Zack Snyder Sci-Fi – The Hollywood Reporter

In 2021’s zombie heist thriller Army of the Dead, that sneaky Zack Snyder tricked us into believing he had rediscovered his sense of humor, a keen understanding of the fact that trashy fun and gory action mayhem need not be mutually exclusive. But just seconds into the leaden sci-fi saga Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire, it’s clear the director is back to indulging his worst tendency for self-serious bombast. That opening features the sonorous voice of Anthony Hopkins droning away over a gloomy spacescape: “On the Motherworld, blah, blah, blah …” It’s a glop of garbled narrative foundation that makes the opening text crawl on the original Star Wars look like a haiku.

The epochal George Lucas creation that spawned a billion Disney spinoffs appears to be very much on Snyder’s mind in this major undertaking for Netflix, with a reported budget for the two-parter of $165 million. The project has been kicking around in the director’s head for decades, which might explain how so much Star Wars mythology got tangled up in it, not to mention Dune, Avatar and even a dollop of Game of Thrones.

This is a derivative crazy-quilt endeavor loaded with enough plot to plug up a black hole but only the most feebly drawn characters to do the work. Its theme of resistance against oppression is too basic to carry much weight.

In case you forgot, this is the guy who redefined gay soft-core porn with the big, dumb slab of ancient Greek battle pulp, 300, and almost everyone here has killer abs. One notable exception is the disgusting jowly blob who hits on Michiel Huisman’s hot farmer Gunnar in a spaceport dive bar full of mercenaries, thugs and freaks, which might invite charges of homophobia if anyone were silly enough to take Rebel Moon seriously.

Then there’s the head-clobbering obviousness of a fascist militia enforcing the merciless rule of the Motherworld, controlled since the slaughter of the king by the power-hungry Regent Balisarius (Fra Fee). His emissary is the vicious — wait for it — Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), a sinewy sadist sporting Bolshevik-style outerwear over Nazi-chic black and white, who favors bashing his victims’ skulls in with a staff made from the bone of some ancient creature.

Snyder never met a superhero team roundup he didn’t love, and although he’s put aside capes and spandex for rugged galactic garb, the screenplay he co-wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten plays like the result of someone feeding Seven Samurai and Star Wars into AI scriptwriting software.

The warrior in charge of recruiting insurgents to go up against Noble’s army is Kora (Sofia Boutella), a brooding stranger taken in by a peaceful farming community after crash-landing on the remote moon Veldt. Village chief Sindri (Corey Stoll in an unfortunate beaded beard) has barely finished urging everyone to honor the harvest gods with rabid lovemaking, or “thrusting of hips” as he lustily calls it, when Noble’s hulking warships appear in the sky.

The Motherworld contingent descends to discuss the supply of grain for their underfed armies, their negotiations turning nasty as Noble horrifies the assembled farmers with an act of violence and clarifies his demands: “It’s simple. I want everything.”

He leaves behind a goon squad to take charge of the crops, and while Kora is preparing to flee, she hears the screams of sweet young villager Sam (Charlotte Maggi) being manhandled. “I’ll turn her from a farm girl to a whore!” declares an especially skeevy brute. In one of the worst bits of rape dialogue in recent memory, the senior officer snatches Sam away from that a-hole underling, bellowing, “I’ll split this sapling myself, and then you can have her. Then you can all have her, mwahahahah!” It’s in moments like this that Snyder confuses menacing with gross.

Luckily, Kora is handy enough with ax, guns, fists and feet to spare Sam, before convincing the farmers that they’re going to have to learn the art of war. She takes off with Gunnar, who has contacts in the resistance, looking to enlist skilled fighters to train the villagers. En route, she fills in the details of her past for him: “I’m only telling you this so you know who I am.” No, sorry, girl, you’re only telling him this because the audience requires that giant exposition dump to make sense of this nonsense.

Their first connection is with shady pilot Han Solo, who agrees to transport them on the Millennium Falcon. Oops, sorry, I mean bounty hunter Kai (Charlie Hunnam), who whisks them off on his freighter. Hopping from one planetary outpost to another, Kora and Gunnar win over formidable warriors to help their cause. Among them is an ‘80s calendar model, or something, Tarak (Staz Nair); a lethal swordswoman with fire blades for arms, Nemesis (Doona Bae); a fallen general, Titus (Djimon Hounsou); and an insurgent leader, Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), who heads a rebel army fighting the Motherworld with his sister Devra (Cleopatra Coleman).

Along the way, Snyder weaves in plenty of outré sci-fi weirdness, which might seem original if you’re new to the genre. There’s a yucky talking bug right out of Naked Lunch; a spiderwoman (Jena Malone) who’s like a vengeful upgrade on Greek mythology’s Arachne, as seen in the ‘90s Hercules series; and a griffin-like winged beast called a Bennu, which creature whisperer Tarak gets to break in, recalling similar scenes with the Hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or the leonopteryx in Avatar. Some jolts of creepiness seem to have been tossed in as random arcana without explanation, notably the leech-like tentacles Noble plugs into his torso for kicks at bath time.

Will the fanboys go for all this elaborate world-building, inevitably leading to a deadly face-off on the insurgents’ way home to Veldt? Hard to say. I, for one, won’t be sorry never to see poor old King Levitica again; he’s a peace-loving monkish ruler with flowing robes and a head like a frozen turkey raised too close to a nuclear reactor. Do aliens really have to look this stupid?

Action scenes are serviceable enough but rarely exciting, pumped up with Snyder’s usual tool kit of speed-ramping and slo-mo. But there’s a grimy aesthetic to the movie that becomes ugly and tiresome (the director took on the DP role himself), and the episodic plotting seldom builds enough steam to stop you thinking about other things, like: If there’s no reference to these characters ever having lived on Earth, why does Kai have a thick Irish brogue? And beyond global representation, what’s with the whole hodgepodge of accents, anyway — British, Australian, South African, etc.?

Boutella, who reportedly did the majority of her own stunts, acquits herself capably, acing the fight choreography and looking cool in a hooded cloak. Hunnam also gets to show some spark and Bae certainly looks commanding in her all-black kumdo suit. But there’s not much scope for the actors to do anything of interest beyond scowl, fight or look anxious.

At least Hopkins got out of it with only voice duties as Jimmy, an android soldier whose fighting days ended with the death of the king. His once-regal armor is reduced to a battered tin-can shell and his military programming has given way to contemplative human feelings. When young Sam recognizes the robot’s kindness early on and crowns him with flowers, it sparks Jimmy’s final rejection of Motherworld doctrine.

The droid’s rogue appearance at the end of the film — having gone full animal-cult with a set of antlers, seriously — hints at a more active role in Part Two: The Scargiver, due in April. For anyone not already too scarred to check back in, that is.