters you introduced who could have built story but chose to discard them. This stupid show…

So now Kora is pissed and wants to assemble an army to fight the Empire and damn is she committed. She with her useless farmer cohort Gunnar who has no skills whatsoever set across the planet to build this team one NPC at a time without any resources at all. Plucky this one is.

Then for the next two hours any resemblance of a story or conflict comes to a halt. In a ham fisted attempt at world building we simply bounce around various locations and the team building is simply a case of someone who knows someone who knows someone else and it all comes together with barely an effort. The explicit references to other films seems criminal. Star Wars, Seven Samurai, LOTR and even Harry Potter just strung together leaving us with the acute sense that we’ve seen this all before. And it’s because we have. There’s not a single original idea in this incoherent mess.

Case in point - Kora and Gunnar’s first stop? Yes, a cantina scene filled with alien scum and villainy where they meet up with, wait for it, a dashing young pilot/trader named Kai (Charlie Hunnam) with his own ship who offers to fly them around the universe for whatever they can pay. How very convenient and how very clearly a set up for later. And since he’s a straight white guy we know he’s going to be trouble.

We meet each new character with the same type of low resolution set up. We get some vague backstory on each character followed by some feat they can pull off to show us just how badass they are with no narrative relevance. We meet Tarak (Staz Nair) with all his abs who can tame a griffin, Nemesis (Bae Doona) in an overworn stereotype of the female Asian warrior who kills some Shelob-adjacent monster with her glowing swords that are absolutely not light sabers. Is there a point to this? Did it advance the story? Who are these people? No one cares. It’s not story, it’s just showing off to look cool.

Then there’s Titus (Djimon Hounsou) who was once some great general or something, but he’s now just a drunk in an alley who our characters just stumbled upon without any real searching or asking around. How did they even know what he looked like when they’ve never seen him before? Don’t ask questions just accept it, peons. And finally we’re introduced to Bloodaxe (geeze, these names) played by Ray Fisher. He’s important because he’s got like ships, soldiers and stuff. Every so often we cut to Noble just to remind the audience that there’s still a villain somewhere in this abstruse non-plot.

And with that the band is together and we couldn’t care less. They’ve all aligned themselves with Kora even though none of them have any real skin in the game and have no genuine motivation to risk their lives for her mission. It’s maddening and dumb and we’re already two hours in with nothing to show for it.

We then get the expected betrayal by Kai we all saw coming and all the characters are now trapped in these crab footed face clamps ala Hannibal Lector that Kai had to have the exact number of on his ship before he even met her. The inane sort of coincidences it took to bring us to this moment shatters all credulity. So with the characters trapped with no chance of escape...they all just escape and Snyder-motion kicks into high gear leaving some moments so slowed down they might as well be still frames. Anyfuck, Noble has shown up and we get this confusing battle where Bloodaxe dies by punching a windshield or some shit and saving everyone. The film begs us to have sympathy as one of his strangely small cohorts screams in rage to let us know his sacrifice is to have this enormous emotional weight but we only met the guy like fifteen seconds ago so yeah no. You didn’t earn that one, buddy.

Now Kora finds herself face to face with Noble out on some platform ala the Death Star. He thankfully didn’t tell her he was her father but I was waiting for it. It’s a decent fight sequence but eventually she gets the upper hand, breaks his shillelagh and stabs him with it sending him plummeting some thousands of feet to his death. Okay I guess but it’s really problematic. There’s another film to go, your big bad guy is dead and there’s twenty minutes left to this nonsense. How does one fix this conundrum? Oh, it’s easy.

Just bring him back to life.

Yep, just like that. His troops scoop up his crushed, stabbed lifeless corpse and dump him in a tank with a bunch of rope lights, magic and goo. Problem solved. This is the laziest shit writing I have seen in awhile and that’s saying a lot. It’s one of the more infuriating tropes that’s evolved in recent years where the death of a character no longer holds weight or significance. It becomes meaningless when we can just simply bring them back because the writers want them to for the sake of plot convenience. When Ned Stark got his head chopped off, we gasped in shock and moved on because the writers knew what the hell they were doing and could carry the story forward. Fuck this stupid non-dying trope with its character bringy back thing.

The last over confident minutes see our prescriptive heroes all lined up in a self congratulatory Marvel shot along the rim of a deck as the camera pans over them as if they’ve somehow earned our respect. At this point I don’t even remember their names. There’s never been any meaningful dialog between them, they’ve never grown as characters and we know nothing more about any of them since they were first introduced. Congratulations, Zack you’ve spent an entire film solely dedicated to introducing characters to build some super team and we still know little to nothing about them let alone have any remote connection to. That’s quite a feat.

Ultimately Rebel Moon is a self indulgent pet project that even got rejected by the franchise murdering Kathleen Kennedy. Snyder should have just stopped there. That should have been a sign. But I get it, he’s an auteur with vision but lacking any self awareness to realize he had nothing original to offer and no one close to check him. 300 was magnificent and I loved it and it made every man want to start going to the gym, but he’s plateaued since then. His visuals are stunning but baffling at the same time. He employed bizarre anamorphic lenses that rendered his shots smeared, out of focus and distorted. Why? Because he thought it was cool. His color pallette is equally strange and muddy as if the vast majority of the film was shot through a #5 dirt filter and his dialog is so on the nose you can almost always predict what the next line will be. No subtlety, no subtext, no engagement. Except for the beginning and the final fight scene there is no tension or conflict which renders the entire thing boring and unappealing. This whole useless endeavor was a amateurish set up for the sequel which drops in April. Yeah, I’ll hate watch it because I can’t help it.

But I think in the end what bothered me most was the arrogance of the entire endeavor. Snyder set out to make an “R rated Star Wars” which is not just offensive in concept, but is actually something which he didn’t deliver on, or yet – and that was by design.

Why? Marketing. The R rated version will drop in the summer and we’ll get all the sex, violence and nudity hinted at in this version simply to seduce audiences back for a for a second view. He'll do it with Part Two as well. It’s cheap and manipulative. And Snyder-cuts are some of the most self indulgent in the industry.

Ultimately Rebel Moon Part One just made me angry for its unmitigated pretention and that's too bad. It didn't have to be this way.