Zack Snyder pitched Rebel Moon as a marriage of Seven Samurai and Star Wars, which is a bit like trying to sell your new invention as the wheel meets sliced bread. The former channeled all of Akira Kurosawa’s estimable powers in blocking, lighting and composition for battles that still merit the nearly exhausted descriptor of “epic”; the latter was a once-in-a-millennium Big Bang of raw movie stardom, snappy dialogue and transportive production design that turned a mid-budget space oddity into a culture-straddling phenomenon; both are fundamentally impossible to replicate. And so Lucasfilm passed on Snyder’s tall order, as did Warner Bros (more than once), until the good people at Netflix uncinched their readily loosened purse strings for what had gradually become the blockbuster king’s longest-simmering passion project.
Yet the finished product has only the vaguest contours of ambition, diminished by a half-assedness dinkifying the latest CGI-jammed saga to decide the fate of the universe. If it can be considered complete at all, that is – this 134-minute film really only covers the getting-the-gang together phase that most movies in the genre knock out within the first half hour, a fragment of story to be wrapped up with a second installment next year. One hopes that Snyder has saved the good stuff for his climactic conclusion, and not just the grand clashes conspicuously absent from an adventure that fits and belongs on a laptop. (Longtime Snyderheads may happen upon the epiphany that his trademark slow-mo action tableaux look like screensavers more than anything else.) There’s still time for him to add character development to his ragtag band of cardboard cutouts, a tactility to his nondescript greenscreened locations, a deeper sense of meaning to the stultifyingly generic plot, and everything else that leaves a sort of polished nothingness in its lack. But by the end credits, expecting anyone to come back and find out feels like asking a lot.
In film school, some professors use the familiar example of Star Wars to teach Campbellian mythmaking, the theories that identify and codify the narrative units re-contextualized since Grecian times. Snyder demonstrates a clear fluency in these concepts with his classically minded scripting, except he forgot the part where the archetypes are meant to be refreshed through novel contexts. On the humble farming planet of Wherever in the galaxy of Who Cares, the broad outline of a Hero (Sofia Boutella, terse and humorless and physically perfect, just how Snyder likes ’em) must defend her village from a faraway notion of an Evil Empire. They rose to power in some great cataclysm of yore during which our Hero’s family was killed, and the Final Boss took her in to teach her the combat skills she’d one day use to take her revenge. Snyder mistakes exposition for world-building, the lugubriously delivered reams of backstory removing the audience from the fantasy rather than immersing them in it.
To topple the Mini-Boss (Ed Skrein, his British accent and high cheekbones marking him as a baddie) come to appropriate her people’s grain, she and her Sidekick (a neutered Michiel Huisman) bop around the cosmos rounding up sympathizers to their cause, including a self-interested yet caddishly likable mercenary we’ll call Not Han Solo (Charlie Hunnam, more visibly awake than most of his scene partners). They are most easily referred to by their function both because they exist as little more than sketches, and because the muddy sound mix isn’t doing viewers any favors, but especially because their names are often long and difficult to retain. Others are catchier, but never for good reasons. General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and the squid-faced King Levitica offer arbitrary allusions for which the writing never makes any attempt to account. Some are just silly, like the brother-sister warriors surnamed Blood Axe, or Skrein’s effete colonist answering to Atticus Noble.
Despite a few nifty creature designs, the handful of eccentricities never add up to a more colorful sense of personality; a fleshy parasite using its human host as a ventriloquist dummy hangs out in Snyder’s equivalent of the Mos Eisley cantina, but his wretched hive of scum and villainy has the clean interior decor and warm natural light of an upscale sushi restaurant. Even when sci-fi goes horribly awry, it usually yields some memorable weirdness, a tradeoff that’s endeared the likes of Jupiter Ascending or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets to their self-selecting cults. No such luck in this case, with Snyder’s po-faced sensibility totally bereft of humor, intentional or otherwise. He envisioned the fight for Somewhere-or-Other as his masterpiece, its sprawling cumulative runtime and expansive scope unprecedented in his career. Going mad with power should be at the very least fun, exhilarating in the indulgence of an artist’s most outlandish whims. Instead, Snyder’s would-be magnum opus is merely boring.
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is now out in select cinemas and will be on Netflix on 22 December
