December 21, 2023
I watched the first third of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire on my 15-inch laptop screen at around 10 p.m. on a Thursday night after wrapping up a quick-fire review of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. This portion of the film took me right up to the moment when our hero, Kora (Sofia Boutella), and her companion, Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), leave their village planet of Veldt to seek out warriors in their fight against the imperialistic Motherworld. I have two kids and had just watched Aquaman earlier that night, so I was too exhausted to continue watching the movie. That said, my initial impression was pretty mixed: On one hand, Snyder’s influences (Star Wars, Heavy Metal, Warhammer 40,000, Nazis) are all pretty fun fiction fodder in my book, and his fetish for making every character look ripped and greased-up meshes particularly well with Boutella’s physiology. On the other, the movie’s aesthetic is flat and out of focus, and the movie immediately asks us to take seriously something as absurd as viking Corey Stoll preaching about the power of fucking. Not off to the most promising start.
December 22, 2023
My next opportunity to watch some of Child of Fire came during my lunch break the following day, which happened to be a day on which my toddler son was home. Usually we watch Bluey or Thomas the Tank Engine or The Office, but this was my chance to catch a gander at more of the movie. Surely he wouldn’t mind. Unfortunately, he did and managed to grab two remotes off the side table behind a supposedly well-positioned gate I had installed. Turns out he’s grown in the last few months and could get around my formerly impenetrable barrier. Armed with a remote in each hand, he proceeded to at first mute the film and then turn off the entire TV. Given the clarity of his vote, I switched to something more his speed.
During my second viewing, I realized that the movie looks really shitty on a 55-inch 4K TV, especially when I only have the lowest possible ad-free plan Netflix offers. That means I can only stream at 720p. Snyder loves his visuals, but the movie already looks shallow and stagey; cutting the resolution only makes it look worse. Keep in mind: My friends who watched it theatrically say it looks like trash (see Andy and Matt’s reviews), but a vast majority of folks who watch Rebel Moon are likely doing so on plans within the same price range as my own. This means low-resolution, distracted viewing is probably the average way to actually experience Rebel Moon.
Sidebar: Netflix has done this to itself via outrageous pricing schemes, which are clearly heading in a direction of forcing anyone within lower or middle incomes to purchase their garbage ad-based offerings. Every other streamer will follow suit. Coming to you in 2024: Cable, only shittier and more expensive.
This additional 30 minutes encompassed Kora and Gunnar’s journey to their first new planet, where they meet Kai (Charlie Hunnam), a rogue with an inexplicable Irish accent. I’m not sure why he has the accent. Anything goes in outer space, I guess. The action in this little segment was noticeably worse than in the first, perhaps because it was even more sliced and diced around gore that is sure to feature in the eventual Snyder Cut.
We also get the backstory for Kora, who is secretly the most dangerous woman in the galaxy. Somehow giving her such incredible abilities actually ruins the Seven Samurai comparison. She’s just a badass collecting badasses to do badass things, and none of the characters we’ve met so far has any level of personality beyond archetypical qualities. Most of the men in Kurosawa’s film had deep, meaningful pasts that inform their decision to join Kambei and defend the poor villagers. Some even know one another from old wars. Not the case so far in Rebel Moon.
December 23, 2023 (morning)
I returned to Rebel Moon after a morning of cleaning, to pass the 30 or so minutes my toddler and I were waiting for my wife to take a shower and get ready to go. We’d been cleaning all morning and I wanted to sit down while my son played, so I figured this was as good a time as any to make some progress across the universe with Korra, Gunnar and Kai. I’m actually impressed I remember their names.
This segment of viewing took me to the halfway point of the film, introducing Tarak (Staz Nair), the film’s Native American stand-in, whom we meet undertaking the stereotypically Native American power move of communing with a wild beast. In this case, it’s a space griffin, which sadly does not make the journey with our heroes but will presumably show up later for a big moment in the final battle. After that, we meet Nemesis (Doona Bae), a cyborg with lightsaber-esque weapons who spouts mystical jargon about honorable violence. She fights a spider-creature played by Jena Malone. Neither Tarak nor Nemesis feels recruited within the context of the ongoing Motherworld drama or our character’s story. They just sort of show up upon Kai’s recommendation and agree to follow along. Thus far, Kora and Gunnar remain the only characters with any real wants or needs, and it feels like only a matter of time before they bone.
