This article contains spoilers for Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire.
Zack Snyder wraps up Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire, the first half of his epic two-part science-fiction fantasy with a thrilling cliffhanger ending that doesn’t just leave viewers on tenterhooks... it might also have them scratching their heads in bafflement.
How Snyder resolves his Netflix project's cryptic plot lines will, of course, remain a mystery until the release of Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver in April 2024, but we’re here to help disentangle some of the most puzzling narrative strands in Part One. But before we get to the puzzling ending, however, we need to explore the sci-fi universe Snyder has created, and a few of its key characters.
Sofia Boutella’s Kora is Rebel Moon’s ultra-cool but enigmatic protagonist. When we first meet her, she's been living for "two seasons" with a small farming community on a moon called Veldt, having been rescued from a crashed spaceship by a kindly villager.
It’s clear, however, that Kora doesn’t herself come from farming stock, and after the village comes under threat from troops sent by the "Motherworld", the evil empire that rules the Rebel Moon universe, we begin to get glimpses of her tragic, violent past.
We learn that Kora’s home planet also fell foul of the Motherworld and that her people were annihilated when she was a child. Having survived the slaughter, Kora was taken in by a leading Motherworld commander named Balisarius (played by Irish actor Fra Fee) and trained to become a deadly combat soldier. After witnessing more carnage in the Motherworld’s wars, Kora became a devoted personal bodyguard to Princess Issa, the daughter of the empire’s reigning king and queen.
Helpfully, Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire supplies us with a figure that knows something of Kora and Issa’s pasts, a “JC-class” robot known as “Jimmy”, whose intermittent voice-over narration (provided by Anthony Hopkins) lets us know that the Motherworld’s royal family has been slain and that Balisarius, once the king’s trusted advisor, has become the empire’s ruthless regent.
Balisarius and his own right-hand man, Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein), are currently hunting for the now-renegade Kora, and their pursuit runs in parallel with Kora’s own quest to find fighters ready to defend Veldt’s farmers. As What To Watch's Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire review reveals, the movie is essentially The Magnificent Seven in space.
Noble is also seeking to root out the Bloodaxes, the brother and sister leaders (played by Ray Fisher and Cleopatra Coleman) of a band of revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the Motherworld. Towards the end of the film, he eventually tracks them down on Gondival, a floating spaceport connected to a low-orbiting asteroid; he also locates Kora. “I have found her, the most wanted fugitive in the known universe,” he declares.
Why Kora is the universe’s most wanted fugitive remains something of a riddle. Hopkins’ robot Jimmy has revealed the existence of a prophecy in which “a child would stop the madness of war”. He appears to be talking about Princess Issa, but there are hints that Kora is destined to play a key role in the prophecy’s fulfilment.
Evil Regent Balisarius — Kora’s adoptive father, remember — will clearly stop at nothing to eliminate her. Indeed, at the end of the film, he promises to crucify her in a gladiatorial arena akin to Rome’s Colosseum on the moon of Pollux (in another Roman touch, Pollux has a twin moon called Castor). By now we have discovered that Kora does not just possess awesome fighting skills, she also has an equally awesome alias: The Scargiver.
The film’s climactic battle between Kora and Noble atop the perilously floating spaceport leaves Kora still standing and Noble plunging to what seems certain doom. But no, Noble, bloodied and broken, still has what passes for a pulse and undergoes a kind of regeneration suspended in what looks like a giant amniotic sac. Which surely means that an even bigger showdown lies in store for us when Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver arrives.
Rebel Moon is out now on Netflix.
