Rebel Moon Part One: A Review - In a Dull and Derivative Galaxy...

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My recommendation: SKIP IT. Oh boy…this thing is garbage.

Rebel Moon, the new Zack Snyder directed sci-fi film on Netflix, tells the story of Kora, a young woman living on a remote planet in a galaxy ruled by an evil empire, who…you guessed it...rebels against her evil overlords.

Rebel Moon was originally a spec script written by Zack Snyder which he pitched to Lucasfiilm in 2012 as a Star Wars movie. Lucasfilm passed but Snyder kept the idea and took out the lightsabers and replaced them with fiery hot swords and now eleven years later he has made his non-Star Wars/Star Wars movie and it hit Netflix on December 21, 2023.

Having sat through the interminable two-hours and fifteen minutes of Rebel Moon, I can, for the first time in the last twenty-five years, not only understand Lucasfilm’s thinking, but respect it.

As frustratingly sub-par as the last bunch of Star Wars films have been, and boy oh boy have they been sub-par, they seem like Citizen Kane and The Godfather combined compared to the shitshow that is Rebel Moon.

This movie is an amalgam of every sci-fi and fantasy movie trope imaginable, thrown into an insipid and rancid stew of derivative dullness. The end result is one of the most suffocatingly boring and instantly forgettable films in recent cinema history.

I’d get into the plot of Rebel Moon but…what’s the point? You’ve seen everything in Rebel Moon in other, better movies.  

Zack Snyder is a very polarizing filmmaker. Surprisingly, I have, for the most part, been on Snyder’s side in the battles over his abilities over the years. I always appreciated his distinct visual style and I thought both 300 and Watchmen were good. Hell, I even enjoyed the director’s cut and SnyderCut of Batman v Superman and Justice League respectively.  

The cold hard reality is that I really wanted Rebel Moon to be good and was…God help me…looking forward to it…but unfortunately and unquestionably, Rebel Moon is Snyder at his absolute worst.

The script is a gigantic, steaming pile of excrement. The dialogue is painfully cliched and the story is jam packed full of the most tired and lazy sci-fi tropes imaginable. There’s stuff blatantly stolen from Star Wars, Avatar, and even The Lord of the Rings, among many others.

The film has Snyder’s signature visual style but just not as well executed. Everything is matted and hidden under a layer of washed-out gray. Slow-motion is used over and over and over again in action sequences to negative affect. There’s not a single memorable or noteworthy shot in the entire film despite Snyder’s ham-fisted attempts to create one.

Speaking of nothing being noteworthy, the cast of Rebel Moon are egregiously bad.

Sofia Boutella plays the tough girl lead Kora, and she is so devoid of charisma, magnetism or any semblance of acting skill, it felt like I was watching a corpse laying-in-wait for its autopsy to begin. How Boutella, a dancer who has been in some films but never been good in any of them, ever got cast in this thing is beyond me.

As bad as Boutella is, and boy is she bad, Michiel Huisman, who plays Gunnar, is maybe the worst actor to have ever been captured on film. This guy, who somehow was on Game of Thrones, is to acting what Stephen Hawking was to tap dancing.

Charlie Hunham, an actor I usually like, plays a mercenary named Kai. Kai is an awful and annoyingly inane character, but thankfully Hunham’s performance is so dreadful you almost forget the character he plays is ridiculously written. To add diarrhea atop the shit cake, Hunham busts out an Irish accent that would make Dick Van Dyke blush.

The two most horrifying things about Rebel Moon are, number one, that Anthony Hopkins is a voice actor in the film who plays a robot with a heart of gold. Hopkins is 86 years-old and it horrifies me to think there’s a decent chance this is the last movie he makes before he goes off to his eternal reward. I guess I can console myself with the idea that acting in Rebel Moon, even if it is just in voice-over, is a serious form of penance and thus Hopkins sins will be washed away and he’ll be ushered quickly into heaven upon his departure from this cruel earth.

The other horrifying thing is that Rebel Moon is actually titled, Rebel Moon PART ONE…which means, God help us…there is going to be a Rebel Moon PART TWO.

Part Two is supposed to hit Netflix in April of 2024, so every sorry son of a bitch like me who watched Part One has a few months to prepare themselves to skip Part Two entirely, up to and including gouging our own eyes out.

Not to go even darker, but the word on the street is that Snyder is working on the script for Part Three at this very moment…which…holy fuck…I can’t even begin to comprehend the scope and scale of mental illness ravaging the executive suites over at Netflix right now for them to green light more of this garbage.

In conclusion, it is difficult to put into words how truly atrocious Rebel Moon is. Just know that you never, ever, ever have to ever watch this really stupid and relentlessly, endlessly boring movie, because I already did. You’re welcome.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024