THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER-FREE.
by Jarrod Jones. If there was ever a screening that ought to come with a round of tetanus shots afterward, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon would be it. Here’s a movie so inundated by corroded steel, molten blades, mud-caked boots, and goo-producing alien things that one might feel the greasy coat of a hard day’s work begin to form on their skin while watching it. Snyder, the director of brawny dust-ups such as 300, Man of Steel, and Army of the Dead, has long been fascinated by gritty textures, throbbing muscles, and hard edges. It shouldn’t be surprising that his first-ever space opera feels like it was staged inside an industrial smelting facility.
Rebel Moon isn’t a space opera so much as a galactic rendition of goth-punk Stomp. Hammers and other heavy things are swung around with brute force, giving the film an additional soundtrack of tolling bells and cracking skulls to go over its thundering Junkie XL score. The polite droid doesn’t sound like Anthony Daniels but Anthony Hopkins. Lasers don’t go pew-pew; they go BOOM-BOOM. Like the dreaded Imperium, Moon’s world-conquering military force, Snyder bombards and overwhelms with his tyrannical vision of a gnarlier, more brutal galaxy. Naturally, as the director of a fistful of other loud, visually wearying movies, Snyder’s latest is all sound and fury, indicating little else but a driven need to flex.
Which is fine. Most folks who willingly see Zack Snyder’s movies do so to be immersed in spectacle, not character or drama. I’m certainly not immune to the Saturday morning sugar rush of his heavily digitized slo-mo action. There’s a bit in Rebel Moon with a giant black raven that gets broken in like a bucking bronco that almost brought me to the level of transcendence Snyder Fans are likely on whenever his films play. I was similarly knocked dead by Jena Malone, who looks like a cross between a Cenobite from Hellraiser and Aliens’ xenomorph queen and commands her scene with such malice I wished the whole movie had been about her. And there’s the rub: what yanks me out of these intricately designed moments is the realization that they are in service to the vibes of Rebel Moon, not its substance.
Snyder’s enthusiasm to share this new galaxy, with all its rebels, alien weirdoes, and robots, assembled with the brio of Howard Hawks if not the staginess (let’s say some sets are less convincing than others), is both evident and admirable. It isn’t hard to spot where Rebel Moon goes wrong; Snyder, who shares screenplay credit with Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, emphasizes lore over drama. It’s that miscalibration that trips him up. As a copy/paste from works such as Star Wars and Seven Samurai, he retrofits older stories with new digital zip and dims their heart and humanity under the oppressive weight of a fanboy’s dogma. That might be awesome for pedantic content hounds who will dutifully collate the tropes Snyder’s working with and confuse them for depth, but for those hoping against hope that he’d do something of material value with them, Rebel Moon will be a slog.
Sofia Boutella plays Kora, an action movie archetype we know only too well — she’s the soldier turned solemn farmer who is thrust back into a life of violence — and throughout the film, she attracts other well-trod archetypes:
- The handsome bounty hunter (Charlie Hunnam)
- The boisterous gladiator (Djimon Hounsou)
- The nobleman fallen from grace (Staz Nair)
- The lusty revolutionary (Ray Fisher)
- The stoic swordswoman (Doona Bae)
- The seemingly useless dude hanging around for romantic reasons (Michiel Huisman)
Rebel Moon amounts to a minor series of quests designed to accumulate these characters. That wouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker — after all, this is the first of a two-part epic — if Snyder bothered to work in reasons why we should give a rip about any of these people.
So much is given to the rush of action and bombast that it’s easy to lose track of why Boutella and her merry band cruise from planet to planet. Their reasons for taking on the film’s fascist freakazoid villain (Ed Skrein) are, as a result, shallow: “The Imperium must be stopped because fascism is bad.” Yes, but: Can we assign personal stakes for each character other than that universal desire for freedom? If there are too many characters to do this, can we remove one or two (or, let’s be honest, three) of them? Why do these funky star-farers ally themselves with Kora so easily? Do they even like each other? Star Wars at least put in the minimum effort of twin-sun gazing and “let the Wookie win.” Rebel Moon‘s characters are echoes from other stories, not people.
When he made his DC trilogy, which culminated with his rousing and confounding Justice League super-cut, Snyder riffed on established lore that can be recited by comic book fans from memory. That gave him the leeway to boost the material with his sinewy vision, which at least gave icons like Superman and Batman an otherworldly, nigh-Olympian bent. Breaking an established mold like George Lucas cracked Flash Gordon to make modern fiction’s new science-fantasy ur-text is ambitious, and I’ll say it: Snyder’s cracked take on that galaxy far, far away shows promise. If I’m going to say “so what?” to a movie, I’d rather it be made with big swinging energy than the latest plastic adventure thing from Disney+.
Still, it’s frustrating to watch Snyder’s two big Netflix projects, Army of the Dead and now this, collapse under the weight of their influences. (There are worse Aliens homages than Dead, but few crib from it as blatantly.) Some will say we shouldn’t blame a movie geek like Snyder when he’s given carte blanche to make the fusion of Star Wars and Excalibur that’s been bombing around his brain for years and winds up making a clattering mess of things. And, sure, maybe it’s well past time for me to recalibrate my expectations of Zack Snyder. But while it is disappointing to see his ambitions amount to thundering duds again and again, there remains a minor thrill in watching him smash shit together in the only way he knows how.
5.5 / 10
Rebel Moon drops on Netflix this week.
Directed by Zack Snyder
Screenplay by Kurt Johnstad, Shay Hatten, and Zack Snyder.
Cinematography by Zack Snyder.
Starring Sofia Boutella, Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman, Djimon Hounsou, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman, Jena Malone, Ed Skrein, Fra Fee, and Anthony Hopkins.
Produced by Deborah Snyder, Wesley Coller, Zack Snyder, and Eric Newman.
Rated PG-13 for bloodless violence, side-tush, and space swears.
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