Film Review: Rebel Moon, Part One: A Child of Fire

Lower your expectations. No, lower than that. Really. Just lie down and pray for death.

Rebel Moon, Part One: A Child of Fire is, as films go, fascinatingly bad - not because its sins are in any way unique (they aren’t) or because, as is sometimes the case, its badness confers upon it an ironic watchability (it doesn’t), but because of the degree to which it betrays Zack Snyder’s fundamental non-understanding of basic storytelling. It’s like a 3D map of How Not To Make A Movie: the kind of simplistic case study you’d give a 101-level writing class to teach them about story editing. That Snyder was not the lone writer responsible for this profoundly terrible offering - Kurt Johnstad, who wrote the screenplay for 300, and Shay Hatten, who wrote for the third and fourth John Wick movies, are also credited - is not, I think, an exculpatory factor. This is very much Snyder’s movie: whatever contributions his accomplices made, or did not make, the final say was his. I’ve watched Snyder-authored movies before and disliked them, but Rebel Moon is a specific type of nadir, and one made all the more cringeworthy by how nakedly it’s trying to be Star Wars, especially in the first half. Visually, it’s pretty in parts, but that’s the lowest possible bar you’d expect a Snyder movie to clear, and even then, the metaphoric foot is skimming so close to the pole you’d need a smaller unit than millimeters to measure the technical clearance. Beyond this, it has no redeeming qualities. It’s bad bad.

On a pastoral planet called Veldt, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a former high-ranking soldier of the fascist, empire-building Motherworld, is trying to start a new life as a farmer. She’s being courted by Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), but doesn’t feel she can love anyone after her terrible upbringing. Cue the arrival of a Motherworld dreadnought run by Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), whose sole character beat beyond Smirky Fascist is a three second clip denoting his love of getting fucked by tentacles, although this happens later. (Do you know how hard you have to fumble the bag for horny gay SF fans not to show up for a space fascist with a canon tentacle kink? It’s a bit like making a pizza so bad that even drunk fratboys won’t eat it: a perversion of the natural order so profound, it’s hard to even articulate what went wrong. But I digress.)

Atticus is hunting rebels and wants the village’s grain to supply his troops, but as Gunnar already sold their surplus to the rebels in question, they’ve got nothing to give him. Rather than admit this, village leader Sindri (Corey Stoll) tries to claim their farms yield so little that they can’t help; Atticus is clearly skeptical, and when Gunnar weighs in to try and smooth things over, Atticus kills Sindri, tells the farmers he’ll be back in ten months to collect their next harvest, leaves a squad of his men behind to oversee things, and fucks off in his dreadnought. Kora wants to flee, but when the Motherworld troops try to rape Sam (Charlotte Maggi), a random farmgirl, Kora fights back and kills all but one of the soldiers. Knowing Atticus will return, Kora and Gunnar decide to go in search of fighters to defend their village when the time comes. Their starting point: find the rebels to whom Gunnar sold the surplus grain.

This establishing sequence, which lasts for about forty minutes of the film’s roughly 130-minute runtime, is the most watchable part of Rebel Moon, which isn’t saying much. It’s desperately unoriginal, the substance so nakedly cribbed from Star Wars that even my 10-year-old noticed and wrinkled his nose before giving up and wandering off. Typically of Snyder, too, the early plot leans heavily on the tension and fear imbued by threats of sexual violence to try and shore up the lack of emotional or structural coherence. It’s not clear, for instance, whether Veldt is nominally part of the Motherworld’s empire or exists only at the fringes of it; this might seem a nitpick detail, but in either case, the unfolding plot makes no sense. If Veldt is a colony world, Atticus should have records detailing how much the farmers produce, rendering Sindri’s attempt at deception pointless; if it’s an independent world, the village should at least try to appeal or report to a higher on-planet authority, which must logically exist. Except that, as best we can tell, it doesn’t: as far as the story is concerned, Veldt doesn’t have a government, just like it doesn’t appear to have more than one farming village for the dreadnought to plunder, such that Atticus is content to wait ten months for the grain he supposedly needed now instead of checking literally anywhere else on the planet. He doesn’t even steal their existing supplies! He just fucks off!

