Rebel Moon (Parte uno): La niña del fuego

What's worse than a movie that shamelessly plagiarizes elements from other sci-fi or fantasy products? A movie that does all this and fails to even build a world in which you feel interest and curiosity in finding out how the story will evolve. However, if the terrible world-building is Rebel Moon's biggest flaw, it certainly cannot be said that everything else is able to compensate for the extremely poor script. Direction, visual effects, photography, costumes are all so aseptic and unmemorable that it is guaranteed that nothing of this movie will remain forged in people's minds for years to come, as movies and TV series have been able to do like which Rebel Moon would pretentiously love to place itself.

I wanted this to be good so badly. Like really badly.

Other than the world design and effects, there really isn't much else to salvage from it.

In true Snyder style we've got lens flare and slow motion, but this time he's dialled it up over the top.

Some of the action scenes are absolutely ruined from way too much diving in and out of slow motion.

The biggest disappointment is the writing.

The first 70% of the film is absolutely a waste of time and not needed.

You don't find out most of the characters actual relevance until the back end of the film.

Everything before that is a mixture of utterly pointless painfully boring scenes done for the sole purpose of filler.

Looks great, but that's all.

A test of the degree of imagination shown in a sci-fi film is whether it could equally have been done as a cowboy movie. "Rebel Moon Pt. 1" could have, and the movie would have been "The Magnificent Seven" (1960, 2016, 1998-2000 as a TV series, or indeed "Seven Samurai" of 1954), because the plot is err.... identical. And I expect the plot of the second half will be identical too. So if you have ever seen any of those and a spaceship taking off, you don't need to see this movie (OK, some of the spaceship imagery is very good). But I have to wonder whether anyone was actually paid for "writing" the script :-)

Watching this film, it felt like it was created by committee and written for an audience that the director thinks is not particularly clever.

There were so many elements in this that seemed like they had been added because someone thought "hey wouldn't it be cool if there was a... *cool flying bird you can ride* or *a bar scene that looks like the one in Star Wars*

The script also needed some work. The parts of the story were just thrown in as backstory or someone explaining the bleeding obvious. A little more respect shown for the audience would have allowed us to know some of that through watching, understanding or less didactic dialogue.

On the plus side, it looks great. Visually there is always great depth and detail. I enjoyed it enough to want to see the next one, although I suspect my guesses about major plot developments will be correct.

Like many others I was hoping for something good and a bit different and felt a bit let down. I found it lost itself in connection, there just seemed to be something missing however I now know what was missing and what was missing was literally half the movie. I decided to watch the directors cut out of curiosity as I felt it may have added what I felt was missing and wow just like magic it all seemed so much better and made a lot more sense almost like it was an entirely different movie with some character and story background. I think the short version was an attempt at trying to cater to a commercial audience but in reality the long version should have just been the original. Much better 7-6 stars for the editors cut but only 4-4 for the original. Although it's much better, still lacking something.