Rebel Moon

I think by now we all know how I feel about Zach Snyder and his storytelling ability (or lack thereof). I am not really sure why he was given a Star Wars project to begin with but here we are, Rebel Moon exists and it's pretty clear that it is a failure. Not sure when we are going to shove Snyder into cinematography where he belongs but I hope it's soon. He has proven over and over again that he is incapable of being a storyteller.

I would like to start with the fact that apparently this film is going to be two parts and part 1 is already over 2 hours. It is very clear that Snyder is incapable of actually telling stories. If every single original thought you have is over 3 hours, you can not tell your story. Long movies have their place but if it is all you are capable of then you are bad at movies. Part of it is that he doesn’t have anyone to reign him in, he refuses to work with people who don’t give him full creative control and he sucks at full creative control. He needs someone to actually edit for him because not a single one of his stories has ever NEEDED to be longer than 2 hours.

Anyway, here we go…

God Snyder really likes these long shots of nothing. Look, a lack of dialogue is great, you should be showing and not telling. HOWEVER a long shot of a single character with no movement or anything else happening does not accomplish that.

Also the fucking slow motion. Literally all of his little stylistic things that let you know it's a Snyder movie are stupid, unnecessary, do nothing to serve the story and only eat up time. Seriously if you take out the ridiculously long shots and slow motion the movie is almost an hour shorter.

It's obviously a Star Wars ripoff, he farmed it to Disney first and they didn’t want it but Netflix will buy anything so here we are. We fight extra hard because a boy we loved dies…okay. Sounds like something a man would write. The thing Snyder doesn’t seem to understand is just because a woman is good at punching people, that does not make her a strong female character. Nor does it make her a good character. All of his writing is so upsettingly surface level, there is just nothing to these characters, no depth, no emotion. Everything they do is hollow and it means nothing.

They find a rando character that leads them to another rando character who flies a hippogryph to gain his freedom. There is some more slow motion and a big epic shot that means nothing because we have no idea who this guy is and have not been given a single reason as to why we should care about him. But here’s some more slow motion. We also seem to be gathering an adventuring party like the fucker thinks he’s writing a dungeons and dragons campaign and not a film with an act structure. One more time ya’ll…you can break whatever rules you want IF you understand the rules. Zach Snyder doesn’t seem to understand what an act structure even is, let alone how to use it.

Also he doesn’t seem to understand that it is in fact possible to have a fight scene without slow motion. Halfway through the movie and a whole lot of nothing has happened. We got our inciting incident and we left on a quest….and then we left on a quest…and then we left on a quest…and we have accomplished nothing.

There is a whole lot of talking and absolutely no showing. The only visuals we’ve gotten are fight scenes, nothing that has actually informed character or story. Everything we’ve found out context wise has been said through dialogue…which is piss poor writing. SHOW DON’T TELL, writing 101 Zachary.

“You want redemption, what about revenge” followed by shitty, supposed to be epic music is just one of the worst things ever written.

I wouldn’t care about the absolute garbage VFX if everything else was good (Xena, Doctor Who) but everything else is also terrible so the horrendous CGI is just shit icing on a garbage cake.

Michiel Huisman also has a modern romcom face and is completely unbelievable in a space movie.

Enter more slow motion and the longest, seizure-inducing final fight scene of all time, including a noble sacrifice from a character we met 5 minutes ago and therefore do not care about, and completed by more slow motion, Michael Bay explosions and cartoon-like visual effects.

Rebel Moon was exactly what I expected to be, that is to say, it was bad. I literally had to start watching it at 1.5X because I just needed it to be over. For the purposes of journalistic integrity I will try and force myself through the very unnecessary 2nd part but good lord Zach Snyder needs to go sell cars or manage a Walmart or something because he is not good at storytelling. This business is not for everyone folks.