Putting “Part One” in a movie’s title simply forewarns audiences that they’re about to watch an incomplete affair—a misguided decision that plagued Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1, and Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One. Zack Snyder falls into the same trap with the excessively punctuated Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child of Fire, the maiden chapter of a two-film science fiction saga (in theaters Dec. 15; on Netflix Dec. 21) whose lack of originality is only matched by its humorlessness. Cribbing so liberally from Star Wars that George Lucas deserves hefty royalties, this misbegotten attempt at creating a new out-of-this-world Snyderverse is merely a knockoff dressed up in its director’s stylistic signatures, and all the more depressing for not even properly concluding its painfully shallow tale.
While Lucas’ Episode Four was famously inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, Snyder instead mimics Lucas as well as the Japanese master’s Seven Samurai (and its progeny, The Magnificent Seven and A Bug’s Life). This appears to be some sort of deliberate double homage, but it speaks to the threadbare derivativeness of this endeavor, whose plot and designs come across as faded photocopies of photocopies.
In an unspecified distant galaxy, a fascistic Motherworld has responded to the treacherous assassination of its slain king, queen, and princess by sending out evil boot-stompers like Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein)—who dresses like an SS cosplayer—to root out pesky rebels. Atticus tracks one such outfit to a tranquil farming planet where he also finds Kora (Sofia Boutella), a loner living in peaceful harmony with the land she tills, her hands caressing and sniffing the soil with the same sub-Malickian gentleness that Snyder first employed in Man of Steel.
Kora is beautiful, tough and mysterious, and ensuing flashbacks reveal her connection to the Motherworld and its tyrannical military. Those sequences are leadenly expository but at least they show and tell, which is more than can be said about the rest of Rebel Moon. When not indulging in empty flowery language, Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Shay Hatten’s script has everyone bluntly explain who they are, what they feel, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. After one particular storytime interlude about her traumatic past as an orphan of war and cog in the Motherworld machine, Kora remarks, “I’m only telling you this so you know who I am.” The problem, however, is that no matter how much these characters describe and define themselves, they remain so utterly featureless that calling them one-dimensional would be a compliment.
Kora is on the lam because she’s wanted for a crime she undoubtedly didn’t commit (stay tuned for that revelation in Part Two!). Hiding out in a quasi-Viking agricultural village led by Corey Stoll’s beaded-bearded leader, Kora is forced into action when Atticus arrives and promptly (and violently) demands the community’s entire grain supply in ten weeks’ time. Taking harvest manager Gunar (Michiel Huisman) with her, she ventures to distant planets to round up a motley crew of fighters who will stand against Atticus and his stormtroopers.
This entails wearing a Jedi cloak, visiting an alien cantina, and hooking up with assorted rogues who are easy to find, even easier to recruit (despite this being an apparent lose-lose proposition), and devoid of notable character traits beyond their basic descriptions as a drunken former general (Djimon Hounsou), a thief with a rickety starship (Charlie Hunnam), a shirtless-and-oiled hunk with a gift for taming animals (Staz Nair) and a cyborg swordswoman (Doona Bae).
These characters have no personalities and do little besides blindly follow Kora, a heroine embodied by Boutella as the blandest of badasses. The film barely sketches its protagonists and, worse, refuses to give them funny one-liners or amusing quirks, thereby turning the material laughably severe. Sprinkled throughout are hints of Dune and Blade Runner, yet Star Wars is Snyder’s Rosetta Stone, such that every moment features a character (is that an amphibian Gungan relative of Jar Jar Binks?) or element (are those flaming lightsaber-ish swords?) cribbed from Lucas’ original and prequel trilogies. So heavy is that series’ influence that it’s no surprise Rebel Moon began life, a decade ago, as a pitch for a new Star Wars franchise installment. Still, that doesn’t excuse its inability to fashion a single sight or idea that isn’t a dull sci-fi cliché.
Snyder vainly strives to interject some weirdo carnality into Rebel Moon, be it the notion that sex and romance are key to both a well-oiled war machine and a bountiful farm, or Atticus’ fondness for tentacle erotica. Like everything else in these lifeless proceedings, however, this is all just detritus drowning in a sea of endless slow-motion. The director uses his most beloved embellishment not just for his numerous combat set pieces but for any inconsequential shot that hasn’t already been decorated with blinding lens flares. The film’s repetitiveness extends from its aesthetic devices to its battle choreography, with Kora routinely power-sliding on the ground as she slices and shoots up her enemies, and others power-leaping through the air in panoramas that fail to conjure grand Heavy Metal-style magic.
Anthony Hopkins’ intro narration (the film’s de facto opening crawl) and voice performance as a soulful ex-military robot is as random and tossed-off as most of Rebel Moon’s story, which ultimately leads to precisely the sort of Empire Strikes Back-ish showdown one starts to expect around the midway point. As with his prior Army of the Dead, Snyder’s latest is visually polished, technically accomplished, and crushingly generic, failing to deliver anything approaching novelty—to the point that one alien scoundrel looks like a Lord of the Rings Orc and another monster (played by Jena Malone) resembles the offspring of Star Trek’s Borg and a giant spider.
The dearth of imagination is shocking, and the fact that many significant details aren’t even explicated until its finale is par for its ungainly course. “Part Two” may be on its way in April 2024, but given this first installment’s shoddy plagiarism, it’s hard to imagine it doing more than continuing to clumsily cover Lucas’ greatest hits.
