By Seth Lukas Hynes
Rebel Moon
Starring Sofia Boutella, Ed Skrein and Michiel Huisman
Rated M
Part 1: 3/5, Part 2: 3.5/5
Best described as bootleg Star Wars, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon films are exciting and beautiful but shallow and poorly-written action epics.
Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious woman with a dark past on a remote farming world, must gather a band of warriors to defend her village from the tyrannical Imperium.
Rebel Moon, Part 1: A Child of Fire features stunningly imaginative visuals, painterly cinematography, an elegant score by Tom Holkenborg and several thrilling action sequences.
Boutella is a fierce yet sensitive lead, and Ed Skrein is a compelling villain of prim, barely-controlled rage as Admiral Noble.
Unfortunately, the slow, erratic pacing carries little urgency, and the film is full of clunky dialogue, smothering exposition and thinly-sketched characters.
Snyder pitched Rebel Moon as a Star Wars movie or game a couple of times, and so the Star Wars influences are blatantly obvious; the action also suffers from gratuitous slow-mo, which is a hallmark of Snyder’s work.
Rebel Moon, Part 2: The Scargiver feels like Seven Samurai in space, as Kora’s warriors and the village prepare to fight Admiral Noble and his forces.
The Scargiver has much the same technical virtues and storytelling and slow-mo shortcomings as the first film, and takes nearly an hour to get going, but it’s more cohesive; the bulk of The Scargiver is one massive, enthralling war sequence.
Even though we barely know the main characters across two movies, each hero still gets a brutal chance to shine in battle.
A Child of Fire’s climax emerges from a well-executed twist, and The Scargiver effectively splits its focus between increasingly-devastating skirmishes on the ground and Kora’s subterfuge aboard Noble’s ship.
Action-packed and viscerally-satisfying but dramatically hollow (as Snyder films often are), both Rebel Moon films are available to stream on Netflix.
