Rebel Moon - Partie 1 : Enfant du feu

There’s one rather unexpected twist, other than that, it's a compilation of situations seen elsewhere, nonsensical statements and hacked scenes. I'll admit I considered looking up the Snyder cut, since Snyder didn't bother to edit this film and I probably would have done better. There's a lot of stuff I don't understand why it's even there... like the unnecessary flight on Klofan. WTF? Maybe the ridiculous persuasion of that disparate bunch with the ear-splitting dialogue and odd behavior of most of the characters goes away in the edits. Maybe. I'm sorry about the weaker ship and weapon design and the sloppiness of the visual effects, an edit won't fix that. Sofia Boutella tries her best, Ed Skrein enjoys his sturmbannführer and nobody has much to show for it apart from the traditionally fine Charlie Hunnam. Hopefully the second part will be all about the slow motion action. Zack Snyder should leave the screenwriting to someone more capable. P.S: The best character is actually Anthony Hopkins's Jimmy, but they don't really take him on a road trip. (24/12/2023)

A fun guilty pleasure where Zack Snyder bit off more than he could chew, but I have no problem with it. We didn't get a proper sci-fi flick this year. Creator was a dull bore and this, though ripping off a lot of other movies, was more likeable than the whole Star Wars thing, which I hate. Part of it may be the fact that I have a soft spot for movies where a team is being put together (The Magnificent Seven vibes!), I've loved Sofia Boutella since Kingsman, and Charlie Hunnam is a good too. The ruthless bad guy Ed Skrein of Nazi ilk kept me entertained and the rest of the characters are pretty okay. Too bad the character development and interaction between them is nil (it’s definitely missing some banter), but I can forgive that. The atmosphere and visuals have a "Warhammer" feel to them, which I applaud, and the action isn't bad. The barn fight is very good (I can imagine some decent gore if the film had been R-rated). Too bad Snyder didn't release an R-rated version immediately, the final impression could have been better. The finale is a bit meh, even though there is one minor twist, it doesn't quite pull it off. All in all I have no problem with the movie, I wasn't bored , the world was interesting, but I'd rather see an Army of the Dead sequel than this. Too bad they didn't add more monster-spiders here, it was excellent. 6/10. (27/12/2023)

Zack Snyder used to be a director whose films I alternately rated very high or very low until about 2013, but in the last decade or so my acceptance of his films has settled more on the lower star numbers, with Rebel Moon clearly being the culmination of that trend. It basically can't go any lower than that, everything here is wrong except that it roughly keeps the technical parameters of a Hollywood blockbuster. Good luck trying to build a new cinematic universe around this shit, because I can't imagine who will realistically care about these characters and their world. (23/12/2023)

I really didn't expect it to be that shit, but I've been trying to find something that would be at least a little bit good for Rebel Moon for about an hour now. Well, let's just say the make-up effects and Ed Skrein's overacting bad guy are pretty cool, other than that, though, it's a complete monstrosity. If anyone was living in hope until recently that Zack Snyder was a lousy writer but could still be at least a decent director, they'll lose that hope here, because almost nothing in Rebel Moon was good. The questionable quality of the visual effects would be the least of the problems, as would the shoddy rip-offs of just about every major sci-fi film from Star Wars to The Fifth Element, Flash Gordon to The Matrix to Jupiter Ascending. The bigger problem is that, audiovisually, the whole thing is uglier than the fifteen-year-old Mutant Chronicles, and you can't see a damn thing in the action scenes. Snyder as a cameraman keeps relying on the already pretty annoying slow-motion effect, but most of all he can't even get a proper picture of the characters who are currently fighting, and that none of the heroes have any personality or motivation. And I don’t mean a believable motivation, but any motivation whatsoever, because recruiting galactic badasses usually goes along the lines of "Can you help us? - I don't know, more like no. - How about revenge? - Ah, okay" . The result is two hours of boring characters running around the screen, bossed around by a perfectly bland Sofia Boutella, all set in an ugly world that looks like a twenty year old sci-fi flick that was already bad back then. Considering Snyder got a blank check from Netflix and could do whatever he wanted and he made this, it's obvious he's completely useless as a filmmaker. (23/12/2023)

Without the slow motion, it would have been half the running time. But okay. Let's just say I had a pretty decent time for the first half at the expense of Zack Snyder trying to embrace the concept of The Magnificent Seven and graft onto it some mythology that would stand up to many sequels. It didn't annoy me, even the graphic sequences from the panels of some overstuffed comic book somehow survived unscathed. But then it starts flying around planets, making do with a few ugly CGI settings, even darker, perhaps to make the digital clutter not so in your eyes. Snyder stuffs in a few generic fights that won't get a normal viewer out of their chair, without any suspense, let alone a hint of atmosphere, and with a villain that looks like out of a classy S&M club. Everything that happens after the scene of the monster taming is one big visually ugly waste, and that's pretty much the entire second half, with one slow-motion sequence after another, where Snyder must have thought that if it worked in 300, it must work here. No, Zack, it really doesn't, maybe in your wet post-pubescent dreams. (05/01/2024)