Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire

Zack Snyder's latest, a holiday season blockbuster for Netflix, resuscitates an unsuccessful Star Wars pitch that the writer-director made back when Disney and Lucasfilm were looking for ways to expand their (surprisingly parochial) space saga. Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire does then, at least in conceptual terms, betray a slightly deeper understanding of this disconnected predecessor. The film isn't satisfied to mindlessly wield the used-up aesthetic or revolutionary warfare of George Lucas' space opera, Snyder knows to poke around in the bones of that piece, recognising the debt to Ray Harryhausen's Dynamation monster films or Akira Kurosawa's rain-lashed chanbara. Snyder and his team are obviously fluent in the works that followed in Star Wars' wake too - the fantasy epics; the lead figure tabletop games; the science-fiction comics, like Heavy Metal or 2000 AD, that stripped the religious aspiration out of an American cultural phenomenon, replacing it with human avarice and body-shredding violence. Unfortunately this pop culture fluency is communicated by a film experiencing a severe, structural lurch. 

Although Rebel Moon's first act shows promise, teasing out the familiar tale of impoverished farmers forced to hire warriors to battle the invaders who would drive them to famine, once Sofia Boutella's ex-imperialist Kora starts putting the gang together Snyder's film begins to run aground. Seven Samurai (and to lesser degrees, The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars) built scenes around the emerging camaraderie experienced by a growing gang of misfits. The small connections that their similar backgrounds reveal or their collective responses to attempts at trickery. There was a class dimension too, one that doesn't quite scan here thanks to Kora's backstory. She may live as a farmer now but she wasn't born one; she wasn't raised as one. When interacting with the people she recruits, Kora does so as an equal rather than somebody who is scared and suspicious, who perhaps even considers themselves to be somehow socially inferior. Rebel Moon doesn't just skip over successful or misfiring fellowship though (drawing together a line-up that barely interacts), the film eventually abandons the basic, consumptive stakes outlined when a battleship landed on a wheat field. As the canvas swells to include a star system's worth of planets, seemingly instantaneous space travel (and therefore retaliation), and the genocidal glassing of a pacifist planet, the basic thread of hopelessly outgunned mercenaries repelling a technologically superior force slips away completely.