Rebel Moon Review I — Parts One & Two: What a Fine Mess

Now to talk about the two new sci-fi films from Zack Snyder. Spoilers for Part One and Part Two. You were warned.

My range of emotions wildly bounced back and forth whilst watching the latest instalment of what is likely to be the greatest worst franchise in all cinema history. But let’s track back a bit. Back to last year when the first part was released on Netflix and the only real worry was that Zack Snyder led the project. Sci-fi is a genre that, apart from some notable exceptions, has been yearning for a fresh take, a new franchise, or something that isn’t another addition to the tired old franchise pile. And I am very aware I say this as a huge Star Wars fan, but I’ve slowly been coming to terms with my love’s own death these past months. We may end up talking about that some other time. But Rebel Moon was announced. Originally a script for the previously mentioned franchise that Lucasfilm turned down, Snyder kept at it and reworked it into a brand new franchise for all of our enjoyment. The trailers make the films look good. Which isn’t hard with a Snyder film, to be fair. Place some of the action in there with some of the least cringe lines and you get a trailer that actually gets me hyped for the film. But after watching Part One, it’s fairly evident that Snyder’s issues with filmmaking have not disappeared and if anything have exponentially worsened. We’ll get into the issues later on, but overall the film is a big mess of technical, writing, and acting deficiencies but at the same time provide some cool sci-fi looks and ideas that get completely lost amongst the deluge of shit that is Rebel Moon. It sent me into a frenzy, eagerly anticipating the next instalment that would release a mere four months later. The time came around and I eventually got ready to view this second part of what was intended to be one film. And boy is that patently evident with Part Two. Initially the film simply pauses in its place. It recovers from the ending of Part One and has our main protagonist and antagonist of this first film, Kora and Noble, recover from their fight as the inevitable fight on Veldt. Many montages of wheat ensue as occasionally the characters meet up in various groups to info-dump to the audience. This isn’t new to the new franchise as this was perpetually potent during the first film. Don’t do something interesting with non-linear storytelling or setting up your characters in interesting ways, no just simply have the character tell you their backstory like this is a one-shot D&D session your friend is running for fun. Some of the minor characters even gave a short speech about what each character’s moral characteristics are as if somehow it was obvious when the film has told us barely anything about them. Even those minor characters have only known them for a few days, so how the hell do they know? At the end though, like Part One, I was in a frenzy. The film had miraculously carried on its fascinating streak of good ideas with terrible writing and a constant blur of the edges of the frame. Its mix of fascinating and awful continues to enthral me. But first let’s talk about some of the good.

Seriously, there are some great things about these two films, partly why I am writing this and why I am excited to see where this franchise goes. The first thing is the world itself inside Rebel Moon. It hasn’t got a single original bone in its body, but the mesh of Star Wars, Warhammer 40,000, and painfully obvious historical influences allows Snyder to create a wonderful set of frames that contain interesting landscapes and wonderful small details about the world around these badly written characters. Small things like mechanical instruments used in and around the starships. Aiming the canons, and feeding whatever they use to resurrect Noble through pipes that attach in a very grimdark fashion. These give a more gritty realistic feeling to what is a very fantasy flavoured sci-fi and weirdly gives this more credence as a possible future of humankind than other sci-fi franchises. Something else I quite enjoyed were the characters. Though not the writing of them, nor the acting (more on that later), but rather the base of each of the characters. They all have a potentially interesting backstory that would be mightily improved if they were not simply told to us through an info-dump. Not all, but most are distinct enough to give an interesting range of characters without repeating much. The cast also provides a lot to the films and it is a fantastic cast. I have hinted that the acting isn’t great, the cast is. The acting is something that I believe is affected more by the script and the director in this particular scenario. Although the score is fairly forgettable, nothing on it stands out as bad or even slightly aggravating. Most blend into the background and provide more of an ambient feel to the soundtrack barring one song in, you guessed it, a flashback scene during an info-dump. Though admittedly the reason that it ends up being the best track of the score may be because the song is actually diegetic. A bizarre scene in and of itself, we’ll address that later. The two characters I found to be the most interesting are sadly two that died in both the films. First Kai as the Han Solo knockoff who actually does betray the group and take on more of a Lando Calrissian role without the redemption and then Nemesis who pokes at the weeb weakness that we all secretly have whilst providing some of the most interesting backstory in her own info-dump that we sadly just don’t hear anything else about. At this point, I am starting to struggle to find any more that I would officially call ‘positives’. But to give a little breathing room for the two films, most of my enjoyment does come from how much of a mess it ends up being.

