Rebel Moon reaction: This isn't the Star Wars Clone you're looking for...
Which is actually a good thing.
Read here or listen/watch at the end:
At least that’s what I saw it billed as in the many speculations since the announcement of Snyder’s space fantasy film series. A Star Wars ‘killer,’ replacement, whatever you want to call it.
With the plethora of weird-looking alien species, some cool spaceship shots, and certainly the glowing swords, can we really be blamed for this assumption? But a closer look at even the trailers indicates that Rebel Moon’s taking a different tack, which I actually approve of.
Rebel Moon is presented as an epic, complete with an opening narration telling the viewer how we got to where we are in this universe. There’s news of a King’s assassination, hints at betrayal by a warmongering politician-commander, and of course unrest in the Realm’s most far-flung systems, where the titular Rebels are already forming a resistance to the evil Regent’s crushing fist of iron.
Not a bad background for a space opera, and the sense of intrigue and stories within stories pervades the film’s entire runtime. This both works and doesn’t, and we’ll get to that.
What we really want to get to as epic space fantasy fans is the Main Character, our Luke Skywalker or Taran the pig keeper. Here we’ve gone the route of Strong Jaded Female Warrior with a mysterious past, going by the name Kora. At first look she appears to be a farmer on a moon with a lovely view, but soon we discover she’s more than that, and indeed even more that that. We might have guessed from the trailers and other promotional material of course, but the further reveals are handled well enough with a few flashback scenes narrated by Kora herself.
Now some of you will be giving her the side-eye, waiting for the insufferableness to drop, but she actually wasn’t that bad. I’ll get to that soon, too.
So naturally our Inciting Incident is the arrival of Admiral Atticus Noble, a space nazi, in his slightly chonky but cool looking dreadnaught, the King’s Gaze. Simply put, he wants to take everything he can from the simple-minded space Scandinavians Kora’s living with, and despite her attempts to distance herself, well, it turns out Kora’s not really cool with that. With the Imperium’s Latin naming conventions, and the not-so-subtle SS styling of the officers, we get a pretty strong hint at the story’s Warhammer 40K inspirations, which I might argue are a bit stronger than the Star Wars influences.
I guess it’s kind of Warhammer 40K Light, for a wide swath of viewers who probably aren’t even as familiar with 40K as I am.
Anyway, I don’t want to spoil much more plot than that, since this is so accessible as a streaming event on Netflix. So let’s get into this writer’s reaction.
I’d like to survey what works, what’s cool, and then talk about what got botched. It’s such a mixed bag. Some will call it messy, but I think there’s something else going on here.
So, what works? Kora’s current attempts at a peaceful life, her backstory, and indeed the backstory of the setting to this point, all work for me. It’s a solid launching point you could take a hundred different ways. And that mysterious past, gradually unveiled, is a big part of what makes this potentially tropey female protagonist worth watching. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that watching a movie about her past could have been a better, alternate start to the series. Since we didn’t get that, we instead rely on the character as portrayed and the big energy Sofia Boutella brings to the role.
It’s very clear that she enjoys playing this part, particularly the action sequences, and in no way is she just dialing it in. I’m not a great critic of acting prowess, but whatever she’s doing is convincing enough to me. She’s attractive, in a hard-edged kind of way, and I think this is a useful, if presently sort of controversial, way of signaling that our hero or heroine possesses some inner virtue.
Many will assume the movie is quote fingers ‘woke,’ but I didn’t catch any of the typical woke elements. It’s also not really ‘based.’ It’s kind of like Snyder sat down with a bunch of action figures and slapped together a TTRPG setting. I’m not saying that has to be a bad thing.
Kora brings to mind a survey of Rebel Moon’s rampant use of the rule of cool, a tangent I’ll allow before I get back to characters.
Cool stuff:
Kora’s main weapon is an ornate Imperial issue blaster/bolter that is treated by the characters as if it’s something special. I sort of expected to learn more about the gun, but we didn’t. Still, it was cool enough to leave an impression.
