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

Zack Snyder's Justice League: A Review

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

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An imperfect film, but if you like superhero movies, it’s worth the effort.

THE SNYDER CUT IS HERE AND IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT

After much consternation, speculation and hype…the eagerly anticipated Justice League “Snyder Cut” has finally premiered on HBO Max and I watched all four hours of it.

If you don’t know about the Snyder Cut then you’re probably a healthy human being living a normal life, but just to get you up to speed here are all the relevant details.

Zack Snyder, who has directed such notable hits as 300 and Watchmen, became the artistic force of the DC Comics cinematic universe in 2013 when he helmed Man of Steel, a reboot of the Superman origin story.

Snyder followed that up by directing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 and its sequel Justice League in 2017. Unfortunately, due to the sudden and tragic death of his daughter Autumn, Snyder had to drop out of post-production of Justice League, and was replaced by Joss Whedon.

Whedon, at the behest of the movie studio Warner Brothers, re-shot a lot of material and made substantial changes to the tone and tenor of Justice League in the editing process, thus obliterating Snyder’s original artistic vision.

When finally released in November of 2017, Whedon’s version of Justice League was panned by critics and performed poorly at the box office.

Ever since then rumors have swirled of a “Snyder cut” of Justice League which restored Zack Snyder’s original artistic vision. A group of hopeful fans started a movement, #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, in order to pressure Warner Brothers to do just that and let the world see Snyder’s version of the film.

After years of hemming and hawing, Warner Brothers finally relented and agreed to release the Snyder Cut, and even gave Snyder a rumored extra $70 million to reshoot some scenes and re-edit.

The result of all of this is Zach Snyder’s Justice League, now streaming on HBO Max.

Let’s be clear, Zach Snyder’s Justice League isn’t Citizen Kane, nor is it a superhero masterpiece like The Dark Knight, but it is a thoroughly satisfying and entertaining DC superhero movie that is infinitely superior to Joss Whedon’s Justice League.

As the end credits role in the Snyder cut a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” plays, and it seemed very apropos considering the movie feels an answered prayer for long-suffering DC fans.

The greatest changes Snyder made to Justice League were restoring its dark theme and tone and doubling its running time from two hours to four hours.

Zack Snyder has always been much more a cinematic stylist than a proficient storyteller, and so giving him two extra hours to flesh out narratives and character arcs is enormously helpful.

The same was true with Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The theatrical release of that movie was two and a half hours, but Warner Brothers later released a directors cut titled “The Ultimate Edition”, that added an additional thirty minutes and it is a far superior, and much more dramatically and narratively coherent movie than the original theatrical version.

The Snyder Cut’s four hour running time may be a barrier to those ambivalent about superhero movies or with limited attention spans, but it adds much needed depth, context and coherence to the story and I found the movie to be surprisingly captivating the entire time.

Another noticeable and needed change Snyder made was in giving more time to Ray Fisher’s Cyborg and Ezra Miller’s Flash in order to flesh the characters out. Both Cyborg and Flash got short shrift in Whedon’s version and in the new cut they prove themselves to be very compelling characters.

That’s also true of villain Steppenwolf, which went from being a rather dull cardboard cutout in Whedon’s version to being a powerful and multi-dimensional character in Snyder’s cut. 

The newly added scenes with DC supervillain Darkseid also resonated, and elevated the film by giving added context.

The recent crop of DC films have often been maligned by critics and audiences for being too thematically dark, unlike the supremely successful Marvel films which are often fun and light fare.

Joss Whedon’s Justice League floundered though because it tried to bring Marvel frivolity to DC’s existentialism. To its great credit, the Snyder cut unabashedly embraces DC’s dark roots and shuns any Marvel imitation.

While Snyder is no Christopher Nolan, he is an accomplished cinematic stylist, and regardless of what you think of his style, it is unquestionably true that both Batman v Superman and Justice League were considerably improved when the entirety of his vision was allowed on screen.

When the suits at Warner Brothers have meddled with Snyder’s vision, his DC films have suffered critically and financially.

If Warner Brothers were smart they’d learn to leave the artists they’ve hired to direct their flagship properties alone, because those directors are better at making good movies than any suit pushing banality and conformity over artistry.

The next Batman movie, The Batman, is being directed by Matt Reeves, who is terrific, as evidenced by his two fantastic Planet of the Apes movies that were exquisite blockbusters. Reeves could help Warner Brothers and DC start fighting back against the Marvel behemoth, but only if they let him do his thing and don’t meddle and muddle things up like they’ve done with Snyder’s films.

As for Zach Snyder’s Justice League, it isn’t for everybody. It may be too long for some, or too dark for others, but despite being an imperfect film, it certainly hit a sweet spot for me.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021