About that mess, let’s talk about the major issues. As I have already hinted at, the story is probably one of the biggest problems with both films. Let’s address that first fact to begin with: two films. It should not have been two films. I have talked about this previously how some two-parter films actually suffer from being split into two two-hour films rather than being kept as a three-hour maybe three and a half-hour film. Usually it ends up where one of the films suffers and collectively they turn up as an absolute mess. In this case, the first part of Rebel Moon almost completes the story it tries to copy but cuts out the last thirty to forty minutes and then excruciatingly spreads that across a two-hour runtime for the second film as they finally finish the first film’s plot. Most of the second film being wheat collecting and info-dumps until a drawn out battle scene that does have some great shots involved but ultimately could have ended well in about three different moments during the battle. But the film struggles on and gives us a weird final fight on the ship, the King’s Gaze. And then in the greatest sequel setup to ever grace the cinematic screen, we are suddenly told by a drunk who hasn’t been in the know for a while now that the Princess Issa who was executed by our lead, Kora, herself is actually alive for some reason. And then all the characters agree to journey together to find her because reasons. Also the robot joins them. The robot is something important also to mention. You hire Anthony Hopkins, one of the greatest actors to ever live for a voice role where the character is barely seen in both films until the last half-hour of the second film. And his name is Jimmy; I half expected him to have the last name Space and create his very own type of marine. Ultimately, the character simply adds to the already long list of characters that had huge potential that ended up being wasted by the script which the actors could barely do anything about. And these scripts, oh boy. These are something. Not only are there intermittent info-dumps that you can see coming from a mile away, the dialogue is simply terrible. As I mentioned, the cast is fantastic but none of these great actors could save the absolute tripe they have to perform. The one small exception is Kai, performed by Charlie Hunnam, who just about scrapes by with a reasonable Belfast accent that apparently had been edited a bit so that American audiences could understand him better. He also has not too much awkward dialogue to reveal too many of the script’s weaknesses that he appears to be able to talk well compared to the other characters. To understand the biggest flaw with the two films we have to look at its creator as a whole: Zack Snyder. To preface this, the man has made some good films and has had enough tragedy in his life that if he retired and sat back for the rest of his life, no one would blame him. But that doesn’t mean he is immune to the criticism that needs to be levied against him for his part in this mess. His directing is great, and I would say it’s his best quality that does still manage to shine through these two films. Yes, there is far too much slow motion and I would personally only keep one of the slo-mo shots from the second film out of the many that are included. But overall the direction is good, not unlike the cinematography. I never watched Army of the Dead myself, being bored of the zombie genre now for a number of years. But one of the main complaints I had heard was that Snyder had picked up the mantle of cinematographer and completely fucked it up. Arguments were made that he had fallen in love with this particular lens that gave the edges of the frame a ton of blur, and even that one of the cameras or lenses had a dead pixel. So when I found out that Snyder was continuing his cinematography journey for this film, I was worried. And, apparently, my worry was justified ’cause by god these films contain some of the most confusing frames simply due to the amount of blur in them. You’ll have a scene of a character standing in a long hallway. The background will be blurred as is expected with any lens that has any kind of depth of field. But then the character who is standing in the foreground is also blurred except their face and maybe their neck if it’s a two shot. The blur of the body will have this radial look to it which just simply gives the whole shot a real bizarre look to it. Like I am wearing some kind of diving suit and having to personally focus my own eyes to figure out what’s happening in most of the shots. Now, surprisingly this weird radial blur was also used in another piece of art in recent months that actually worked. I am planning (planning being the key word) on writing about this television show in more detail soon, but the FX show Shōgun uses this technique very subtly throughout the show’s run. Now the show also has a myriad of other reasons why it’s probably already the best show of the year but the fact that this was used in the show without it being hugely noticeable and actually being justified within the story shows that Snyder seems to be acting without thought. Writing the script, which we’ve already talked about, is the other aspect Snyder has really dropped the ball on. He is very much a director first and foremost. I understand wanting to control the story and its direction but just like George Lucas with the Star Wars prequel films, Snyder should be handing off the screenplay writing role to someone else whilst taking more of a story and worldbuilding role as the new franchise blossoms. In fact, George Lucas is even more apt of a description as it would be hard to argue which has the higher level quality of dialogue. Visually, I have already prattled on about the interesting visuals and worlds that Snyder has created in these two films. However, some shots and even some entire scenes feel like a scrapbook or mood board of the inspirations that went into Rebel Moon. In one shot there will be a priest that looks directly ripped from Warhammer 40,000 alongside Admiral Noble in obviously fascistic military uniform whilst he holds the weapon that is definitely not a lightsaber. Definitely not. What are you talking about? It is a visually stunning pair of films, but in some instances it can feel like looking at a pool of vomit where every meal from the day is evident in the produced mixture.

As much of a mess as this article is, the two films are far messier with the occasional peak of brilliance shining through disastrous fog. On the one hand, these films should not exist and other art should be able to shine through and get their just rewards but I also can’t help but root for this new franchise. And this comes from someone who was never a huge fan of Zack Snyder whatsoever. Maybe it’s the fact there’s a new sci-fi franchise that actually has some backing to it. Maybe it’s the enjoyment I am getting out of how bad some of these scenes are. I can’t lie, I haven’t laughed this much at a film taking itself seriously for a while now. I just don’t understand how Netflix can justify more money being put into this franchise whilst also wanting more and more of these films. Perhaps the franchise can already be saved from itself if another creator is given a television show to run, or a game studio is given a game project to create. Either way, this has been a bizarre and interesting experience no matter how much you degraded it, Zack.

I forgive you.