The end is just \u201cthe start of something,\u201d according to one of the action-figure-deep heroes of \u201cRebel Moon\u2014Part One: Child of Fire,\u201d the lumbering first half of Zack Snyder\u2019s planned two-part \u201cStar Wars\u201d knockoff. After 133 minutes (give or take seven for credits), Snyder\u2019s latest gang of misfits are finally ready to fight space Nazis. It\u2019s Akira Kurosawa in space again, only this time everything\u2019s rendered with storyboard perfection and a frustrating emphasis on sheer visual scale, despite a general lack of eye-catching details.<\/p>\n
Snyder (\u201cArmy of the Dead\u201d) and his two credited co-writers, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, never really try to be original. Instead, they joyless trudge through formulaic territory, only now with a bigger budget and a Snyder-y compulsion to replicate the looks and styles of other movies and comic books, among other media. \u201cRebel Moon\u201d often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth. <\/p>\n
Everything\u2019s big\u2014and corny, and ungainly\u2014in \u201cRebel Moon,\u201d starting with the space farmers who try and obviously fail to resist a visiting party of space fascists, representing the Motherworld\u2019s formerly great colonial power. The farmers are initially led by a brawny Corey Stoll, whose needlessly swole physique and braided pushbroom beard ostensibly contrasts his character with Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), a very pale goose-stepper with a short temper and an army at his back. <\/p>\n
Stoll\u2019s character dies pretty quickly, because even a father figure with a barrel chest and Viking Snuffleupagus beard cannot defeat Noble and his fellow would-be overlords. Now the farmers of, oh gosh, Veldt must plan for the Motherworld\u2019s next visit. Their champion, a petite farmer with a past named Kora (Sofia Boutella), then sets out to find warriors who can train her people to fight back. She finds stock types with prominently exoticized backgrounds, like the Scottish mercenary Kai (Charlie Hunnam) and the beastmaster prince Tarak (Staz Nair), now a slave. <\/p>\n
As usual, Snyder doesn\u2019t seem to care about these characters so much as he likes their style-guide features, like their cleavage, their haircuts, and their hard-stressed accents. Some actors, like Hunnam and Stoll, dig in with both hands, but not everyone fares as well with dialogue that never stops expositing even as matte-painting replica landscape shots threaten to swallow up whoever\u2019s pushing the plot this time around. It\u2019s usually Kora, but other characters help to establish the movie\u2019s passing interest in the usual post-\u201cStar Wars\u201d space opera themes of resistance, hope, and compassion, mostly through bumpersticker dialogue and G.I. Joe poses. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The end is just \u201cthe start of something,\u201d according to one of the action-figure-deep heroes of \u201cRebel Moon\u2014Part One: Child of Fire,\u201d the lumbering first half of Zack Snyder\u2019s planned two-part \u201cStar Wars\u201d knockoff. After 133 minutes (give or take seven for credits), Snyder\u2019s latest gang of misfits are finally ready to fight space Nazis. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,35,46,51],"class_list":["post-1258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-adventure","tag-netflix","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}