Film Review: "Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire"
Zack Snyder's sprawling space opera is a disappointingly flat and distressingly boring flop.
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As a general rule I try not to review films that I don’t like. I prefer to spend my time writing about movies that have brought me joy in one way or another and besides, there’s already just so much negativity out there that I like to think it’s my job to put a little something positive out there. Every so often, though, a film comes along that is such a disappointment to me and manages to undercut all of my expectations, that I can’t help but vent my spleen about it.
Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire is just such a film.On paper, it seems like this movie should be right up my alley.
When the film starts, Kora (Sofia Boutella) is living on a small moon called Veldt, where she has managed to find some sort of peace. Very soon, however, it’s all disrupted when emissaries from the sinister and despotic Motherworld arrive, demanding tribute. Enraged by this and determined to overcome both her own demons and her troubled past, Kora sets out to gather up a troupe of warriors who will, she hopes, train the residents of Veldt to find back against despotism and exploitation.
Sounds great, right? It’s like Dune and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings all mixed into a space opera froth. In more original hands the Snyder’s this might have made for a film that played by the rules of the genre yet managed to be fun and exciting and exhilarating. Unfortunately, it ends up being as banal and as trite as one could imagine, with the director leaning on all of his well-established narrative and visual tropes–queerly deformed baddies, slow-motion cinematography, and cardboard cutout characterizations–without the usual flare that makes such tropes typically enjoyable.
It certainly doesn’t help that most of the cast fails to bring anything new or exciting to their roles. Boutella gives what she can, but not even the revelation that Kora is, in fact, the Arthelais, the former acolyte and adopted child of the brutal dictator Balisarius is enough to make the character into someone at all interesting, let alone someone that we should cheer for as she turns her back on the man that forged her into a deadly weapon. Boutella gets the brooding heroine part of the role down, but I just didn’t find her all that interesting to watch. I certainly didn’t find her arc as a character that convincing, because so much of it is related through flatly delivered dialogue and exposition.
The rest of the cast is likewise flat and banal. Charlie Hunnam gives it a go as a mercenary, but I found his Scottish(?) accent so hackneyed and overdone as to be something more off-putting than parody. I feel most sorry for Djimon Hounsou, who plays the disgraced General Titus, who is given almost no lines and almost nothing to do. Even the presence of Anthony Hopkins as Jimmy, a robot knight, isn’t quite enough to save the film from its own banality.
All of this could be forgiven if the film at least had some visual panache or a mythology that you could sink your teeth into. Unfortunately, it has neither. I struggled throughout Rebel Moon to figure out just why I should care about these characters, let alone the broader world of which they were a part. There’s a flatness to the entire affair that nothing can quite dispel, and even a portentous opening narration from Hopkins is enough to really clue us in as to why any of this matters. Visually the film is also surprisingly uninspiring. Aside from some few moments of spectacular destruction, I found myself asking: “Is this it? Is this all that Snyder can produce on such an enormous budget and with so much creative control?”
Making matters worse is the fact that the film leans heavily on info-dumps and tedious exposition. Don’t get me wrong. I actually quite enjoy exposition in written form (maybe it’s the historian in me, but I love it when characters set about telling us about the past of a particular place). However, even I have to admit that exposition rarely works as well in film as it does in written texts, and it most certainly doesn’t work when it’s delivered with all of the energy and verve of a dial tone. Rebel Moon commits that gravest of sins for a big-screen epic of this kind: it bores us. When you’re dealing with a story of this vastness–both in scope and in runtime–the one thing you can’t afford is for you viewer to lose attention.
If there’s one bright spot in this film it is, paradoxically, Ed Skrein’s Atticus Noble, a literal space Nazi who delights in clubbing people to death whenever they displease him. He’s not fully-developed as a character (because, to repeat, no one in this film is), but he at least has some panache to his performance. He’s loathsome and sadistic and horrid; in other words, he’s all of the things that you’d expect from a fascist. For a while it seems like he might have perished but then, through some sort of weird astral projection–another part of the film’s internal mythology that makes little to no sense–he is resurrected and forced to confront Balisarius himself, who gives him a thorough dressing-down. Fra Fee is fine as the movie’s obvious big bad, but he didn’t have nearly enough presence to make him as menacing as Snyder clearly intended to be.
I sincerely hope that the second installment of this two-part film ups the ante. As it is, not only does Rebel Moon feel incomplete; it also feels poorly slapped-together, as if it was a series of ideas that was never allowed to fully cohere into something fascinating. If this is the screenplay that Snyder tried to sell to Lucasfilm and Disney, I can easily see why they said “no thanks.” Unless Snyder manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat with the follow-up, I don’t think I’ll like it any more than I did this one.