Zack Snyder's 'Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire' is SO 🤬 BORING

One giant space vagina aside, natch.

The thing about Zack Snyder is, his movies are rarely good, but they’re usually singular, which makes them interesting. Like any true auteur, Snyder’s work is an honest glimpses inside the filmmaker’s mind, and this particular filmmaker is such a peculiar mix of frat bro and artiste; he’s passionate about geek stuff but he also wants us to know he’s smart and, like, deep, bruh. But like an adolescent, he seems to equate humorlessness, violence, and on-the-nose symbolism with profundity, and like a toddler, his stories frequently make no sense. And the contrast between being so deeply dumb and yet so deadly serious often makes his movies really goofy in a way he definitely does not intend for them to be.

Snyder’s latest offering, Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire, opens with the extremely distinctive voice of Sir Anthony Hopkins narrating expositional balderdash over an image of a phallic ship emerging from a giant space vagina that emits a globular sound as it unfurls. It’s a promising start that instills the viewer with hope that they’re about to see another camp disasterpiece from the man who brought us “Martha.”

Alas, no such luck: Rebel Moon is unique within Snyder’s oeuvre because there’s absolutely nothing interesting about it. It’s a total misfire on every level, and not in a way that’s funny, or even particularly revealing about Snyder’s psyche. Forget schlepping to see this thing on the big screen during its limited theatrical run; I wouldn’t even advise you watch it when it debuts on Netflix later this week.

Rebel Moon infamously began life as Snyder’s rejected pitch for a Star Wars movie - that pitch ostensibly being “Seven Samurai only with Jedi” (makes sense - George Lucas was so influenced by Akira Kurosawa that he originally wanted Toshiro Mifune to play Obi-Wan Kenobi). Like The Magnificent Seven, Three Amigos, and A Bug’s Life, Rebel Moon ports the basic premise of Kurosawa’s classic into a different genre - in this case, the space opera. There’s a planet of lowly grain farmers, and representatives from the Motherworld (this movie’s version of the Empire) are gonna come and take their crop and leave them to starve to death. So a couple of the braver farmers, lead by Sofia Boutella (who can now celebrate being in something even worse than the 2017 Tom Cruise version of The Mummy), venture to other parts of the galaxy in search of warriors to help the farmers defend themselves.

Snyder didn’t understand Superman and Snyder didn’t understand Watchmen, so I guess it’s not surprising that Snyder apparently doesn’t understand Star Wars or Seven Samurai. Rebel Moon’s “story,” to whatever degree it exists, has neither the fairytale simplicity nor color characters so central to the success of Kurosawa’s masterpiece or Lucas’ cultural juggernaut. The plot is often blanketed with impenetrable fantasy lore, and Snyder, working again with screenwriters Kurt Johnstad (300) and Shay Hatten (Army of the Dead), makes a variety of decisions that undermine the drama. In Seven Samurai and the other films it inspired, the farmers truly have no idea how to fight back, and will be totally screwed if they can’t find anyone to defend them; in Rebel Moon, Boutella’s character is a former military hero capable of taking down ten bad guys at a time all by herself. In Seven Samurai and its offspring, the aggressors are random bandits and outlaws, their threat representing a lack of governmental protection and cultural solidarity; in Rebel Moon, the aggressors ARE the government, which means Boutella doesn’t have to convince anyone to fight for some small village they’ve never even been to before, she has to convince them to take part in an uprising that will benefit billions of people besides just the farmers. These changes to the original set-up make the heroes’ jobs easier, lessen the underdog status of the farmers, and lower the stakes of the overall narrative.

But even that might be less of a problem if you gave a shit about anyone on screen.

Kurosawa introduced his samurai one by one, each with a memorable scene that told you a lot about who they were as a person and what they bring to the group: one samurai saves a child from a bandit by disguising himself as a monk so he can get close with arousing suspicious, one samurai tries to talk an aggressor out of a duel because he knows he’ll win (and he does), one samurai easily sidesteps a trap meant to test him, one samurai appears to be a total lunatic, etc., etc. Snyder’s characters are introduced in a series of repetitive scenes that tell us nothing about them: the heroes go to recruit someone - the recruit has to fight someone (or tame a wild a gryphon - same difference) - the recruit wins the fight - repeat again and again and again until the team is together.

For example: that scene from Seven Samurai with the kidnapped child? It’s repeated here, only the savior, played by The Host’s Doona Bae, doesn’t do anything clever to get the kid back - she just kills the captor (Jena Malone as a giant spider-lady called ‘Harmada,’ which is almost certainly a middle finger to Walter Hamada, former head of DC’s film division). So now we know this lady with the big swords is good with big swords. How helpful.

What little we do learn about these characters is conveyed via long, stolid monologues set to Junkie XL’s doleful white noise of a score, or, in the case of Boutella’s character, a series of long, stolid flashbacks sets to Junkie XL’s doleful white noise of a score. It’s a LOT of “tell don’t show,” and it does nothing to endear any of these people to the viewer. And that’s if the characters even get that much backstory - one of the heroes is killed just one single scene after they’re introduced, and it’s played as this big emotional moment, except we’ve known this person for all of five minutes.

That kind of sums up the whole movie: every story beat is perfunctory and unimaginative. Even the elements for which Snyder is best known - his visuals and his action sequences - are letdowns here: the set pieces are just as insipid as the characters.

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire ends on a cliffhanger; Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is scheduled to be released in April. Part One is a such a miserable viewing experience, however, that I can’t imagine even trying to watch a sequel… unless, perhaps, that next chapter provides a more prominent part for the giant space vagina.