Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire

The biggest problem of the movie is the plot. It is just bad. And not just the main storyline which makes little sense and the villains are comedic, but almost every interaction ends up with the viewer asking "but, why?" or "how does it even make sense?".

The assembly of heroes (what the movie is about) is also rushed as hell, and the motivation of the people to join is straight-up nonexistent in most of the cases and is simply skipped entirely.

As for the villain who comes to find mysterious troubling rebels, apparently every single person knows who are the rebels and how to find them and shares that information to the first stranger they meet. It's not like they are even hiding.

Next, combat and action scenes. Blasters that penetrate people in armor through, but can't penetrate a thin piece of wood. Remember when in the new Star Wars trilogy a red guard could strike Ray but was just making dumb random moves to simulate action? Well, it's absolutely the same here. Maximum drama, lots of slow motion, frequent switch of the scenes every few seconds and very little sense.

The acting is ok, but it's difficult to judge the actors if they do good because the script tells them to follow an unnatural character arc in the first place. I'd say Sofia played Kora well, but Kora is just a poor character which is out of place in the very story she's central.

It's not all bad. The picture is nice.

I'd say it's the most disappointing Snyder's movie so far.

I think Zack Snyder didn't really do much research into this one. Maybe it's because it's a Netflix thing, I am not sure. There's so much borrowing from several other popular movies that I just wasn't invested in the story because it was all tooo basic and predictable.

You had the Thanos and Gamora moment in there, you are the Starwars Resistance vs The First Order moment in there. You had the Darthvader type figure in there. You had the Kylo Ren character in there. And the worlds looked like something from a Starwars episode.

Also the whole story was just weak, too weak for a director like Zack. I mean we've seen it done so many times from Lord of the Rings, to Game of Thrones, to even The Avengers. You are threatened by a bigger force, so you go around recruiting people to help you fight this force. That's basically it. There wasn't any rich subplot like we see in eg. Dune. Just very basic.

Does it warrant a part 2, I strongly don't think it did. It's lazy writing and directing and shouldn't be encouraged.

All in all, it's an ok movie. It's not bad like some reviews are saying. The effects are spot on, I loved the cinematography. The only drawbacks for me were the weak storyline, the awful fight sequence, the casting could have been better and the all too familiar scenes.

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.

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.

As an other reviewer wrote, there are wooden language, wooden expressions and wooden dialogue.

The first ting I noticed in the movie was the words the actors spoke seemed like they had been written by a teenager... so many pointless words.

Then there where the actors speaking the words, they just seemed wierd and emotionless.

Then there are the action scenes. There are a lot of them, and they could have been really good. But the editing are just a bunch of normal speed, slow speed clipping to make it look good, and the bad guys just stand still doing nothing while the "hero" spends minutes moving around in the open...

CGI/Greenscreen galore.. but very well done. So this is perhaps the strongest part of the movie.

Waisted and nonsense slowmo sections... there are so many of them... and they are so pointless and gives nothing to the movie. There are movies and directors that know how to use slow motion sequences in a movie, and then there are this movie and director, that did not take that class... it's just a waist of time.

In summary, if you are able to ignore all the writing, dialogue, acting/directing issues... its a passable scifi action movie.

The movie could have been so much better, because there is a decent enough story underneath.. and they obviously had enough money to do what they wanted...

I'm assuming Netflix payed for this. So I'm guessing that there where a big payday for writer/director and no requirements for quality on the delivered product. So they just cut from the budget anyone that could have given the director feedback on the uality issues.