Zack Snyder pitched Rebel Moon as a marriage of Seven Samurai and Star Wars, which is a bit like trying to sell your new invention as the wheel meets sliced bread. The former channeled all of Akira Kurosawa’s estimable powers in blocking, lighting and composition for battles that still merit the nearly exhausted descriptor of “epic”; the latter was a once-in-a-millennium Big Bang of raw movie stardom, snappy dialogue and transportive production design that turned a mid-budget space oddity into a culture-straddling phenomenon; both are fundamentally impossible to replicate. And so Lucasfilm passed on Snyder’s tall order, as did Warner Bros (more than once), until the good people at Netflix uncinched their readily loosened purse strings for what had gradually become the blockbuster king’s longest-simmering passion project.
Yet 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. If it can be considered complete at all, that is – this 134-minute film really only covers the getting-the-gang together phase that most movies in the genre knock out within the first half hour, a fragment of story to be wrapped up with a second installment next year. One hopes that Snyder has saved the good stuff for his climactic conclusion, and not just the grand clashes conspicuously absent from an adventure that fits and belongs on a laptop. (Longtime Snyderheads may happen upon the epiphany that his trademark slow-mo action tableaux look like screensavers more than anything else.) There’s still time for him to add character development to his ragtag band of cardboard cutouts, a tactility to his nondescript greenscreened locations, a deeper sense of meaning to the stultifyingly generic plot, and everything else that leaves a sort of polished nothingness in its lack. But by the end credits, expecting anyone to come back and find out feels like asking a lot.
