Rebel Moon: When an overrated director indulges in his worst tendencies
Rebel Moon, or more accurately, Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, is a 2023 Sci-Fi opera movie from Netflix, being their attempt to compete with Disney/Star Wars, having touted and advertised this for a couple of years. It’s written and directed by Zack Snyder, who I’ve come to realise that I actually don’t like as a filmmaker. Sure, he has an eye for visuals and his contributions to the DCEU (Man of Steel and the Snyder Cut) were pretty good. But that’s about it.
I used to be a fan of his and thought that he was a pretty good filmmaker and thought he was completely done dirty by WB (and in some ways, he was). This increased with the Snyder Cut, where I saw his proper vision of Justice League, unhampered by studio interference. And it was pretty good, with improved characters, a better (and surprisingly sympathetic) antagonist, better pacing and even humour, and even better visuals. But then came Army of the Dead and then I started to be more critical of Zack. Especially when it comes to his previous movies.
300 was over the top, dimensional and inaccurate (ironically if it was more historically accurate, then the Persians would be the ones we’d be rooting for), Watchmen tried to be accurate yet completely missed the point of the original storyline (this is controversial but I think the HBO miniseries/Damon Lindelof did a much better job with their series, which is a sequel to the graphic novel), Sucker Punch was visually stunning with a pretty good opening but became a boring and pseudo-symbolistic dumpster fire; Even Batman VS Superman, a movie that I enjoyed back then, I enjoy even less now because I see the flaws in that movie. It killed off a bunch of interesting characters (I mean, they kill off both Mercy Graves and Jimmy Olsen and waste both Tao Okamoto and Michael Cassidy, the former who is an underrated actress and the latter who did well with what he was given), tried to kill Superman (though they’ll resurrect him in Justice League), miscast Lex Luthor (I still think Corey Stoll would have been the best pick) and had some questionable lines (“Save Martha”). I still enjoy the dark tone, they just needed to respect the characters and the source material a lot more.
Rebel Moon is his latest film outside of the DCEU and I’m just gonna come out and say it: It’s his worst movie to date. I don’t think it’s worth mentioning the plot because the movie’s (or more accurately, the first part) plot is very drawn out and thin as ice. It’s like he took a look at Seven Samurai and decided to copy and paste the plot of that and Star Wars and make no effort to alter it in any way, and then split it into two movies AND make director cuts for both of them. Except unlike Justice League, he was given free reign over the source material, so wouldn’t it make sense to release the full cut if that’s the case? And it ironically got a 15 rating over here in the UK (both that and 18 are the equivalent of an R-Rating) so if they were going for PG-13, then they’ve partially failed.
Also, I should point out that starting from Army of the Dead, Snyder has ditched his regular director of photography, Larry Fong, and is now acting as his cinematographer. Remember Mr Bean’s Holiday, where Willem Dafoe plays this egotistical and pretentious director named Carson Clay who premieres his vanity project film at Cannes and the opening namedrops him 4 times (as presenter, producer, director, and actor)?
Yeah, it feels like that kind of stunt.
And it clearly shows. His visuals have surprisingly gotten worse since he’s now embraced digital technology and doing the camerawork himself. Now, he’s fully indulged in depth-of-field shots with his “custom lens”, with most of them looking blurry and incredibly cheap; it’s worse than using vaseline on the lens. If he was trying to mimic Dune’s cinematography, then he’s failed.
Secondly, his usually striking colour grading has gotten softer and a lot worse. Remember the opening in Spectre where scenes in Mexico were shot with a sepia filter to show that they were in Mexico? Yeah, it’s like that, only blander and more obnoxious. Every shot feels like it was peed on in the editing bay and the soft look that the lenses bring just makes the shots even more bland and washed out. It’s also like he took a look at Greig Fraser and decided to copy parts of his style and mash it together with his while missing the point of what made his camerawork special.
Also, remember his slow motion, the very thing that made him iconic in the first place? Well, he increased his usage of it, to the point where it’s used for a simple and mundane shot of grain being dropped. Seriously?
Which brings me to the fight scenes. Zack has this habit of putting his actors through strict physical training, but what makes it obnoxious is that he makes a big deal of it on the behind-the-scenes featurettes, describing it as a psychological thing to get them in the right state of mind and to be prepared to do the fight scenes. This has existed since 300.
