The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend – Rebel Moon
No, I don’t know why.
Zack Snyder has always been utterly dependent on his writers. There is no great shame to this. If you can accept your limits as a creative professional and admit your dependence on colaborers in other fields, it is possible to create something extraordinary.
Snyder has done this on occasion. He got his start in the music videos. Okay, plenty of directors have started out there and frankly, it beats filming porn which is where the rest get their start. The thing is, the guys that matriculate out of MTV film school do so pretty quickly. Snyder had been laboring in the video mines for ten years before he got his break. And that break was largely a matter of luck. Dawn of the Dead (2004), had a tight script courtesy of James Gunn but what it didn’t have was a director. The picture looked like it was under a curse, every director hired became unavailable for a string of reasons. Finally, a couple of days before shooting was to start and the project was directorless again, Universal called and said, look we’re sending somebody. You haven’t heard of him but there might be something there.
Dawn of the Dead was a surprise hit, albeit mostly due to Gunn’s script. Snyder’s signature style didn’t come to the fore until his collaboration with the legendary Frank Miller. 300 gave Snyder a known, pronounced metier and mode. His next film was Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Look I’m no fan of Moore but I won’t deny the power that book had.
Snyder’s highest-rated film on IMDB is another music video short. It was the only time he ever got Superman right and again, someone else (Bruce Timm) wrote it.
His career had gone very well up to his being put in charge of DC and I can be fair, the worst of the Snyderverse’s blunders was the result of panic-stricken studio interference. Nonetheless, he appears to have started craving the high-status Hollywood one-two punch of being a Writer-Director, and he is a terrible writer.
His rewrites for the Snyder Cut showed his instinct for setting up a good visual at the expense of a good story. Classic example; Martha Kent having a heart-to-heart conversation with Lois Lane,* but then the entire scene is utterly ruined by Martha turning into the Martian Manhunter. Narratively, it was a trainwreck but hey, trainwrecks look cool right?
Army of the Dead and Army of Thieves continued this trend of cool-looking narrative ten-car-pile-ups.
Now we have reached his much anticipated Rebel Moon. This story is the worst yet.
Zack Snyder has discovered ChatGPt. That is the most likely explanation for what I just saw. I can’t prove this but I’m seriously detecting The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power energy here. The story is almost that good. It feels like something an AI wrote. Although, I am forced to grant the production values are much better. Snyder showed an AI every single eighties science fiction movie; Empire, Jedi, Dune, Blade Runner, Akira, Battle Beyond the Stars (ChatGpt really liked that one) Krull, Akira and you name it. The AI got to see them and then it barfed out a script. Snyder knocked the roughest edges off the first draft then he sent the script to the Netflix DIE board to have all the proper checkboxes inserted and then he filmed the result.
I had joked that Rebel Moon looked like Warhammer 40K and Star Wars had hate-fucked and made a baby that was raised by Luc Besson.
I wish it was that good.
What makes this movie so tedious to get through is the utter lack of originality.
There isn’t a single scene in this movie that I haven’t seen somewhere else. Hell, past a certain point, I was wondering if Zack Snyder had been replaced by an AI himself. Had the poor thing been shown nothing in its sad existence but Zack Snyder movies and then was ordered to create one?
About the only entertainment value Rebel Moon had was figuring out which movie a given scene had been lifted from. The plot of the scene was completely predictable once I had identified the movie.
For instance. The film opens with happy village peasants having a harvest festival. There is nothing more dangerous for peasants to do than have a harvest festival, it always ends in disaster.
One of the peasants “Kora” is an outsider with a troubled past. The harvest festival does its job and an Imperial dreadnaught from the “Mother World” shows up. “Mother World” feels like a placeholder name Snyder just went with because he couldn’t make up a name he liked better and it’s one of the few bits of evidence that point to human involvement with the script.
The Commander spends what feels like a half hour pretending to be friendly while building dread and creating tension before he kills the headman and tells the villagers he’ll be back in ten weeks to take their entire harvest so they can starve to death.
This sequence’s primary problem is that it’s too stupid to be believable. There were two ways to set this up, one, make it clear that the harvest was terrible and there would be barely enough to survive the winter. Fine, a warlord shows up and don’t care about no peasant problems, like eating. However, these peasants had had several years of bumper crops, and they had proved they were willing to sell their excess. These “Mother World” guys obviously have a rep for being bone crushers, so if the Commander shows up and offers to pay for your harvest “at triple the market rate.” You freaking say, “yes” while they are being polite rather than find out what comes next if you say, “no.”
