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Reviews39
wormsoftheerth's rating
I was pretty confident that Azrael was either going to be really impressive, or really terrible - absolutely no in-between. And well, it was terrible.
It's visually impressive with some great gore and a very strong atmosphere. Potentially it could have worked better as a short film in an anthology. However, the pointlessness of the cheap gimmick that drives the movie serves as its downfall and renders the good aspects moot.
The writing is not strong enough to bring purpose nor subtlety to the no-talking concept, rendering it merely a shallow gimmick. Without communication, the movie feels incredibly bland and flat, and as such never draws in the viewer.
Humans are social creatures. Even without talking we communicate in myriad ways - body language, gesticulation, writing, etc. However, the actual ramifications of no one talking on both the individuals and the community is not considered here. Everyone seems to have forgotten how to communicate entirely, despite living in a tribal society with constant human interaction. Instead, every character comes across as a brain-damaged caveman who runs around looking confused and shocked at all times with no ability to express anything to anyone else.
Every interaction feels like the actors want to talk, but know they're not allowed to so instead they just look awkward and confused. I chalk this up to weak directing. What exactly were they even going for? Who knows.
Overall this one is nothing more than its shallow gimmick that delivers nothing of substance. To be fair, I tapped out after 30-40 minutes so maybe it gets better. But even if it does - if the movie isn't strong enough to hook the viewer in that time than it doesn't matter what the rest of it is like. Avoid.
It's visually impressive with some great gore and a very strong atmosphere. Potentially it could have worked better as a short film in an anthology. However, the pointlessness of the cheap gimmick that drives the movie serves as its downfall and renders the good aspects moot.
The writing is not strong enough to bring purpose nor subtlety to the no-talking concept, rendering it merely a shallow gimmick. Without communication, the movie feels incredibly bland and flat, and as such never draws in the viewer.
Humans are social creatures. Even without talking we communicate in myriad ways - body language, gesticulation, writing, etc. However, the actual ramifications of no one talking on both the individuals and the community is not considered here. Everyone seems to have forgotten how to communicate entirely, despite living in a tribal society with constant human interaction. Instead, every character comes across as a brain-damaged caveman who runs around looking confused and shocked at all times with no ability to express anything to anyone else.
Every interaction feels like the actors want to talk, but know they're not allowed to so instead they just look awkward and confused. I chalk this up to weak directing. What exactly were they even going for? Who knows.
Overall this one is nothing more than its shallow gimmick that delivers nothing of substance. To be fair, I tapped out after 30-40 minutes so maybe it gets better. But even if it does - if the movie isn't strong enough to hook the viewer in that time than it doesn't matter what the rest of it is like. Avoid.
The majority of this movie is surprisingly decent for a low budget, one-location film. Aesthetically the house looks pretty good (aside from some weird lighting choices), the actors all perform adequately, and the entire thing slowly builds up into a seemingly layered and interesting mystery.
While not terribly exciting, I enjoyed the slow progression as the scope of the mystery expanded and we see the characters do stranger and more intense things. I felt like they did a good job making every character seem shady to where a variety of major twist(s) could be plausible and applicable to any (or all) of them, and I was genuinely curious to find out how everything was interconnected.
The creature aspect of the movie is done well considering the film's limitations. You do actually see it from time to time and there are some genuinely creepy practical effects used for it. There is some cheesy stuff too (both in terms of effects and scene where the creature is present), but it doesn't ruin it. Honestly, I wish they had just done a straight creature-feature with the creature being a central character/villain instead of the whole "mystery" aspect where you don't know if the creature is real or not, and I would've liked them to cut out some of the various other things going which reduce the focus on the creature and give ol' spiny some more screen time.
All the serious problems with the film come from the ending. The entire thing is very obviously building to a major reveal which should explain all the weirdness that the audience has been witnessing. Unfortunately, the ending fails COMPLETELY.
