Rebel Moon Pt. 1 (2023)
Haha, so I finallly watched this.
This surely puts paid to any lingering beliefs that Zack Snyder is a good director. I'm not sure any good director can create a film this superlatively terrible. Even a good director misfiring creates a decent movie, or something with conspicuous merits despite its problems. This is a staggering, full spectrum failure of colossal proportions.
So we start off with a load of exposition. Something about some dead monarchs of a "motherworld" and this regent taking over (evil, obviously) and then this massive starship turns up at a farmstead with about 50 people demanding food. Here we immediately encounter a problem. Why is a hugely powerful spaceship with an admiral on turning up and harassing some yokels toiling away with 19th century technology? How much food do they think they're going to get? It's also just such a painfully crude way to evoke a disparity: Tatooine was the back of beyond in Star Wars, but it still had technology. Nor do you even get the sense that this is really a planet. Is this planet inhabited by one, single hamlet (pop ~50)?
And how is there such a massive waterfall on that mountain in the background? I mean, I'd be checking that out. It's a veritable Niagara Falls: there can't possibly be enough rainfall on that lone peak to support such a torrent. There surely must be some amazing alien technology pumping water up. No? Just scenery? Okay, move on.
Anyway, the soldiers of the evil empire are cartoonishly evil thugs, threaten to ravish a villager in the most dedicatedly lazy female victimisation plot ever, and our heroine pops up and kills them all. Plus another massive dose of backstory exposition, then what appears to be a quest to find some "Magnificent 7" type people to protect the village and lead a revolt and oh whatever.
No-one in this film is interesting. Literally no-one. I'm sure the actors do decent enough work (it has some good actors), but the best actor in the world cannot make a character interesting that is fundamentally badly written, with terrible dialogue, too little time or backstory, and a leaden script. Immediately therefore, at it's core, there is no emotional weight to this movie because you're not able to care about anyone in it. There is a a lot of weight to the movie, however: it is ponderous, po-faced, utterly humourless, dragged down with clumsy exposition. A vast, leaden millstone of pompous seriousness around its neck. The plot is trash. It's nonsensical. It lacks flow. It completely fails to hold attention. It is lazy and cliched to a genuinely terrifying degree, lazily copying the simplest stuff from much better movies.
As above, it's probably mostly aiming at the "Magnificent 7", but with Star Wars tropes. (Actually, this concept already exists, it's called "Battle Beyond The Stars" from ~1980 and it's massively better than Rebel Moon Pt. 1, but then almost anything is better than Rebel Moon Pt. 1, and I say this as a man who recently watched The Toxic Avenger Part II). I can't help but notice that the Magnificent 7 collected their heroes and saved the village in one movie. For roughly the same running time, Rebel Moon is completely underdeveloped in comparison, neither getting you involved with characters, and still needing Part 2 to save the village. Who are these heroes? None of them even really register, so who even cares? I was at least mildly interested to note it had both actors who played Daario Naharis in Game Of Thrones, but if a small spot of trivia is what engages you most, there's a big problem.
Part of the dislocating nature of the movie is it keep jumping hither and thither to pick the heroes up, in busy but forgettable CGI environments that flitter by leaving you with no sense other than that the GFX team had to do a lot of work (and some of the CGI isn't even that good). Each seems to be punctuated by a tedious, long fight / action scene with catastrophically overused slo-mo. Films need time in their locations, to get a sense of what they are, some continuity and solidity. You don't to know and engage with a character through an action scene. This film just drags you through a load of stuff going on.
Mercifully, after a deeply underwhelming and even somewhat unpleasantly sadistic end boss fight and another chunk of exposition (from the villain), the audience is put of its misery by the film ending.
I've watched some of the mega-turkey blockbusters of the decade, and whilst poor, none of them were as resolutely bad as this. What a disaster.
Haha, so I finallly watched this.
This surely puts paid to any lingering beliefs that Zack Snyder is a good director. I'm not sure any good director can create a film this superlatively terrible. Even a good director misfiring creates a decent movie, or something with conspicuous merits despite its problems. This is a staggering, full spectrum failure of colossal proportions.
So we start off with a load of exposition. Something about some dead monarchs of a "motherworld" and this regent taking over (evil, obviously) and then this massive starship turns up at a farmstead with about 50 people demanding food. Here we immediately encounter a problem. Why is a hugely powerful spaceship with an admiral on turning up and harassing some yokels toiling away with 19th century technology? How much food do they think they're going to get? It's also just such a painfully crude way to evoke a disparity: Tatooine was the back of beyond in Star Wars, but it still had technology. Nor do you even get the sense that this is really a planet. Is this planet inhabited by one, single hamlet (pop ~50)?
And how is there such a massive waterfall on that mountain in the background? I mean, I'd be checking that out. It's a veritable Niagara Falls: there can't possibly be enough rainfall on that lone peak to support such a torrent. There surely must be some amazing alien technology pumping water up. No? Just scenery? Okay, move on.
Anyway, the soldiers of the evil empire are cartoonishly evil thugs, threaten to ravish a villager in the most dedicatedly lazy female victimisation plot ever, and our heroine pops up and kills them all. Plus another massive dose of backstory exposition, then what appears to be a quest to find some "Magnificent 7" type people to protect the village and lead a revolt and oh whatever.
No-one in this film is interesting. Literally no-one. I'm sure the actors do decent enough work (it has some good actors), but the best actor in the world cannot make a character interesting that is fundamentally badly written, with terrible dialogue, too little time or backstory, and a leaden script. Immediately therefore, at it's core, there is no emotional weight to this movie because you're not able to care about anyone in it. There is a a lot of weight to the movie, however: it is ponderous, po-faced, utterly humourless, dragged down with clumsy exposition. A vast, leaden millstone of pompous seriousness around its neck. The plot is trash. It's nonsensical. It lacks flow. It completely fails to hold attention. It is lazy and cliched to a genuinely terrifying degree, lazily copying the simplest stuff from much better movies.
As above, it's probably mostly aiming at the "Magnificent 7", but with Star Wars tropes. (Actually, this concept already exists, it's called "Battle Beyond The Stars" from ~1980 and it's massively better than Rebel Moon Pt. 1, but then almost anything is better than Rebel Moon Pt. 1, and I say this as a man who recently watched The Toxic Avenger Part II). I can't help but notice that the Magnificent 7 collected their heroes and saved the village in one movie. For roughly the same running time, Rebel Moon is completely underdeveloped in comparison, neither getting you involved with characters, and still needing Part 2 to save the village. Who are these heroes? None of them even really register, so who even cares? I was at least mildly interested to note it had both actors who played Daario Naharis in Game Of Thrones, but if a small spot of trivia is what engages you most, there's a big problem.
Part of the dislocating nature of the movie is it keep jumping hither and thither to pick the heroes up, in busy but forgettable CGI environments that flitter by leaving you with no sense other than that the GFX team had to do a lot of work (and some of the CGI isn't even that good). Each seems to be punctuated by a tedious, long fight / action scene with catastrophically overused slo-mo. Films need time in their locations, to get a sense of what they are, some continuity and solidity. You don't to know and engage with a character through an action scene. This film just drags you through a load of stuff going on.
Mercifully, after a deeply underwhelming and even somewhat unpleasantly sadistic end boss fight and another chunk of exposition (from the villain), the audience is put of its misery by the film ending.
I've watched some of the mega-turkey blockbusters of the decade, and whilst poor, none of them were as resolutely bad as this. What a disaster.
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