Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

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.

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.

It is all over the place. No character connection. Vulgar scenes to force emotions. Weird cheap cocktail of Star Wars and Dune. Felt like fan-made university project with a multi-million budget that was only spend on slow motion CGI scenes. I doubt that the extended edition will have more movie magic since this one already fails in every sense.

Not even the world-building or the design felt worth watching since it felt like the characters were in costumes rather than authentic dresses. No scene composition gave the feeling of a profound world with deep history.

Too many unoriginal ideas that were thrown together with the hope of "Let's hope it will be the next movie success".

I wouldn't say that the actors were weak, rather the error or lack of writers in the writing process of the movie show how important dialogue, character building arcs and real emotional value are in movies rather than gross tasteless blood baths, torture, explosions and one-dimensional characters.

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.