While these details could certainly be made plausible within a given narrative framework - whatever else can be said of Firefly, for instance, the concept of frontier colonies on remote worlds bartering with various absentee powers was one it executed well - Snyder would first have to understand that they matter, which he manifestly does not. It’s a problem of narrative object permanence: Snyder doesn’t appear to think of his setting as a functional, complete space, but rather as a series of disconnected sets through which his characters move, irrelevant except inasmuch as they offer cool visuals (primary) and simplistic pretexts for action (secondary). This might be forgivable if he’d focused instead on characterization, pacing and dialogue - or, hell, even just one of these things - but all are absent.

Arriving in Veldt’s underwhelming version of Mos Eisley, and after a fairly pointless action sequence that does nothing to advance the plot while attempting, badly, to riff on Luke and Obi-Wan meeting Han Solo, Kora and Gunnar meet Kai (Charlie Hunnam), a random - guy, I guess? Trader? Something like that - who agrees to help them track down the rebel army after first collecting a grab-bag of random fighters to aid their cause. He also agrees to do this for basically no pay, as the farmers are broke (not that we have any sense of what this means, in-world: there’s no hints about currency or what the farmers might’ve cobbled together for Kora and Gunnar to use), and despite Kora’s apparently cynical nature, she’s not suspicious of this. So Kora and Gunnar get on Kai’s ship - or at least, I guess they do; we only really glimpse it without getting a tour or told its name, which is a cardinal sin for any space-based story - and jaunt off to collect the first member of their team.

It’s here that what little structure Rebel Moon possesses truly starts to degrade, and badly, as Kora, Kai and Gunnar travel from world to world, recruiting their team of rebel-affiliated warrior All Stars: Tarak (Staz Nair), Nemesis (Bae Doona), Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher). In a just world, casting this good would redeem at least some of Snyder’s failings as a storyteller; instead, it only serves to emphasize his incredible clownfuckery. This middle third of the film is so bad on such a basic craft level that articulating why makes me feel mildly unhinged, as if I were having to explain the concept of a steering wheel to a licensed driver. Like, how did you even get here without knowing this, my guy? What the actual fuck! You literally drive for a living.

The problem is that Snyder doesn’t understand the difference between outlining a character and the process of characterization. Jotting down a bullet-point list of cool facts about your OC works in your first draft notebook, but turning that list into a clunky bit of expositional dialogue and then segueing into an action sequence and/or Stirring Appeal To Justice is not how actual characterization works, and especially not - oh my actual god - when you proceed to do it four fucking times in a row. Which is exactly what happens in Rebel Moon: we meet Tarak on one planet, where he has to tame a gryphon in order to be free; then we jump straight to another planet, where Nemesis is fighting a half-spider woman with laser swords; then we visit a gladiator world, where Titus is wasting away for lack of a cause; and then, finally, we go to a place with actual non-human aliens, where Bloodaxe and his sister - the rebels to whom Gunnar originally sold the grain - have to be convinced to fight the dreadnought.

At no point in this sequence, which lasts for a fucking hour, do any of the newly introduced characters interact with any of the existing cast beyond the few words exchanged in their recruitment, let alone with each other. There are no scenes showing the interior of Kai’s ship or showcasing how interstellar travel works, and despite the supposed omnipresence of the Motherworld, they’re functionally irrelevant here, as the characters don’t have to sneak onto planets under their control, circumvent their ships, pass through their checkpoints or engage with them in any other way. We have no idea how much time has passed, how far apart these locations are, or how they relate to anything in the setting, and because we have no pre-existing investment in these new characters - and because nothing they’re doing when we meet them has any bearing on the wider plot - the end result is a sequence where, very nakedly, the only reason anything is happening is to convince us that the characters are Cool and Mysterious. It’s the hollowest shit imaginable, and if Zack Snyder was twelve and writing all this down in his trapper-keeper, you’d think the kid had promise, but from a veteran filmmaker and supposed titan of SFF properties, it’s deeply fucking embarrassing, like a shart on the white pants of cinema.