It feels like they were writing the story as they went and didn't have an ending in mind but thought "eh, we'll figure it out when we get there". Then the time came and they still didn't have anything that could adequately explain things, so they instead opted for something easy and generic which fails to actually line up with anything that was introduced in the movie.
The ending is cliché and a total cop-out. If you like to try to predict twists than you will absolutely have thought of this but likely dismissed it due to how dumb and nonsensical it would be.
The problem is that the ENTIRE movie hinges on the cleverness of the reveal, and the lame reveal actually ruins, or at least makes insignificant, everything else that happened in the movie. When you go back to the scenarios that played out and take the reveal into account everything actually makes LESS sense and gives the impression it was all a bunch of arbitrary stuff that the writer thought looked or sounded good at the time but doesn't actually tie in or interconnect. Instead of tying things up or providing an explanation, it just introduces a bunch of questions and plot holes.
It's a shame about the ending; this was a solid 5-6 for most of its duration, but, as I stated, the ending makes literally every other aspect of the movie worse, so it's impossible to give it a good overall rating. Worth a watch if you've run out of other horror, but don't have any great expectations.
While not terribly exciting, I enjoyed the slow progression as the scope of the mystery expanded and we see the characters do stranger and more intense things. I felt like they did a good job making every character seem shady to where a variety of major twist(s) could be plausible and applicable to any (or all) of them, and I was genuinely curious to find out how everything was interconnected.
The creature aspect of the movie is done well considering the film's limitations. You do actually see it from time to time and there are some genuinely creepy practical effects used for it. There is some cheesy stuff too (both in terms of effects and scene where the creature is present), but it doesn't ruin it. Honestly, I wish they had just done a straight creature-feature with the creature being a central character/villain instead of the whole "mystery" aspect where you don't know if the creature is real or not, and I would've liked them to cut out some of the various other things going which reduce the focus on the creature and give ol' spiny some more screen time.
All the serious problems with the film come from the ending. The entire thing is very obviously building to a major reveal which should explain all the weirdness that the audience has been witnessing. Unfortunately, the ending fails COMPLETELY.
It feels like they were writing the story as they went and didn't have an ending in mind but thought "eh, we'll figure it out when we get there". Then the time came and they still didn't have anything that could adequately explain things, so they instead opted for something easy and generic which fails to actually line up with anything that was introduced in the movie.
The ending is cliché and a total cop-out. If you like to try to predict twists than you will absolutely have thought of this but likely dismissed it due to how dumb and nonsensical it would be.
The problem is that the ENTIRE movie hinges on the cleverness of the reveal, and the lame reveal actually ruins, or at least makes insignificant, everything else that happened in the movie. When you go back to the scenarios that played out and take the reveal into account everything actually makes LESS sense and gives the impression it was all a bunch of arbitrary stuff that the writer thought looked or sounded good at the time but doesn't actually tie in or interconnect. Instead of tying things up or providing an explanation, it just introduces a bunch of questions and plot holes.
It's a shame about the ending; this was a solid 5-6 for most of its duration, but, as I stated, the ending makes literally every other aspect of the movie worse, so it's impossible to give it a good overall rating. Worth a watch if you've run out of other horror, but don't have any great expectations.
Snyder's Rebel Moon has become the newest addition to my list of the stupidest sci fi movies of all time, finding itself right in between Prometheus and Jupiter Ascending. It is 100% style and 0% substance. Every ounce of production was spent on trying to make a thing that looks "cool" and not one modicum of effort was spent on characters, narrative, cohesion, world-building, etc. There are so many problems with this movie and I'm annoyed that I haven't seen any reviews giving this the brutal scalding that it deserves.
