Whatever side of the Zack Snyder fence you’re on — and if you straddle the fence, prepare to get pushed, one way or the other — Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire is exactly what you think it is. For fans of the director, it’s an unfiltered space fantasy full of the director’s “mature” content, slo-mo, extremely shallow focus (literally), and stylistic excess. For haters of Snyder, the same. This is space opera with a capital “O” — there’s no key moment Snyder won’t punctuate with slo-mo, no emotional beat he won’t enhance with an ear-assaulting choral soundtrack. Characters speak in broad proclamations as if to get as far from Joss Whedon’s sensibility as possible. The script has no jokes and very little humor aside from that which may be taken from the overall excess and over-the-top nature of the thing.
How you react to this may vary. It took some years, but Michael Bay hung in there long enough to see his “Bayhem” go from being the bane of film critics’ existence to a stylistic tic they now want to see more of sometimes. Snyder’s not there yet, in part because of vitriolic spambots and online trolls determined to exacerbate any distance between the director’s critics and fans. To those who do appreciate his work, however, Rebel Moon feels like the logical culmination of everything he’s done so far. It’s an actual Snyderverse that operates entirely under Zack Snyder laws of physics and adolescent-sensibility badassery.
Screen to Page
Some comics allow the reader to easily imagine them as movies; Rebel Moon is the first to make me imagine the comic adaptation: where the captions would go, when the artwork would become more stylized, what the splash pages would be, and so forth. Thanks to Snyder’s familiar stop-and-go, slow-down-speed-up action scenes, it frequently feels exactly like a motion comic. Comparisons to Star Wars are obvious, but it also feels like Sucker Punch in space, except that Snyder, and not his protagonist, is the one imagining it…as his escape from the torture of online discourse, perhaps. Like 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars, itself a Star Wars cash-in by Roger Corman, it’s The Seven Samurai in space, but after 43 years, I think it’s okay to allow another one to exist.
As if it’s a competition for directorial excess, Snyder attempts to smack down several obvious rivals by one-upping their most irritating tics. The use of lens flares in the first act is eye-melting and makes J.J. Abrams look like a goth kid by comparison; his sound mixes, rendering dialogue inaudible, give Christopher Nolan a major run for the money, though perhaps pointlessly, since this is a Netflix movie and closed captioning is right there. We must await with bated breath the extra-hour-long R-rated cut, which promises [per Snyder at a post-screening Q&A] envelope-pushing perversity; for now, the story, such as it is, doesn’t feel like it’s missing chunks. Indeed, the story as a concept begins to feel almost irrelevant here; Rebel Moon verges on an art film in the way it primarily uses motion, color, and the objectification of its actors to propel the narrative.
Who Did Not See That Coming?
Where it’s less of an art film is in its message, which boils down to “fascism is bad” and “appeasement doesn’t work.” Granted, there are plenty of public figures in our world who could stand to have a message that basic drummed into their heads, but like Rob Zombie, Zack Snyder is more interested in making cool imagery than analyzing its undertones. Without seeing the full story, judging the themes is harder. We can nonetheless judge the coolness factor, which is probably off the charts for 14-year-olds and still pretty decent if you’re the kind of adult who still loves Heavy Metal magazine.
On a planet that’s basically agrarian, pre-Christian Ireland — they celebrate the harvest by having traditionally mandated sex, rather than praying — representatives from the Motherworld show up in conspicuously Nazi-like regalia, led by Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein). This is the movie’s notion of irony: giving a scummy villain a name derived from a famously positive literary character and his primary adjective.
Waltzing in
Noble is essentially Hans Landa from Inglourious Basterds, and when his uncannily calm conversation inevitably devolves into violence, he leaves Planet Ireland with an ultimatum. They’d better give him the majority of their crops by his deadline…Or Else. Most of the locals decide that if they do really good work harvesting, Noble might be impressed and spare them. But Kora (Sofia Boutella) knows better.
The reason she knows better is she’s actually Gamora to Noble’s Thanos: a forcibly adopted daughter raised to kill who changed her mind and went on the run. Looking to hide again, she can’t help herself from taking out some of the occupying troops when they threaten to rape a local girl, and once she lays waste to the creeps, there’s really no choice but to prepare for war. If you know the inspiration, you know what happens next: Kora must go looking for mercenaries and other rebels to join her fight and take on the Empire, er, Imperium.
It’s Like Some Sort of League for Justice
The team she assembles includes Belfast Han Solo (Charlie Hunnam), Totally Not Female Cad Bane With Lightsabers (Doona Bae), General Drunk Maximus (Djimon Hounsou), Local Dork (Michiel Huisman), Noble Indigenous Animal Whisperer (Staz Nair), and the Kickass Dreadlocked Siblings (Ray Fisher and Cleopatra Coleman). The Anthony Hopkins-voiced Threepio With Antlers is peripheral thus far, though he appears to be on a saga-length quest to deprogram his own pacifism. Lengthy flashbacks explain Kora’s past; for the rest, we’ll have to wait for part 2.
Yes, they have names, but they’re all names like “Balisarius,” and in some cases, they have alternate names, and half the time, what characters say is inaudible anyway. This is what action figure packages are for. Snyder’s sensibility here feels a lot like Rob Liefeld’s in comics — everyone has to have the biggest muscles, most lovingly preposterous weapons, and coolest poses. The story is strictly a secondary concern, aside from the mandate that the PG-13 envelope must be pushed with as much blood and fetish material as the rating will allow.
Is There a Problem?
This may sound like an insult, but it really isn’t. Sure, this style would work wonders with a really good script, but that feels like complaining that ballets have predictable plots. To the extent that the story surprises, it’s with images, not narrative twists. Snyder may not have a message he’s trying to impart with all his visual poetry, but he offers up a field day for analysts in what he throws up out of his id. For one thing, he has apparently always wondered whether or not Walrus Man wanted to have sex with Luke Skywalker in the Tatooine cantina.
Like Beau Is Afraid and Babylon, Rebel Moon is a big swing of a film that feels like everything its director ever wanted to do, and every filmmaker should get at least one shot at that. Snyder’s best movies use other people’s stories to cover his relative lack of interest in narrative, but there’s something to be said for letting him go nuts and losing yourself in the madness.
As to whether or not you’ll enjoy it, frankly, you already know.
Grade: 4/5
Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire debuts on Netflix Dec. 21.
