Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire Review

Netflix is so desperate for a franchise to call their own that they've appeared to have written director Zack Snyder a blank check and said "make us "Star Wars."" And the end result, the mouthful-of-a-name "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire" is exactly that, only it has all the style and budget but absolutely none of the heart, soul, or reason for being.

This is not just a bad film, but also an ugly, needlessly long, cliche, tedious, monotonous, sterile, joyless, tired, absolutely plain old cinematic travesty. I'd call it a turkey, but it's more of a tofurkey, no real meat here.

It doesn't help that the apparently blank check the streaming titan provided didn't come with anyone to keep Snyder's energies in-check; this is perhaps the most self-indulgent piece of movie making I can recall seeing. My mouth laid agape as all his bad habits appeared in such excess that you wonder if he intentionally set out to make a terrible film. Dialogue is terse and often shouted, lacking the magic of a truly gifted screenwriter (or world-builder). We get this huge, sprawling world, highly stylized but devoid of personality, where all sorts of nasty people and even nastier creatures function in a society barely explained. Our main villain (Ed Skrein) at one point wears a white shirt and black tie, yet other characters are draped in flowing robes, loin-cloths and humble scrapes of fabric seemingly sewn by hand. When does this take place? Why do the horse-like creatures, Urakis, look just like regular horses with a tree-trunk taped to their heads? Why is Anthony Hopkins voicing a robot? Why is Anthony Hopkins barely in this? Why is he here at all? Does he really need a paycheck that badly?

His egregious overuse of slow motion, a trademark of the director, is easily the worst, we sit bored stiff as this laborious lemon of a movie shows us scenes including, but not limited to, slow motion walking, slow motion running, slow motion standing, slow motion falling snow, slow motion hand-to-hand combat, slow motion gunfire, slow motion space ships, slow motion removal of hats, and, my favorite, slow motion sword fights against a giant spider woman. What a hell of a sentence, I know.

The plot is a garbled mess of sci-fi stereotypes, one involving an evil empire called the Motherworld, who comes land one day on the small farming village of Veldt asking for demanding food supplies. The evil people do evil things to innocent people because that's what they do in cliches, and it takes only a few dozen minutes before there's an attempted rape on one of the local girls. Why in the world anyone thought this was a necessary plot point is beyond me, then again, it's directed and written by all men so, I dunno. You tell me what that means.

Our protagonist Kora (Sofia Boutella) saves her of course, by killing all the baddies left in the town, so the community decides that, well, better join "the resistance" now, because, cliche. Heading out with Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), a farmer who may have a lead on someone who'll get them in-touch with "the resistance." The two travel from one empty hull of a set piece to the next, searching for would-be warriors to join their cause in hopes of strengthening "the resistance." And yes, much of this is done in sloooooooooooowwwwwwwwww moooooottttttttiiiiiiiiiooooooooonnnnnnnnnn.

There is an awful lot of money on the screen, but there is not a single interesting character. There is not one piece of interesting dialogue. I counted two interesting moments, though. That's not a typo, there are truly only two genuinely amusing things that happen here, and one is the aforementioned spider woman fight. The other is this little creature who talks through a human host. It exists for the sake of moving the narrative along, still, it was a fun little visual effect in an effort so starved of excitement that I was happy to just have something new to look at.

A bit of interwebs searching brought me to the Rebel Moon wiki, because apparently that's a thing, and it tells me there's going to be a directors cut next year, alongside part 2, and it'll be rated R (this, um, "streaming cut" is PG-13). Considering they didn't have to worry about losing money to teenagers being unable to buy movie tickets (anyone with a non-kids account can probably access this), I suspect this is purely a marketing move. I do not look forward to seeing what other slow motion scenes were cut.

I went into "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire" with no context, I hadn't even seen the trailer. Had I watched it before, I probably wouldn't have added this to my Netflix watchlist.