Review: Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire (2023)

Zack Snyder’s latest film for Netflix—grandiosely billed as Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire—is unfortunately his biggest dud. After our 2021 Retrospective on Snyder, it’s no secret that I admire most of his films and even appreciate aspects of his most bizarre and worst received works (for example, see my thoughts on Sucker Punch in the Three Brothers’ ranking of Snyder’s films). However, Snyder’s previous film for Netflix, Army of the Dead, a pastiche of zombie, post-apocalyptic, and heist movies, didn’t quite come together for me. Rebel Moon is more cohesive than Army of the Dead but less interesting, as most of the cast is uncharismatic in their roles and, more importantly, the basic concept remains lifeless.

By now, everyone knows that Rebel Moon was initially conceived, once upon a time, as a Star Wars movie. Snyder claims the final product went in directions he couldn’t have gone with Star Wars IP, and that seems believable—given, for example, a scene that suggests the villain, Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), has a tentacle fetish. But although there are plenty of enjoyable Snyder trademarks—such as cool stylized slow-motion fight scenes and memorable visuals (like a silhouette of the heroine ploughing a field against the gas giant-filled sky)—the final result is never enough of its own thing. 

The opening voice-over narration, told over images of gargantuan galactic battleships (clearly Snyder’s substitute for the opening crawl of every Star Wars movie), introduces us to the state of the galaxy. We soon arrive at a far away moon, where we meet the muscular, reserved Kora (played rather blandly by Sofia Boutella) who has joined a humble farming community. Very quickly, we learn that she is secretly a warrior who has fled some dark past, and we suspect she might emerge as a galactic saviour to battle the evil Imperium forces of the rapacious Motherworld.

That above paragraph notwithstanding, not everything about Rebel Moon is in the vein of Star Wars. The basic plot is two degrees of separation from the works of George Lucas, being cribbed from Seven Samurai (just like A Bug’s Life). Kora will have to recruit warriors to defend the small farming community from the evil soldiers who will return to collect the harvest (an event that will take place in Part Two, presumably).

Even further from the Star Wars vein, the farming community is made up of horny space Mennonites who host sex parties to inspire the gods to bless the land with fertility. Corey Stoll plays Sindri, the leader of the community, with a vaguely Nordic accent. (Stoll’s agrarian leader is one of the better supporting characters. Charlie Hunnam’s Han Solo-like rogue is okay, but Djimon Hounsou is given little to do as an old general. Many of the side characters are poorly conceived or blandly performed.) These space Mennonites are but one example of where the film could lean more into the absurd possibilities of science fiction, à la another, far more successful non-Star Wars space opera: Luc Besson’s brilliant The Fifth Element (1997). Unfortunately, Snyder can never quite balance his interest in the humorous and bizarre, which is more unleashed here than usual, with his typical interest in self-serious themes of heroism, sacrifice, and empire.

How can you be so demanding and snobbish, you might ask, when the movie offers so many bizarre and hilarious bounties? There’s the Mos Eisley Cantina’s Dr. Evazan from A New Hope reimagined as a sexual predator; Jena Malone as a kidnapping, alien spider in a kung fu fight; robots that crawl like scorpions but catch you like chairs; the happy chance of Djimon Hounsou of Gladiator rescued from a space gladiator planet; and Anthony Hopkins voicing a noble old robot who dons a flowered crown in a moment of Terrence Malick-esque memory. I’m not mocking when I say these things are almost enough to win me over. But they are never fully integrated with the bigger picture Snyder wants to tell.

Disney, by making Star Wars ubiquitous, has also essentially made it impossible to rip off. They may have deflated the value of Lucas’s one-time gold mine, but its wider currency makes the close counterfeit less acceptable. This is a major problem for Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon. It never amounts to more than a second-, and at times, third-rate space opera. There are narrative and thematic seeds here that could fertilize and grow into a better story, such as the intriguing characterization of divine royalty or the strange bodily cyberspace that allows intimate communication across vast distances. So I admit that my overall view of Snyder’s project, now only half-realized, could change after Part Two, but for now, it’s Snyder’s biggest flop.

4 out of 10

Rebel Moon (2023, USA)

Directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Shay Hatten; starring Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Ed Skrein, Michiel Huisman, Doona Bae, Ray Fisher, Charlie Hunnam, Corey Stoll, and Anthony Hopkins.

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