First of all, there is not one single thing in this movie that is unique. I saw a review describe this as a kid dumping out their toybox filled with bootleg action figures and bashing them together, and that's EXACTLY what it feels like. Take the worst, most generic tropes from every Space Opera (Star Wars, Dune, Warhammer, Riddick, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc), combine them and you get Rebel Moon. Every single character, scene, location, encounter, line of dialogue, etc is at best extremely uninspired and predictable, or is a nearly direct copy of something from another movie. For example there is a cantina scene here that is pretty much beat-for-beat the Mos Eisley scene. The motherworld or whatever is just House Harkonen/Imperium of Man/Necromongers, the Gyphon scene is straight out of Harry Potter/Avatar....you get the idea.
The story is painfully stupid and suffers from the same inherent flaw as Justice League. This is another "I'm forming a team" movie where we're thrown into a universe that we know nothing about, and are rushed around to meet the characters who will form the squad at a breakneck pace without ever understanding why or what's going on. We're quickly introduced to each character on some random nondescript world, shown what is supposed to a poignant scene with them (which has no impact whatsoever because we know literally nothing about them) and then quickly move on and the character never speaks more than 2 lines for the rest of the film. It's impossible to care about anything because nothing is explained or connected in any meaningful way. To make it worse, the scenes are often incredibly silly and contrived, take the spider one for example -- the asian lady with swords (sorry, we're told nothing at all about this character so that's literally all I can say to describe her) kills the spider because it has been stealing children. However they say its been stealing children for a while yet only RIGHT NOW in front of our heroes the lady decides to kill her. There are no repercussions whatsoever for killing the spider, so why didn't she (or someone else) do it sooner? Every one of these scenes is exactly like this - completely lacking in logic.
The narrative provides only the absolute bare minimum required to move the characters to the next place so they can find the next guy and we learn nothing of substance in any of these encounters.
The other major problem with this film is that I never got the sense that the writers put any thought into the universe, not do they understand anything about how science, technology, or space work. Similar to the stupidity of Prometheus: no one ever wears space suits or a helmet for some reason, because I guess everyone can breathe everywhere in the universe and every planet is exactly the same as Earth in every way; when people do actually wear "armor" it's the most bizarre, half assed stuff that wouldn't protect you from anything (one in particular is like a half-finished roman cosplay outfit. Yeah very functional for futuristic combat I'm sure!). The level of technology is extremely inconsistent to a level of absurdity so great I'm not going to bother getting into it. There are a lot of throwaway lines that indicate how little thought was put into this universe. At one point the main girl mentions fighting for the empire when she was age 18 and that she "fought on countless worlds". Really, how did you have time to fight on COUNTLESS worlds being that young? Things in space are very, very, very far apart, how did you travel to countless worlds in the span of a few years? Are we really saying this universe even contains COUNTLESS (millions, billions?) of fully populated, habitable worlds in it? How would that even work? How does the empire keep control over millions of worlds, how do people travel and communicate over those distances? Anyway, my point is that there are tons of lines and scenarios in this movie that make it obvious that the only thing that mattered was making things and scenes that "look cool", and nobody cared that nothing makes a single shred of sense if you think about it for more than a second.
Unfortunately, they barely even succeeded at the looking cool thing. A few things do look nice - a few of the Star Wars-derivative locations are nice to look at and a few costumes are ok as well. There is a robot that looks cool and seems important, but then after 2 minutes of screen time is never shown or mentioned again. That said, there is also a lot of horrendous CGI (the background on the moon is laughably atrocious), and a whole lot of scenes randomly going out of focus which feels painfully amateur.
The fights are generally clunky, illogical, filled with "extremely accommodating stunt men" and the comically liberal use of slow motion.
There's more I could say but I'm tired of expending mental resources thinking about this film. To sum it up: Rebel Moon is the worst aspects of Zack Snyder filmmaking, the worst aspects of Zack Snyder writing, and the worst aspects of the Space Opera genre. Watch at your own risk. 1 star for a few of the creature designs and 1 star because my cat seemed to be really into it and only ran away once.
