REBEL MOON: PART I - A CHILD OF FIRE- A Brief Review
by Jason Godbey
Back in November, we previewed the winter films of 2023, and in that episode I spoke about Zack Snyder’s latest offering, Rebel Moon Part I: A Child of Fire. My prediction was that this would be Snyder’s Stars Wars, and it would contain super slow-mo and awesome action. Not to toot my own horn, but apparently I was right on the money.
Critics have been a bit harsh with this movie with a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I won’t say the movie is great by any stretch, but it’s not that bad really. Is it derivative? Yes. Does it wear its influences on its sleeve? Absolutely. Is that the worst thing for a movie? Maybe not.
The backstory to this movie is that it was originally a script for Snyder’s Star Wars movie. He pitched it to Lucas Film, and they declined. Snyder has had some recent success with Netflix having made Army of the Dead for them, and when he brought them this project, they welcomed it with open arms. One can definitely see Star Wars in this movie, it has all the elements: space empire, rebellion etc. It’s also the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven in space mated with other genre classics like Dune, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and the alike. The villains are basically space Nazis, and the heroes are a rag-tag group of rebels lead by a warrior who is discovered working on a farm. I won’t go into all of the similarities because that would take a while, and I did say in the title that this would be brief.
All in all, this feels like the first two episodes of a TV show, a two hour pilot that’s meant to introduce all the characters and setup the world for us, and for all of that, it does well. We meet this group of warriors assembled by Kora (Sofia Boutella) to defend her farming planet against Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) and his band of evil space Nazis who fight for the “Mother World.” The plot could not be more straight-forward. We do get some subplot backstory stuff about Kora and the history of the universe, but it’s mainly bad guys come to town and good guys must rebel to survive.
The derivative nature of the script is counter-balanced by everything that is Snyder’s wheelhouse as a filmmaker; arresting visuals, awesome action, and of course the slow-mo, lots and lots of slow-mo. Everything is shot for maximum epicness, epicosity, total epitude (none of these are words, but you get the point). You can’t say Snyder doesn’t have a style or a tremendous cinematic eye. This is his vision and possibly the most Zack Snyder movie ever made.
The pacing is slow, this could have probably been a tight 90 minutes or two hours, but at two hours 15 minutes we get bogged down in it rather than marvel at it which I presume was the desired effect.
The script is limited, but that’s okay here. No one is asking for a Best Screenplay Oscar with this kind of material. The talkie bits are to get us from one big action set piece to another, and for that they serve just fine as do the performances. Everyone here seems to be cast for their ability to look cool while shooting someone or cutting them in half in super slow motion which is somewhat over used to the point you’ll find yourself saying “get on with it already.”
As far as the recommendation, this is a Zack Snyder film with both barrels and fully loaded. If you dig that, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re expecting new and innovative, this not for you.
Originally published at http://behindtherabbitproductions.wordpress.com on December 25, 2023.
