Spoilers will be with you always.

Let’s get the history out of the way first. Zack Snyder conceived this story inspired by the works of Akira Kurosawa and George Lucas. He pitched it to Lucasfilm as a Star Wars film shortly after they were bought by Disney in 2012. Eventually it became a Netflix film, split in two parts. It’s obviously derivative of the franchise galaxy far, far away and that in itself is not negative. If you’re already having a bad feeling about this, you’re correct. Lock S-foils in attack position, we’re going in.

(Credit: Netflix)

Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire (2023) was directed by Zack Snyder, who originally envisioned the story and wrote the screenplay with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten. In a small settlement of a moon far away from the rest of the galaxy, Kora (Sofia Boutella) lives a simple life until an army of the Motherworld led of Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) come around to threaten to take all their resources. Kora and a young farmer named Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) embark themselves on a trip to recruit warriors to form the resistance and fight Noble’s army.

To accomplish this task, Kora and Gunnar employ the services of Kai (Charlie Hunnan), a smuggler with a ship that knows a few people. This turns into going into a strange world, finding a mysterious stranger, said mysterious stranger doing something awesome to prove their mettle and they becoming recruited. And so we meet beast tamer Tarak (Staz Nair), swordswoman Nemesis (Doona Bae) and the jewel in the crown, disgraced imperial general Titus (Djimon Hounsou). Together they will try to get the rebel forces led by Devra Bloodaxe (Cleopatra Coleman) and her brother Darrian (Ray Fisher) to join their cause.

What we have at its core is a collection of vignettes as we travel to different worlds with a different aesthetic to gather another adventurer for the cause. This reminds me a lot of fantasy stories where we pick people of different talents to form a ragtag band of misfits. The selling point here is the visuals with the heavy use of CGI. The visual concept is ok, influenced by a lot of other IPs. There’s even some Warhammer 40K influence that can’t be denied. Unfortunately there’s rarely an iconic or unique look on any of the ships that can be remembered. They’re all borrowing heavily from designs we’ve seen several times before.

It doesn’t work cohesively. It’s a very nice collection of vignettes tied up very loosely. The action, which should be its selling point, is built by having one character attempt to charge recklessly, slowing the camera down and cueing up the music building up. The movie seems to constantly chase having iconic moments where someone does something cool or shocking that will become a mainstay in main culture. Unfortunately nothing sticks.

Furthermore, the time devoted to each setting becomes increasingly shorter as if the filmmakers appear to realize they’re going past their allocated time. By the time the last introduction is done (meeting the Bloodaxes was really underwhelming) and we head into the climactic confrontation, we’re skipping transitions at lightspeed. The acting is very flat to the point that all characters seem bipolar. You could make a drinking game of each time the character goes from calm and quiet to purely shouting out the injustices of the world. Count the times that Kora either drops or raises the hood of her cape to start or end a conversation and you can start a drinking game. Kora is the main character, by the way. After a while all the names become a blur.

Barely recommended with plenty of reservations. It’s trying very hard to be a gritty and edgy R-rated sci-fi epic, but it’s too hard. Some comedy would go a long way into adding entertainment value to it. Seriously, if it took itself less seriously it could become a hoot to watch. There’s a chance it could do that in the next installment (it’s a two-parter, not sure why it doesn’t go for three instead). As it stands, it’s watchable for a single viewing. It has potential to redeem itself in the sequel if it makes a few adjustments and embraces its over-the-top-ness.

That will do for now.