My Review of "Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire"

Rebel Moon is the big exclusive Netflix release of 2023 by Zack Snyder. There was a whole bunch of promotion going into this movie and I got caught up with the hype. I have to admit I flip flop when it comes to favoring Zack Snyder films. Half of his movies have me having the best time but half of them have me wanting to shut the movies off half way through. This is a little mix of both.

The movie starts off with the introduction of this enigmatic character named Kora. Apparently she's a refugee that has immigrated to this intergalactic Amish village. She really loves it there and they've taken her in as one of their own. This of course is too much of a good thing in an action movie.

An evil intergalactic organization comes in and propositions these farmers for more food. Already it doesn't make sense but we're just going to go with it for the movie's sake. Basically he manipulates the villagers to enslave themselves to this organization and marches on.

Kora fears for the worse and tells the villagers to fight. She's basically going to get a band of warriors to come defend this worthless village. Yes it's the same exact plot to the Seven Samurai. There are a lot of references throughout this movie. I don't know if these references were intentionally or non-intentionally taken to keep this movie going.

There's so much wrong and so much right about this movie at the same time. Unfortunately, there's more wrong than right. The consistency of the worlds don't make sense and they're really cliche as well. We have every single stereotypical setting we can find in this movie. There's a Viking area, a steampunk city, Roman gladiator area and the list goes on. It's really weird because how could all of these places exist in such a technologically advanced world. You'd think farmers would want to use some spaceship technology to help them out. That's why I assume that they're Amish-like.

Roman gladiators still exist in this area? They even got the guy that acted in the movie Gladiator 20 years ago to play a gladiator! It was like he was a multiverse version of him joining in on this universe. This was so weird and really threw me out of the movie. Tons of these weird instances happened and I don't know if they're intentional or not.

This movie sort of reminded me of another Zack Snyder movie called Suckerpunch. I hated that movie. That movie was all style and no substance and this movie followed the same suit. This was like watching a video game go from scene to scene no exploration, no build up, no nothing really.

All this to get to the good parts though. The best thing this movie has for it is the visuals. They are perfectly lighted and gorgeously orchestrated. Slow motion is of course added to emphasize more of the visual splendor that they want us to be engulfed in. Luckily for us there is a plethora of action sequences with jaw dropping visuals. This I have to commend the movie for. If it wasn't for this I would have shut this thing off a long time ago because it's over 3 hours long.

I've come to understand that maybe Zack Snyder should understand that he's not a writer. The stuff they added to this movie felt like they just thought of the coolest ideas they had and shot it against the wall. They wanted to see how much of it they could add to the movie. He's better at following a script and accentuating visuals to make movies even more appealing than they really are.

Overall, I had a good time with the action sequences but this doesn't mean that this is a good movie. In fact, I would have to admit that this is a bad movie. There's too much emphasis on style and no emphasis on the substance. The world building is terrible and it really feels like a bunch of young adults just brainstormed a bunch of ideas and smashed them together. I have to give this one a 4.5 out of 10. I honestly don't know if I could handle the second part of this movie.