Zack Snyder’s latest is a two-part space opera epic with the classic rebels-versus-empire dynamic popularized in the cinema mainstream by Star Wars (the film began its life as a Star Wars film pitched to Disney). This dynamic is purposefully simplistic, with basic white hat heroes and black hat villains. The issue with Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is that these characters are not only simplistically drawn, but they are never particularly compelling figures to begin with.

The first sign that this script has character issues is an emotional monologue given by Sofia Boutella’s Kora. She speaks of being unable to receive or give love, that love was “beaten out of her” long ago. Every word of it is the sort of easy character building material that would be obvious subtext in a hardened action film. Only here, it is delivered as blatant text. Characters go around saying out loud the types of things that in other films viewers are asked to discover over time. At one point later in the film, Kora concludes a massive exposition dump of a monologue with the line, “I’m only telling you this so you know who I am.” It’s as if Snyder is admitting his inability to organically integrate backstory into his massive sci-fi epic.

Kora lives a relatively isolated existence on a farming village on the edge of the galaxy. Work is steady and she successfully evades her past, until the authoritarian galactic government rears its ugly head. They begin siphoning the village’s resources, install a military outpost, and leave the soldiers on planet to do what they will. These soldiers, upon attempting to assault a young woman in the village, force Kora to act, exposing herself and the village as a whole to the Motherworld empire’s wrath.

Snyder, instead of focusing on interesting characters, obsessively builds out the lore of this fantasy space world. Military occupation of a remote farming world. Robot soldiers who refuse to fight wars. Seedy trading outposts populated by extravagant alien species. Defiant rebels, dashing rogues, defecting soldiers, and the occasional laser sword. Everything is a minor piece of substance cobbled together into a largely substance-devoid whole.

During the film’s glut of a midsection, characters are introduced and immediately thrown into side quest missions whose narratives hold no consequence beyond establishing these heroes as valuable and noble. The entire stretch of the film brings tedious sequences that lack stakes or momentum. And given we know from the title that this is merely the first part of the story, it becomes clear that all of this window dressing of character introductions and empty calorie action is leading to nowhere other than a cliff-hanger. The entire film winds its way toward a casual shrug of indifference.

The film’s action is directed with Snyder’s usual idiosyncrasies. The choreography largely feels stale despite some quality camerawork. The stakes of combat feel notably toothless considering Snyder is going for gritty violence but the consequences of that violence are (visually and emotionally) bloodless. In some instances, this action doesn’t even look like it is taking place in a tangible world, with Snyder’s stylistic flourishes taking over to the point where the distant space planets look more like the sound stages that they are.

That Rebel Moon is so clearly riffing off of Star Wars and Seven Samurai makes its failure more interesting. All three of these films are pulling from sources that inspired their creators. They are films which express a passion for the film medium and for the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and the western. They are films that carry their references on their sleeve proudly. Where Rebel Moon diverges is in the inability to breathe life into borrowed material. Both Lucas and Kurosawa infused their films with rich texture and full imagination. Rebel Moon is, instead, overloaded with stiff backstory and hollow characters. The most life and texture to be found is in the soil of the outskirt planet fighting for its autonomy. In the soil, not the fight.

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire: D+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)