Because these guys obviously won’t take no for an answer or stop for an order.
Which brings us to the rape scene. Soldiers that have been left in garrison notice the cutest blonde. You know she’s going to be dragged off at the first opportunity, thus forcing Kora With the Troubled Past to kill all of the soldiers.
You knew all of that was coming the moment you saw one of them look the blond over.
Speaking of utterly predictable, this was the first of the signature Zack Snyder bullet time fight scenes.
S-o-o-o-o-o… m-u-u-u-u-c-h-h-h… b-u-u-u-l-l-e-e-e-t… t-i-m-m-m-e…
Look that computer slow motion than fast motion stuff was cool fifteen years ago when 300 came out but it has been done to death since then and Zack Snyder has been the one killing it. This thing is absolutely packed with those bullet time scenes to the point that it was, again, boringly predictable.
Now the Battle Beyond the Stars rip-off storyline begins.** Kora and her Mansel in Distress (he almost gets raped in the Cantina rip-off scene), set off to find their Nekama. As well as rebels with actual ships and troops, who frankly should have been priority one.
This brings us to the film’s other big problem. Snyder’s complete inability to set up narrative satisfaction. After Kora killed the soldiers there needed to be a scene where it is revealed that she is some kind of super soldier, but she isn’t. She’s just a strong woman. Next, when you set out to build a Team Supreme you have to say something like, “I’ve got a plan but I will need warriors with certain skills.” Name the skills and that you know one person who can do one of them. That guy will know the next and so on. This movie never does that. Kora just fucks off into the starry night to find seven randos and tells them to join her. It should have started with a Farmer Simp Boy who most closely fits the connected guy trope, saying “I know someone.” Which he does, but that guy was getting seized by bounty hunters when they first saw him. Farmer Simp just shrugs at that point and basically says, well I got nothing else. So they just go into a Cantina to have a drink, I guess.
They find a sketchy smuggler to fly them around… Hmm? Why yes, they did find him in the Cantina. How did you know?
Anyway, Kora tells her girlish boyfriend her life story. This allows us to see a different Zack Snyder storytelling technique, barely skimming over a subplot that would have been the most interesting part of the story. Kora was adopted by the general who would eventually murder the royal family and make himself regent. She became a soldier fanatic of the empire and then something-something, so she took off and is now the most wanted fugitive in the Galaxy. So it is kind of surprising that no one knows what she looks like. But we shot through that in three or four minutes so we could go back to the next incredibly long visual.
The collection of Kora’s seven took way too long and none of them had any reason at all to join her suicide cult. They just did it so the next scene could happen
There was one good subplot toward the end but the film went back into silly mode the first chance it got. Apparently knocking out a door gunner can make a space dreadnaught crash. The Mother World has unbelievably shitty shipwrights. I had been wondering what Team Kora was supposed to do against this monster but apparently, seven really was all she needed to take one of those out of combat.
This movie functioned when it was bothering to function at all, as the first act of a story welded to a premature climax. The situation and characters were introduced, then there is a battle scene that temporarily solves the problem.
Part 2 will be streamed in April.
Was there anything I liked? A few things.
The actors were doing everything they could with what little they’d been given. The effects were better than anything Marvel or Star Wars has delivered for quite some time. Sound design carried its load as did the soundtrack. Visually this thing is a treat. Snyder is an atmospheric storyteller, which is fine but you need to be telling a simple story for that to work and the Seven Samurai is just too complicated for visual representation to do all the heavy lifting.
It has one or two moments but it is a wade through molasses to get to them. The story itself just doesn’t hang together. Too many things happen only to make the next visual happen. A super special Snyder Cut is not going to fix these problems.
I was honestly hoping Rebel Moon was going to be the Star Wars killer that Zack Snyder had promised it would be but it absolutely is not. As it is…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Rebel Moon
*That scene was written by Chris Terrio, I believe.
**I can’t believe I’m saying this but Corman’s rip-off of the Magnificent Seven (itself a rip-off of Seven Samurai) was actually better than Rebel Moon.
