The trailer for Rebel Moon dropped yesterday (I’m not sure how a 3:30 minute trailer is considered a “teaser”, but never mind). It looks very Star Wars-like, which is not surprising given that it started development 10 years ago as a potential Star Wars property. The press release description:
When a peaceful colony on the edge of a galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of a tyrannical ruling force, Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious stranger living among the villagers, becomes their best hope for survival. Tasked with finding trained fighters who will unite with her in making an impossible stand against the Mother World, Kora assembles a small band of warriors — outsiders, insurgents, peasants and orphans of war from different worlds who share a common need for redemption and revenge. As the shadow of an entire Realm bears down on the unlikeliest of moons, a battle over the fate of a galaxy is waged, and in the process, a new army of heroes is formed.
I’m not a Snyder fan, but this looks…pretty cool? Maybe he’s figured out how to lean into his ample skills as a filmmaker and suppress his really annoying habits. Who knows based on just a trailer.
That’s where I’m at, too. He’s a straight big dumb visual guy, not much with the ideas, so when he’s stuck inside a specific genre (zombies, superheroes) his worst instincts undercut him. He needs to be unmoored from obligation to do his best work.
I’ve said for years I want to see him do a big-screen Wagner Ring Cycle adaptation. This is a decent second best option. It looks like “Heavy Metal Album Cover: The Opera.”
Plus the cast is weird and amazing. In particular I wanna see if Sofia Boutella can graduate from being the supporting actor who usually steals her movies to holding down the center as the lead.
I expect this to be ridiculous and overstuffed and brotastic, and loads of stupid fun.
That’s what I thought. It seems like a bunch of space opera / fantasy tropes thrown in a blender, or something you’d get out of ChatGPT with the prompt ‘write something that isn’t Star Wars, but make it Star Wars’. At least from the trailer it doesn’t look like there’s any angle that hasn’t been explored a dozen times over.
I laud Snyder for his creative and daring accents of taupe and bronze that really give punch to the khaki highlights dancing about the shaker-sunset-sand foundational palette. Oh, and an occasional blue laser appears to let me know the dialog has stopped.
And I generally have no problem with that - after all, you could say the same thing about the Guardians of the Galaxy films, and they were great. But they were also fun and visually inventive, and I don’t see any of that here.
Plus, that narration was godawful - the perfect balance of pretentious and incomprehensible.
The full trailer was released yesterday. It’s somehow shorter than the teaser, which doesn’t give me hope that much about this movie will make sense. But the new trailer does have a lot more Snyder-y scenes and effects, so it’s got that going for it.
Zack Snyder is great at creating really cool trailers for mediocre movies. The trailer for Watchmen was amazing. Maybe he should just have a new career making trailers for imaginary movies.
Reviews are out, and hoo boy. It sounds like all of you who were not impressed by the trailers have been fully vindicated.
(The Guardian) The finished product has only the vaguest contours of ambition, diminished by a half-assedness dinkifying the latest CGI-jammed saga to decide the fate of the universe.
(IndieWire) …singularly torturous slog that tries — and fails, and fails, and fails again for 134 minutes of agonizing tedium that are only interrupted by the occasional jolt of sadness for the wasted talent of everyone involved — to distill an iota of creative value from pre-existing images that never seemed worthless until Snyder tried to make them unique. It’s the cinematic equivalent of an NFT.
… the misguided idea that it might be worth sitting through the rest of “Rebel Moon” just to see all the awfulness that Snyder inflicts on his cast. Make no mistake, that is the only reason to keep watching.
(Ebert) “Rebel Moon” only really looks good when it’s focused on things crashing into or flying above other things. Sometimes they hover over and then crash into things, which has its appeal.
That’s disappointing, just because we need more good movies, and I was hoping Snyder could transcend his own ego. But those reviews were deliciously cutting, and vindicate my opinion of Bats vs Supes (I have a student who loves that joyless pile of kraptonite).
Oh, well, sounds like another film to “MST3K” with my cynical friends.
I enjoyed it, right until the very end when I realized there was not enough time left to actually finish the story. Yes, I know it’s “part 1” but it did not finish the story THIS movie was telling. It was seven samurai in space, except they skip the fight at the end.
Did it at least have a theme song based on Yellow Moon?
Rebel Moon, Rebel Moon,
Why you keep rippin’ off Star Wars?
Do you know there’s other, do you know there’s other plots you could write?
Do you have ideas,
Or just a bunch of special effects?
