Overview
When the ruthless forces of the Motherworld threaten a quiet farming village on a distant moon, a mysterious outsider becomes its best hope for survival.
A bunch of characters so memorable I can’t recall one name from the whole thing in a film that spends over two hours on what is essentially at most 90 mins of set-up for the next film. Admittedly if Snyder didn’t keep resorting to his trademark slo-mo, it probably would be 90 mins.
This is a film that suffers from being too drawn out, whilst at the same time being edited down to an unstructured mess of ideas. Whether the already announced and planned for longer cut remedies the lack of structure or depth of characters remains to be seen, but given that extra hour will likely be 20 mins of slo-mo, it will just mean that a 2 hour film runs for over 3 hours instead.
Design is good, with marvelously wonderful alien worlds and ships, but story and characterisations is where it all lacks. Very generic, it is bland Star Wars, with so many elements ripped directly from that very franchise without anything to stand on its own for. You can see why Disney turned it down, and you can also see why other studios didn’t want it. Netflix have instead funded it, but I do wonder whether the whole planned series of films will come to fruition, and whether we will have another hashtag movement. After all, we still haven’t seen anything else from his Netflix “dead” plans. Netflix are known for cancelling planned things on a whim – it will be interesting to see how far this rabbit hole goes.
As for Rebel Moon Part One – I’m sure a certain fandom will shout about how it is a masterpiece, and then when the extended version lands will suddenly say that fixes the problems that this alleged masterpiece has that they couldn’t acknowledge at the time. But for me, it was a chore to sit through – a beautiful looking chore, but still a chore all the same.