Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but King Arthur was better than this.
And only in a sense that they got Guy Ritchie to make a Guy Ritchie movie, and at least he stayed true to his Guy Ritchieness — which is only marginally smarter than the Zack Snyderness of Rebel Moon.
I’m giving Ritchie credit for gracing us with films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (but not its bastard cousin Snatch… or maybe just a bit) and The Covenant.
Okay, fine, I’ll give Snyder 300. That’s a masterpiece. And Watchmen. But these were both based on comics and the source material was already excellent, giving the project a lot of direction.
Rebel Moon, however, is two hours and fourteen minutes of various characters literally explaining the (very boring) plot to you.
And they do it over and over and over and over again.
And just when you think they can’t possibly do it again — yep, you guessed it — they do it again.
The world is a poorly disguised Star Wars, because Snyder pitched it as a Star Wars stand-alone, but was rejected.
So, rather than going back and reworking the world and the characters into something genuinely interesting and even remotely original, he just took off the Star Wars stickers and ran with it.
Besides it being a T-Rex size info dump, it’s also incredibly crap.
It’s full of stereotypes, the dialogue is like watching wooden dolls figuring out speech for the first time, the fight scenes are just trying to recreate what Snyder achieved in 300, but with lengthy (and wholly unnecessary) plot explanations in between.
But clearly Snyder hasn’t learned the same lesson we all did from the Matrix back in ’99, that you use slow motion for added effect. He didn’t even learn from his own past project, where the first battle of the Spartans in 300 uses more slow-mo than the Matrix ever did, but still to very good effect.
I’d hate to think that this is Snyder really trying his level best, because it reads like a 13-year-old was given $80 million to write a script for class and he did it with ChatGPT. At one point, a skull-faced scientist (?) actually says, “Give it all we’ve got” and flips the switch to maximum power. Very science, much wow.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not dissing storytelling where we leave unimportant details as vague and unexplored. Take for example, The Company in All Systems Red. We only ever get to know that it’s called The Company, but through its faceless existence it actually represents something much more.
In Rebel Moon, the scientists (or whatever advanced tech wielders) wear elaborate red robes, more reminiscent of a priesthood (not a bad idea for a group of scientists with questionable morals) and even have dramatic skull masks.
But while they’re prominently featured, they do very little with these characters and they could have been a lot more toned down so as not to distract from the main story.
But I guess that would require having a main story.
Maybe this is the problem when you get an action/adventure director to do a SFF story; they focus on all the wrong things. This was honestly like Star Wars from Wish, badly disguised plagiarised space-Nazis included.
Rebel Moon is a guaranteed two hours and fourteen minutes of your life you’ll never get back. And this is just the beginning, because there’s another one coming.
Snyder wanted to launch a whole universe out of this, but I think we can let this join the likes of King Arthur and Dracula: Untold in the graveyard of universe starters. Because even with two hours and fourteen minutes, he fails to give us anything meaningful.
A whole cast of characters are introduced, they’re all like walking tropes. There’s space travel. There’s lots of spoken exposition (seriously, I can’t stress how much of the movie was just that alone).
And yet, somehow, Rebel Moon got an audience score of 62 on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics’ score was 24. I guess the dudebros like it when things go boom, screw the rest.
The only marginally good thing I took away from this whole ordeal was that Ed Skrein did an excellent space-Nazi. He’s just the right amount of unhinged to be epic.
But this film doesn’t even give the villain an epic ending, because they want to carry him into the second movie. In fact, as soon as Kora (FMC) kills Noble (villain), I sneered and said, “Well, that’s not gonna stick”. And, lo and behold, once the skull faces resurrect him, we get a very Star Wars-esque scene with Noble being called to see his master, so he can hear what a failure he is.
There are three things that bother me so unspeakably much in Rebel Moon.
And no, it’s none of the above.
First of all, why CGI horses? Abysmal, atrocious horses at that.
I get it that they’re not horses, they’re “urakis”, but by golly, do they look like draft horses with just one change. I understand that getting live horses on set and getting them dressed up costs money, but come on. This is a new level of pathetic.
Second, why, oh why, hire Charlie Hunnam, an Englishman, and then make him a fucking Scotsman? Oh, I know why, because Scotsman is shorthand for rebel. My god, does Snyder really not understand how disrespectful it is to take an Englishman and make him play a Scotsman?
It’s not like Snyder hasn’t worked with Scottish actors before — cough, Gerard Butler in 300, cough — so he knows they exist. And Jerry Butler isn’t the only Scottish actor out there. And if Snyder absolutely wanted it to be Charlie Hunnam (no arguments here) he could have just as well have been a rebel with his English accent.
And that Charlie Hunnam’s character sells out our team of intrepid heroes at the end only makes that whole thing so much worse.
Fine, it’s no Mel Gibson in Braveheart, but I thought we’d moved past shit like this in 2024? No? Excuse me while I go count to three-hundred-and-seventy-two…
…
…
…
…72.
And third of all, I despise the ending. This alone is such a fucking good reason to not touch this steaming pile of shit with a long stick.
Let me explain.
At the end, when all is said and done, when we’ve sat through two hours and fourteen minutes of bland, uninteresting characters explaining the plot to us and running around with things exploding around them, the female protagonist (props for the MC being a girl and the actress being Algerian, buuuut…) turns to the male love interest and says that her whole team (made of of token diversity stereotypes) should all be thankful to the one white guy on the team, who’s a self-confessed coward, and literally did nothing but fail upward the whole movie.
And if you don’t believe me when I say the cast is made up of stereotypes, have a look for yourself. Yeah, it’s awful. Like, it’s great that we’ve got more diversity, but my gods is it poorly done.
Here, watch the trailer. At least then you can say you’ve seen the whole movie and won’t be lying, because when you put THE WHOLE MOVIE into the trailer, what’s left to add to fill the full run time? Plus, you won’t have to sit through all that exposition.
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