Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.