Sofia Boutella and Djimon Hounsou in Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire.CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX/Netflix
- Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
- Directed by Zack Snyder
- Written by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten
- Starring Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam and Ed Skrein
- Classification N/A; 134 minutes
- Streaming on Netflix starting Dec. 22
Is Zack Snyder a villain or hero? Depending on which corners of the internet you lurk, the filmmaker who served as chief creative architect of the DC Extended Universe (which comes crashing down this holiday season with the lame-duck release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) is either the worst thing to happen to Hollywood since Joseph McCarthy or the saviour we’re all too Marvel-pacified to properly appreciate.
The truth is of course far less incendiary, or interesting. Basically: the guy is a super-hack, bursting with ideas that are not his own, able to execute them with a façade of flair that evaporates once you look at any one image for longer than a super-slow-mo second. Does this make Snyder’s new Netflix epic Rebel Moon – sorry, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, which is being sold as one-half of the first film in a trilogy – an abomination? Hardly. This is instead inimitably watchable trash, the kind of high-gloss nothingness that doesn’t matter unless you really want it to.
So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger. Perhaps there is a modicum of earned wit in how Snyder goes back to Lucas’s original Star Wars inspiration, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, to patch together this story of an outer-planetary farming community that, when threatened by intergalactic colonizers who look an awful lot like space Nazis, enlist warriors from different corners of the universe to defend their homeland. But just because Snyder once pitched Rebel Moon to Lucasfilm as a dark Star Wars spinoff doesn’t make it the genuine article.
And yet all the recycled elements are put forward with such deluded bravado by Snyder – and financed with such ridiculously bountiful Netflix resources – that you cannot help but resign yourself to sitting back and letting the guy get it out of his system. My, what a nice little facsimile of the Mos Eisley Cantina you’ve recreated here, Zack! Oh, how clever of you to pit the two actors who traded the role of warrior Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones against one another, with Michiel Huisman playing a brave farmer and Ed Skrein a bloodthirsty space-fascist. And, um, sure, good for you in getting Jena Malone to play a xenomorph-y alien spider who faces off against a lightsaber-wielding Wicked Witch of the West.
The descriptions above might make things sound more intriguing than they actually are, but also consider that the charisma-free Sofia Boutella plays a farmland hero whose intensely complicated back story mixes Luke Skywalker with Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gamora. And that British actor Charlie Hunnam adopts the wildest Irish accent ever conceived to play a character who can only be described as “Han Solo, but also an IRA leprechaun?” Do you want to hear about how Anthony Hopkins voices a robot warrior-turned-pacifist named Jimmy? Possibly, but there are only so many hours in the day.
Scratch that – there is apparently a black-hole’s worth of inverted time for all things Rebel Moon, given that Part One just barely assembles its heroic team by the two-hour mark. Only Snyder – or perhaps Lucas, James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve – knows what comes next in Part Two: The Scargiver. Or the “R-rated” extended (!) cut that is set to hit Netflix this spring.
Bring it on, if you absolutely must. Just don’t expect audiences to champion a space opera they have seen so many times before. We will, however, definitely watch it with one eye (maybe even two) half-open.