Ship designs and the general look of things were all fun to look at. They don’t have the handmade level of detail you get with Star Wars, but they’re also not generic or ugly. It was interesting to see the space versions of various cultures alongside things more specifically alien or fantastical. This is everything from the aforementioned space Scandinavians to a space Asian cyberpunk-ish setting, to a more ethereal ten-thousand year old civilization that apparently lives among floating towers inscribed with glowing runes. Pretty to look at, even if we don’t know what it means.
The aliens are diverse, ranging from gross to scary, and among them we actually get a handful of straight up horror elements, oddly enough. Think grasping tentacles, brain puppeteers, and spider mommies.
Many of the individuals among the antagonists have interesting costumes, masks, and helmets, and the Admiral is made to use an interesting and visceral mode of consciousness transfer technology to talk to his Regent across the vast gulfs of space. Visual effects from blasters to the clingy energy of force fields are all fun to look at, too.
But probably my favorite part of the movie concerns two characters who aren’t on the adventure and don’t get a lot of screen time. Sam is a lovely farm girl who comes into contact with a sentient, now-pacifist combat droid named JC-1435 and gives him life advice. I’m always partial to robot characters, so this was no surprise, but once Sam is used to force Kora into taking action against Admiral Noble’s forces, and JC plays his part in the exchange, we don’t see him again until the end of the movie! Alright, well, there could have been something fun there but OK.
Maybe you get the idea now that the story’s setup is good, and overall there’s a bunch of pretty stuff to look at. Some decent combat too, though there’s far too much slow motion. But what did we expect from Snyder? Unfortunately, pretty much everything after the initial setup is clunky at best.
The formation of the core hero group is extremely rushed and pretty contrived, and it was when this began that I saw why critics would call this film messy. I don’t think it’s just that though. Through sheer budget, willpower, and momentum, the story does succeed in yanking you through the process of rounding up our Rebels, providing a group of what should be intriguing secondary characters. The chronology works, and even some of the rationale, but the story here just doesn’t have enough space, ironically enough.
So here’s my quotable moment: Rebel Moon has the opposite problem of recent Disney Star Wars shows, with their bloated runtimes scraping the thin butter of their plots over far too much bread. This is a ‘part one’ film that should have been produced as a ten episode streaming series.
Each of the characters should have had their own episode where we meet them, learn a bit of their backstory, deal with their current plight, and get a solid justification for their decision to become involved in the rebellion… I mean, ‘resistance.’ Instead we’re slammed face first through a series of mini-plots that have little to do with the main group but still result in each new character joining up.
It’s this issue that accentuates the impression that Rebel Moon is just a mashup of disparate IPs in an attempt to create something epic. Kind of a similar problem to what we see in Sucker Punch, but definitely still more coherent.
Though, if I may digress for a moment, would you hear me complaining if Baby Doll showed up in the Realm? No. No you would not.
The designs of our hero group are pretty distinct, if a bit colorless, from a disgraced sword and sandal/planet style prince, to a disgraced space Korean cyberpunk swordswoman assassin, to a disgraced former general languishing at a space coliseum. The moon farmer and space smuggler are just kind of normal, and surprisingly un-disgraced.
There are pretty massive issues with the finale that could have been alleviated by a streaming series approach, but the action was fun enough, and the story’s coda showcases some very interesting elements that I’ve mentioned somewhere above. Apparently there are multiple backstory installments in the works to support all this, but I just don’t think that was the right way to go. Why do we care about the backstories once we’ve already seen the characters’ future? I for one am not much for prequels.
So all in all, I’d say it’s worth the few hours you’ll spend sitting down to watch. It’s not ‘good’ but it’s also not totally rotten. There’s stuff to enjoy here. And in contrast to a lot of popcorn flicks, I’d say don’t just turn off your brain to enjoy this one. Instead, think about the stories behind the stories and engage a little closer with it all by making it work in your own head, even if what you imagine doesn’t ultimately line up with whatever the studio releases in this universe in the future, assuming the IP lasts that long!
And if you’re up to read some weird, edgy fantasy adventure, check out my book series Hero’s Metal, where a lovable but deadly group of sword and sorcery heroes goes up against the consequences of an ancient, failed branch of techno-magic post-humanism!
Remember, creativity is the true rebellion.
Till next time my friends, good journey.