First of all, there is not one single thing in this movie that is unique. I saw a review describe this as a kid dumping out their toybox filled with bootleg action figures and bashing them together, and that's EXACTLY what it feels like. Take the worst, most generic tropes from every Space Opera (Star Wars, Dune, Warhammer, Riddick, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc), combine them and you get Rebel Moon. Every single character, scene, location, encounter, line of dialogue, etc is at best extremely uninspired and predictable, or is a nearly direct copy of something from another movie. For example there is a cantina scene here that is pretty much beat-for-beat the Mos Eisley scene. The motherworld or whatever is just House Harkonen/Imperium of Man/Necromongers, the Gyphon scene is straight out of Harry Potter/Avatar....you get the idea.
The story is painfully stupid and suffers from the same inherent flaw as Justice League. This is another "I'm forming a team" movie where we're thrown into a universe that we know nothing about, and are rushed around to meet the characters who will form the squad at a breakneck pace without ever understanding why or what's going on. We're quickly introduced to each character on some random nondescript world, shown what is supposed to a poignant scene with them (which has no impact whatsoever because we know literally nothing about them) and then quickly move on and the character never speaks more than 2 lines for the rest of the film. It's impossible to care about anything because nothing is explained or connected in any meaningful way. To make it worse, the scenes are often incredibly silly and contrived, take the spider one for example -- the asian lady with swords (sorry, we're told nothing at all about this character so that's literally all I can say to describe her) kills the spider because it has been stealing children. However they say its been stealing children for a while yet only RIGHT NOW in front of our heroes the lady decides to kill her. There are no repercussions whatsoever for killing the spider, so why didn't she (or someone else) do it sooner? Every one of these scenes is exactly like this - completely lacking in logic.
The narrative provides only the absolute bare minimum required to move the characters to the next place so they can find the next guy and we learn nothing of substance in any of these encounters.
The other major problem with this film is that I never got the sense that the writers put any thought into the universe, not do they understand anything about how science, technology, or space work. Similar to the stupidity of Prometheus: no one ever wears space suits or a helmet for some reason, because I guess everyone can breathe everywhere in the universe and every planet is exactly the same as Earth in every way; when people do actually wear "armor" it's the most bizarre, half assed stuff that wouldn't protect you from anything (one in particular is like a half-finished roman cosplay outfit. Yeah very functional for futuristic combat I'm sure!). The level of technology is extremely inconsistent to a level of absurdity so great I'm not going to bother getting into it. There are a lot of throwaway lines that indicate how little thought was put into this universe. At one point the main girl mentions fighting for the empire when she was age 18 and that she "fought on countless worlds". Really, how did you have time to fight on COUNTLESS worlds being that young? Things in space are very, very, very far apart, how did you travel to countless worlds in the span of a few years? Are we really saying this universe even contains COUNTLESS (millions, billions?) of fully populated, habitable worlds in it? How would that even work? How does the empire keep control over millions of worlds, how do people travel and communicate over those distances? Anyway, my point is that there are tons of lines and scenarios in this movie that make it obvious that the only thing that mattered was making things and scenes that "look cool", and nobody cared that nothing makes a single shred of sense if you think about it for more than a second.
Unfortunately, they barely even succeeded at the looking cool thing. A few things do look nice - a few of the Star Wars-derivative locations are nice to look at and a few costumes are ok as well. There is a robot that looks cool and seems important, but then after 2 minutes of screen time is never shown or mentioned again. That said, there is also a lot of horrendous CGI (the background on the moon is laughably atrocious), and a whole lot of scenes randomly going out of focus which feels painfully amateur.
The fights are generally clunky, illogical, filled with "extremely accommodating stunt men" and the comically liberal use of slow motion.
There's more I could say but I'm tired of expending mental resources thinking about this film. To sum it up: Rebel Moon is the worst aspects of Zack Snyder filmmaking, the worst aspects of Zack Snyder writing, and the worst aspects of the Space Opera genre. Watch at your own risk. 1 star for a few of the creature designs and 1 star because my cat seemed to be really into it and only ran away once.