An additional flashback into Kora’s past reveals she witnessed Princess Issa (Stella Grace Fitzgerald) heal a dead bird once, so I guess that’s important. We also get our first glimpse of the King played by Cary Elwes, who has a great beard but the wrong presence for the role.
At this point, I switched to watching the film on my iPhone because it was time to make a sandwich, so I watched it with the movie propped on my leg under the table. Frankly, the film actually looked best on that tiny little screen. During this segment, the group recruits Titus, who is played by Djimon Hounsou — one of the hardest-working and least-rewarded actors in Hollywood history, playing a version of himself from Gladiator, although there’s no gladiatorial combat actually seen for some reason. Kora just yells at him about redemption and revenge.
One of the stranger aspects of these recruitment chapters is that each of the new characters is introduced in their respective sequences, which are heavily intercut with the otherwise formless team of warriors watching quizzically. Tarak seems constantly confused by everything going on around him.
Oh, and for some reason, lead space Nazi Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) likes fucking a tentacle monster. I think that’s neat.
Interlude
I had to do some more chores after eating lunch, so I paused the movie for awhile longer, but my brain didn’t disconnect from it. I came up with what is probably my core thought on Rebel Moon, which is that this movie is no different than Jupiter Ascending to me — a piece of shit that is also essentially perfect version of what a specific fan subculture is looking for in their storytelling. Ascending is certainly a more interesting movie, filled with concepts that seem bizarre to the mainstream but aren’t that detached from what you might have found circling around 15-year old fan-fiction microbloggers in the late 2000s. A lot of those women have made the jump into actual published writing; sometimes when we’re at bookstores, Aly asks me to guess which of the featured titles are actually just adaptations of an author’s Reylo fanfiction, for instance. (It’s a lot.)
The whole saga of Zack Snyder’s career doesn’t really need to be retold here. Lord knows I’ve written about his most recent films more than enough (Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Army of the Dead). It’s very clear Netflix is financing his current crop of product because his name alone attracts a wide variety of viewers thanks to the role he played in internet arguments of yore. It also seems clear that, like Army of the Dead, Rebel Moon was initially greenlit on the promise of a larger franchise that will never actually appear due to the quality of Snyder’s creative output.
That’s because despite everyone having an opinion on Snyder due to his place (and participation) in the maelstrom at the intersection of politics and popular culture throughout the last half-decade, Snyder has never actually made a movie for anyone but himself. And he has the eternal tastes of a 15-year-old boy hopped up on racy comic books, action video games, shallow political ideations and enough caffeine to kill a horse.
If Jupiter Ascending is the fanwank output of a young woman discovering herself through writing fiction that reflects the 24/7 pop-cultural imprinting of an endlessly stimulating society, Rebel Moon is the equal and opposite. This is nothing more than the aggressive formulation of a mildly creative teenager desperate to tell stories that make him feel the way he feels reading all of his favorites. I mean, I was that guy. Snyder gets every detail right. It’s derivative, poorly paced and stupid as hell, and at least 25% of it is just edging for the next jerkoff session. If you know where to look on the internet archive, you could even find my own versions of this still published out there on the eternal internet — but I’m not sharing unless Netflix comes calling.
The biggest conceptual difference between Jupiter Ascending and Rebel Moon is that until relatively recently, a vast majority of our commercial storytelling has been written for young men. They each have their audiences (which aren’t necessarily as gendered as the comparison suggests, of course). We’ve just seen a lot more of Rebel Moon and its ilk. Nothing feels remotely special or novel about it. It exists purely for the audience who are ride-or-die fans of Snyder’s existing aesthetic. It’s just for dumb boys.
December 23, 2023 (afternoon)
I had some time to finish Rebel Moon after finishing all of my chores, so I booted it up on my laptop. There’s just no way I would want to watch it on my actual 4K TV anymore, given Netflix pricing me out of using it properly.
