When it comes to movies from Zack Snyder, I am generally a fan. I enjoyed what he did with his DCEU trilogy and his recent work with Army of the Dead (ready for more movies in this universe). When Rebel Moon was announced as an edgy, sci-fi, space adventure I was hooked. But what we received is far from that. I’m curious to see how fans will react to this new world.
We get a great intro narration from Anthony Hopkins (who also voices an android named Jimmy) which takes us to a farming settlement far out into space on a distant planet called Veidt. Here we meet Kora (Sofia Boutella) who has had a difficult past and is now trying to live a quiet life in this village. The village is soon met by an Imperium squad, led by Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who are hunting down any rebels that are in hiding. To test the loyalty of this village he gives them ten months to gather 12,000 pounds or units (can’t remember the proper scale they use) of grain for his army otherwise will use his ship to destroy their planet. Atticus leaves Veidt but his troops stay behind to monitor the people. One evening a group of soldiers attempt to rape a young girl and Kora steps in and kills them all, revealing part of her past that she has been hiding from the community. Kora knows this information will reach Atticus and he will return with vengeance so she sets off to recruit warriors to help the farmers fight. A fellow farmer, Gunner (Michiel Huisman) says he has connections outside of this planet and joins Kora. Does any of this sound familiar yet?
After the first action sequence we see is when I started having most of my issues with this movie. While the action scene is cool, there are a lot of camera cut-offs to keep this within its PG-13 rating. This is continued throughout the runtime which was a bummer as I was expecting more of an edgier approach. The nods used throughout were too heavy for me as well. There’s a blend of moments taken from other films, such as Star Wars, but I found this movie to be a spot-on space representation of the Pixar movie, A Bugs Life. Everything within the first two acts is extremely identical to the story from A Bugs Life, including some of the warriors joining Kora’s team. I couldn’t help but sit there and laugh at the silliness of this all while hoping the story would move to something more original.
Another issue is we see a lot of characters and many get very little screen time so we don’t have much connection to them. There is also a lot of planet-hopping, which is cool to see how big this universe is but it does take away from the runtime that could have been spent with more character development. My best guess is this will all happen in either Snyder’s Directors Cut or in Part Two.
A Child of Fire tries to tackle quite a bit in its 2-hour and 13-minute runtime. I think it does a great job of building up the foundation of what is to come but the over-use of nods and how this movie has scaled back from what was originally announced didn’t do this much justice for me. I’m hopeful Part Two can correct a lot of this or even if we end up getting a director cut for both movies. I’m willing to give this one more shot (plus the fact that the screening I attended had broken subtitles so there are multiple moments of context we missed out on). I’m curious as to where you stand when it comes to Zack Snyder’s work. Let me know in the comments.
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire will be streaming on Netflix on 12/21/23.
Rating: 2.5/5
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