Take Tarak, for instance. It’s Kai’s idea to recruit him, but there’s a snag: he’s currently serving as an indentured worker for a rancher, and once again, Kora and Gunnar can’t afford to buy him free. Rather than simply telling them to fuck off, the rancher says he likes betting and offers them a deal: if Tarak tames a gryphon (which his men are currently trying and failing to wrangle in a nearby corral), then he can go free; but if he fails, then Kora, Gunner and Kai will become indentured along with him. Kai, who seemingly knows Tarak, or at least knows of him - once again, the details aren’t clear - vouches for his capability, so Kora and Gunnar accept. Tarak talks to the gryphon in what is, presumably, his native language, appealing to it as a kindred spirit on the basis of their shared hatred of imprisonment, which… is the gryphon sentient? Is it from the same place as Tarak, such that it could reasonably be expected to understand him? Does Tarak have a history with animals? Is he using magic? Or is this just the laziest possible iteration of the Noble Savage Communing With Beasts trope? Who knows! The important thing, clearly, is that a hot shirtless sad man with long hair gets to bond with and ride a mythical creature, context or details be damned.

Listen to me carefully: Hot Shirtless Long-Haired Sad Man Bonding With And Riding A Mythical Creature is normally at the fucking top of my personal Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I should have loved this! And instead, I didn’t even care enough to hate it, because it’s utterly fucking hollow. This entire sequence is a juvenile attempt to combine the pod racing scene from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with the ikran-taming scene from James Cameron’s Avatar, and it utterly fails because Snyder seemingly doesn’t understand a foundational premise of storytelling, which is that emotional catharsis has to be earned in order to actually matter.

In The Phantom Menace, the pod race serves as the culmination of several intertwined plot threads: Anakin’s desire to prove himself as a racer, his previous run-in with Sebulba, Qui-Gon’s repeated attempts to free his future protege, their time-sensitive need to leave the planet, and Greedo’s weakness for gambling, all of which are contextualized by the illicit culture of Tatooine and the lack of other options. Similarly, in Avatar, when Jake Sully is brought to try and tame his own ikran, it represents a final step towards joining a new culture: something the story has been building towards, and where the stakes, both literal and emotional, are firmly established. When Anakin wins the pod race - just as when Sully captures his ikran - those victories are materially relevant to the climax of each movie: Anakin flies solo into space and saves the day, while Jake uses what he’s learned to capture toruk and unite the tribes. In both cases, a detailed narrative build has already served to invest us in the characters, such that their success is an earned catharsis - and because their actions are materially relevant to their wider narratives, that moment of catharsis leads to meaningful callbacks at the finale.

But in Rebel Moon, Tarak taming the gryphon is meaningless. It’s not the culmination of an emotional or narrative build, because there’s been no build, period: we literally just met these guys! Tarak’s success is wholly unearned on the basis of what’s come before, and nor does it matter at all to what comes after, because we never see the gryphon again. Snyder is aping the beats of more popular films without understanding why they worked in the first place, and if he was a journeyman filmmaker writing his first script, that would be understandable, but at his level of fame, there are only two real explanations for producing something this execrable: either he’s a wholly cynical asshole who thinks so little of SFF-loving audiences that he can dish up any old crap and expect us to gobble it down, or he’s genuinely bad at writing original characters and is so far up his own ass that he doesn’t realize it. Emphasis there on original characters, because the vast majority of Snyder’s work has involved existing IP. As any half-decent fanwriter could tell you, it’s one thing to do cool shit with existing characters and settings for an audience who already knows and cares about them, but it’s quite another to build something from the ground up for a new audience to invest in. Snyder is sporadically good at that first thing, but the second? Man, just hire a fucking writer. (And then listen to them.)