This segment started with our team meeting Damien Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), who seemed to earn the role thanks to his loyalty during the whole debacle of Joss Whedon’s Justice League. He’s fine. I have no feelings about his performance. Bloodaxe is, as the name sounds, the heavy-hitter character on the team. Then we see more of the dorky Nazis razing one of the planets our heroes visited. I don’t remember the name of the planet because I’ve generally ceased to retain anything at this point. I’m watching Rebel Moon and pretty much experiencing it as Snyder intended — without a whole lot of thought, pleasantly surfing the nostalgia waves of quasi-recognizable science-fiction imagery.
I’m still not clear why Hunnam is using an Irish accent. It’s also a little strange how all of the characters just stand around watching Bloodaxe’s army being blown away, but that’s kind of the level of filmmaking with which we’re dealing. It was also helpful to have Noble go from character to character, explaining a lot of their backstories we had no way of knowing when we met them earlier on in the film. Probably would’ve made a lot more sense for Snyder to write a script that introduced Nemesis, Tarak, Bloodaxe and Titus in such a way that gave us reason to care about them before they are imperiled by some turncoat antics, but I guess that’s asking a lot.
I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the way Rebel Moon — Chapter One: A Child of Fire ends without any meaningful resolution whatsoever, and every single one of those critiques is true. In fact, it’s kind of worse than that: It ends with a totally meaningless interstitial climax that removes characters with potential from the board without developing our heroes in any reasonable direction. The final action sequence lacks any sense of stakes despite the amount of explosions and endless rain of blaster bursts. At the very least, the battle would presumably show our little family growing as a team, learning to use their respective combat specialities in a collaborative manner to defeat Noble. Nothing like that happens here. They’re still strangers to the audience and to each other when the credits roll. I suppose the promise of an extended cut means a lot of that material might be on the cutting-room floor, but somehow I doubt it.
Summary: I’m Just a Dumb Boy
So what we have here is a two-hour preview of a four-hour extended cut that will actually tell the first half of the story Snyder is promising to tell. I’ll watch every fucking minute of it.
The reason I approached my review Rebel Moon with this format is because … well, I think seeing the damn thing on the big screen at a press screening delivers a false sense of what this movie was actually designed to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong: Snyder is a filmmaker’s filmmaker. He’s not a great storyteller, but he built a career off iconic imagery constructed for the big screen and best experienced that way (even if Batman v. Superman was one of the most interminable moviegoing episodes of my entire life). Traditionally, I’d have made the time to see Rebel Moon on the big screen, but that’s simply not what Netflix is hiring him to do. They do not give a shit about box office; they give a shit about minutes screened. In their mind, a viewer who watches their content in a haphazard, multi-format way across several days is just as valuable as one who sits down and watches without interruption. Most Netflix viewers have their phones out while watching. I know some people who say they “focus better” while watching material on two screens.
Frankly, that’s what Rebel Moon is designed for. Perhaps there are creative reasons for Snyder to part with longtime cinematographer Larry Fong; whether it’s personal or simply the director’s professional overconfidence, I don’t know. Reviewers who watched the film on the big screen were deeply frustrated by how shallow and ugly the film is, especially compared to Snyder’s previous work. The fact is that doesn’t matter. This isn’t a movie made for the big screen. It was a movie made to be watched on a phone, on an iPad, on a laptop screen while paying half-attention. There are absolutely zero meaningful conversations between any characters because there’s no reason for the movie to slow down.
Snyder’s never been a bad filmmaker — not this bad, at least, but the thing is that many of the greatest faults of Rebel Moon are the same faults found in almost every piece of content Netflix has financed. It’s rushed, impatient, ugly. It improves if you watch it while distracted, essentially checking in on the story and imagery when the music swells and the moment demands your attention. Information on characters is repeated over and over again, a refrain devised to provide viewers who aren’t actually invested with the context they need to feel like they’re engaged.
Maybe it’s the death of cinema. Maybe it’s just the future.
Thing is: I kinda enjoyed Rebel Moon. Would I claim to have actually watched the damn thing the way I would traditionally argue a movie needs to be experienced? No, not at all. I don’t think I’d watch it again, either. But I love Star Wars and Heavy Metal, and what i know of Warhammer 40,000 — and I really, really like watching space Nazis get blowed up real good. I don’t really know what the fuck happened in Rebel Moon beyond the scant details Snyder’s script and slipshod editing kept hammering into my viscerally split attention span, but it had all those things I liked, as far as I recall. Maybe it helps that, at heart, I’m just a dumb boy.