Rebel Moon Movie Review

DISCLAIMER: This Article Contains Spoilers

Ah, Rebel Moon: Part 1– A Child of Fire. Zack Snyder’s failed attempt at making a Star Wars movie. Where to begin? Where to begin…?
Star Wars meets Seven Samurai in one of the most unoriginal movies I’ve ever watched. I don’t think there was a single new idea in this movie. There were lightsabers, poor farmers, Blade Runner cities, Mandalorian/Predator people, and Mortal Combat-esque fight scenes. You’ve got shady people with ships, an Empire (called the Emperium), characters that looked like Ugnaughts, Matrix pods, and Jar Jar Binks people. The list goes on and on. I think Zack Snyder wanted to make a sci-fi movie and have every aspect of every sci-fi movie he had ever watched included in that movie.
What happens is this- the bad guys want to take some poor farmers’ grain to feed their army, and then the main character (who used to work for the bad guys- BIG REVEAL) decides she’s going to do something about it. The rest of the movie is her trying to recruit a bunch of randos to fight the bad guys when they return for their grain in the sequel.
The VFX felt lazy and looked terrible at times. There was one planet where I wasn’t sure if the giant rocks in the sky (that looked like the skyline in Batman the Animated Series) were supposed to be floating or not. Some spaceship designs were cool, but only because they took after Star Blazers. Another scene had a Tarzan/Conan guy ride a Griffin-like animal in an Avatar-wannabe flight sequence. Ooh, was that bad! It looked bad, we had a useless animal scene, and the Griffin wasn’t seen for the rest of the movie. They did recruit Conan, though, who also turned out to be the Prince of the Universe (or something). Oh, sorry, I spoiled it. On the plus side, he was so jacked that the only thing he wore for the rest of the movie was (at most) a poncho.
The music sucked, seeing as it was probably composed by AI. It felt lifeless and, well, Netflix. Yes, I’m going to be using Netflix as an adjective. I can imagine how much pride they must have taken in describing the score in the subtitles. Not that I got to see said subtitles, as I got to watch this dreadful film in the theater! To be honest, I had a lot of fun watching it like that. The best was right before the movie started when one of the employees explained that Zack Snyder had used a “special lens” to film Rebel Moon to give it a “retro look.” I think the lens just made everything blurry. So much for focus pullers, I suppose.
There was plenty of PG-13 violence in Snyder’s favorite style- slow-mo! Blaster bullet things were flying through the air, people were jumping around, and other people were getting stabbed. Alas, it seemed like they cut out a lot of the action by trying to make it fit into the PG-13 category. Don’t worry, though. If you’re looking for more violence, we’ve been promised a four-hour, R-rated Snyder Cut of Rebel Moon! It doesn’t have a determined release date but is expected to reach Netflix shortly before the sequel (Rebel Moon: Part 2– The Scargiver).
Overall, Rebel Moon was terrible. It’s important to recognize that this movie wasn’t half as bad as the Star Wars sequels; Rebel Moon was a sort of “harmless” bad. I don’t recommend watching this movie, and I can’t even recommend it as background noise. If you do feel the need to watch Rebel Moon, have fun watching a failed kitbash of sci-fi movies.