Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

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.

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.

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.

Hello,

Like evreyone who reads this (sorry i'm french and yes I hated Raygun), finally we have Zach Snyder. I saw his first cut and was unimpressed (hated the first version, too disney like for me).

But, his director's cut, the decription and details of the characters has finally caught up to me. I mean, we did not have any ulteriors or superiors motives for any characters and it was a pain in the neck. But with the director's cut, finally we can relate. Regarding the "violent" scene, finally we left Disney and went for a more "gore" approach (everyone has its limit). Personnaly, it wasn't gore enough knowing Snyder past work. However, the character evolution was spot on. Basically, watch the director's cut, it is so much better than the original one.

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.