With the All Star team assembled, Kai talks Kora into letting him complete one last delivery pertaining to whatever the fuck he was doing before all this; Kora says cool, so off they go to yet another random planet, where - surprise! - it turns out Kai has betrayed them all to Atticus, for like… reasons. We’re then treated to almost a solid fifteen minutes of utterly redundant narrative double-handing, where Kai lists all the characters and their attributes to show why he’ll get a good bounty for them, and then Atticus does exactly the same fucking thing. A big fight happens, Bloodaxe dies and we’re meant to be super sad about it presumably, except that, as mentioned, we literally just met him and he’s only had, like, five real lines of dialogue, so it really doesn’t hit. Kora fights Atticus and knocks him off a tower, and then everyone goes back to Veldt, though we don’t see the farmers again; Atticus gets revived and has some weird conversation with Kora’s evil adoptive dad about bringing her in alive, and then it’s done, The End.

There’s some flashback scenes interspersed throughout detailing Kora’s upbringing and a magic princess foretold by prophecy, but it’s largely detached from everything else, not least because, once again, Snyder doesn’t understand or care about his own worldbuilding. Every Motherworld soldier we see is a man, with white men predominating; Kora is a woman of colour stolen from a colonized world and raised by a Motherworld general. The opening bid of the Motherworld soldiers on Veldt is sexual violence towards a young woman, something at which they seem practiced as a unit, and which is underscored by the absence of female troops - and yet we’re meant to accept that Kora was once the pinnacle of Motherworld soldiery, respected and elevated above all.

Again, it’s entirely possible to square that particular circle with worldbuilding - C.L. Clarke’s Magic of the Lost series, for instance, which begins with The Unbroken, depicts a largely white empire stealing the brown children of its conquered territories to raise as soldiers, digging into the cultural and racial alienation this produces. Snyder, though, hasn’t bothered with any of that, presumably because he never noticed the dissonance in the first place. He’s either uninterested in or unaware of how misogyny, racism and fascism historically intersect, and so has borrowed the trappings of the latter without any thought to the former, such that, in his version, you’ve got both rapey all-white, all-dude combat units and a vaunted WOC commander. This sort of thematic blindness is further exacerbated by the fact that the majority of dialogue belongs to the white characters: Kora gets a few long voiceovers detailing her past, but it’s Atticus and Kai who speak the most, plus a bunch of secondary white characters, while the four warriors collected during the interminable middle section - all of whom are POC - get virtually no lines at all.

Presumably, that will change in the second film - or at least, I’d fucking hope so - but at this point, it’s hard to care. This was the weakest possible sauce one could bring to a table whose occupants are literally starving for original SFF cinema, and desperate as we are, we’ve still turned away hungry. Both the plot beats and much of the costuming are nakedly cribbed from more successful SFF properties - Bloodaxe, his sister and their warriors look like they’ve come from the set of Mad Max: Fury Road - and despite being, to all intents and purposes, a protagonist, Gunnar does basically nothing the entire film.

The script is so wooden you could build heritage furniture from it, I could count on one hand the number of actual conversations between the protagonists (as distinct from voice-over narrations of past trauma, expository speeches and one-line responses to same), and because Snyder doesn’t understand characterization, his pacing is for shit. The limits of his imagination are perhaps best personified by the animals the Veldt farmers use for ploughing, which are just regular horses with slightly weird special effects where their heads should be - horses with hats, as my husband dubbed them. The most original thing about Rebel Moon is the level of incompetence Snyder brings to its execution, and even that’s not new in the scheme of things. I can hardly fault the cast for wanting to make bank, but goddamn, they are each of them worthy of a vastly better movie. Here’s hoping that they - and we - get one soon.