Like dude, it’s just training.
And then when we get to the fight scenes themselves……. it’s painfully average and sloppy. The moves themselves look less impressive than what you’d see in Kingsman or John Wick. The aforementioned slow motion doesn’t help at all and, this time, actually takes away from the fight scenes, making them an absolute slog to get through. And then to add insult to injury, the frame rate is choppy due to the high-speed camera usage which makes those fights look more amateurish.
Another tendency that Snyder has that’s made even worse here is the sexual violence. Before the movie came out, there were reviews criticising the movie’s overabundance of sexual violence and it even was made clear of that in the MPAA and BBFC ratings. This has been a recurring theme in most of Snyder’s work: In 300, there’s the ephors with the oracle and Theron with Gorgo, Watchmen has elements of that too, Sucker Punch is chock full of it and too much to mention in this post, and even in Army of the Dead, we get this creepy security guard who acts like quite the invasive pervert.
Here in Rebel Moon, it’s an inciting incident. The Imperium soldiers occupying the village try to gang rape one of the villagers (keep in mind, this is supposed to be a PG-13 movie), with their superior having no problem with this whatsoever and wanting to even take part. This is the incident that drives Kora to drive the Imperium out and she catches them in the act and kills them. This kind of incident pops up again when at a bar, a fat alien that looks like John C. Reilly acts quite creepily towards not only Kora but also Gunnar, a farmer who had accompanied her, and even sexually threatens Gunnar. Cue massive bar fight. All of this feels like a tasteless and cheap plot device just to give the plot and characters more dramatic weight rather than use actual good writing to do it.
Zack, if you wanted to make your version of Star Wars that is darker and edgier for adults, this is not the way to do it.
Finally, the characters. It seems Snyder forgot his most important and most celebrated aspect.
Show, don’t tell.
It’s an important tenet when it comes to filmmaking or even writing. Even if you write an actual good exposition, sometimes you have to show it to make an impact. And it’s something that this movie forgot to do.
What about Kora, our main protagonist? We know nothing about her apart from the fact that she likes to sniff dirt, is a former soldier, is very solemn and is a good fighter. That’s it. Nothing substantial, just your average, bog-standard protagonist.
None of the main characters have anything substantial to them. Kai is Charlie Hunnam trying to be Han Solo with a terrible Belfast accent, General Titus is a more angst-filled Maximus from Gladiator (and he’s named after a real-life Roman General/Emperor…….who’s well-known for capturing and destroying Jerusalem and building the Colosseum. Yeah, great name for your hero, Zack), Tarak is Conan the Barbarian Beast Whisperer, Admiral Noble is a polite Darth Vader without the scars, the voice and the mask and tries to be like Hans Landa, I have no idea who the Bloodaxes were trying to be, and Balisarius is a younger, less scarred, less imposing Emperor Palpatine with facial hair.
And sometimes, some stuff isn’t even told or shown to us.
Admiral Noble is always flanked by these masked priests (pictured above). In the Vanity Fair first look, Snyder explains they are known as the scribes, priests from the religious order that dominates the Mother World. Their purpose is to write down information but they use human beings as their paper and implant memories and images into them. This is supposedly how history is recorded in the Imperium, which probably explains that big CGI book that they carry. Though this being the Imperium, they are manipulated by politics, and they write down only what they’re supposed to. This makes them pretty interesting and possibly threatening characters, knowing this, but does the film ever show or tell this to us?
NOPE. Not once. They’re just background characters who get no attention and don’t speak a word.
The only character I cared about was Nemesis (played by the wonderfully underrated Bae Doona), who was possibly the only engaging character in the entire movie. Her acting is subdued, like Kora, but unlike Kora, we get some reasoning behind it, we get the implications of a mother who lost her children as she tries to bargain with Harmada, a spider alien who kidnaps human children and kills them because they polluted her world to the point where her eggs cannot hatch. And then when she’s forced to kill her, she rebuffs all praise because she still sympathises with her and wishes that things could have gone down differently.
Do you see the difference? She is given some depth which is shown in a scene rather than told to us. And thus we care about her.
Personally, Zack can be good but like M. Night Shyalaman, he needs someone to reign him in and keep him away from the keyboard. He was given free rein on this one and look what happened. That’s all I have to say about this.
