Zack Snyder first watched Star Wars at the impressionable age of 11 and, based on Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire, the first film of his new two-part science-fiction fantasy, it looks as though, five decades later, he has finally got to make his own version.
Just like Star Wars, Rebel Moon is a tale of a small group of plucky freedom fighters waging war in space against a rapacious imperium. In addition to its near facsimiles of Star Wars' Rebel Alliance and Galactic Empire, Snyder’s movie even has its equivalents of the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon, C-3PO, and the Mos Eisley cantina.
The borrowings don’t stop there, but they don’t prevent Rebel Moon from being hugely engaging and enjoyable. Most hardcore sci-fi fans will, I suspect, find Snyder’s creation more of an homage than a rip-off. And they will undoubtedly love Sofia Boutella’s Kora, the undeniably cool protagonist who anchors this classic tale of good versus evil.
Kora is an enigmatic outsider who, before Rebel Moon — Part One begins, is rescued from a crashed spaceship. She was then taken in by a community of peace-loving farmers living on Veldt, a moon orbiting a giant gas planet in a remote reach of the Rebel Moon universe. Another outsider is inhabiting the farmers’ village: an antiquated robot soldier known as Jimmy, whose voice-over narration (provided with silky gravitas by Anthony Hopkins) fills viewers in with some of Rebel Moon’s dense backstory.
It isn’t long, however, before the farmers’ joyful harvest festival is interrupted by the arrival of ruthless emissaries from the Motherworld (the story’s evil empire). Led by Ed Skrein’s cruel Admiral Noble (the film’s Darth Vader, his cheekbones so sharp they could be weapons themselves), this force is hunting members of the rag-tag band of insurgents that are fighting the Motherworld.
Noble delivers a swift demonstration of his callousness and departs, promising to return having demanded almost all of the grain from the farmers’ harvest, a plunder that threatens the village’s very existence. So Kora, her supreme fighting skills newly apparent, sets off with mild-mannered villager Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) to put together a small band of warriors prepared to put their lives on the line to protect the humble farmers. Yes, you have heard this one before.
This setup is essentially The Magnificent Seven in space. Or, to frame it slightly differently, this is Snyder following George Lucas and plundering the plot of a Japanese film classic —not Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, famously the model for Star Wars— but Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, even more famously the model for The Magnificent Seven.
Kora and Gunnar go about assembling their gang, traveling to a range of colorfully diverse outposts of the Motherworld’s empire to find willing recruits. They locate Tarak (played by a very buff Staz Nair), whose knack for bonding with outlandish creatures is demonstrated when, in one of the film’s most spectacular sequences, he manages to ride and tame a giant winged beast somewhat resembling a griffin.
They also pick up Nemesis (played by South Korean actress Doona Bae), a legendary swordswoman who, in turn, proves her skills when she takes on the monstrous Harmada (Jena Malone), a giant half-woman, half-spider who lives in the labyrinthine depths of another of the film’s realms, the teeming, perpetually dark Daggus. They also track down Titus, a former general-turned-drunken gladiator played with ruined dignity by Djimon Hounsou. There's also Charlie Hunnam’s Kai, a roguish opportunist with some of Han Solo’s gunslinger swagger, and his spacecraft — no, not the Millennium Falcon, his “Tawau-class freighter”.
Kora and Gunnar’s mission builds to a fearsomely exciting climax once their band connects with the rebels’ leaders, dreadlocked brother and sister Darrian and Devra Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher and Cleopatra Coleman) atop a floating spaceport. And, as you might expect from Snyder’s track record (his directing credits include 300, Watchmen, and superhero films Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League), the action is often astounding — particularly whenever former dancer Boutella gets to display her lithe grace with a dash of cool, kick-ass daring.
The film’s special effects are admittedly not a match for some of its recent sci-fi peers — the CGI lacks the crisp detail you find in, say, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — but then again, the reported $166 million cost stumped up by Netflix for the two Rebel Moon movies is a fraction of the sums Snyder had at his disposal on his Warner Bros projects. That said, the film never looks "cheap", and its preference for practical sets over CGI suits the scuffed, lived-in feel of the universe Snyder has created.
The surprising thing is that the Rebel Moon universe, for all its resemblances to its cinematic precursors, doesn’t display any anxiety of influence. Snyder hasn’t made any attempt to disguise the debt he owes to Star Wars; you can tell he revels in it. And nor has he tried to hide the traces of those same storytelling myths and motifs — and film genres, of course — that George Lucas himself drew upon: space adventures, samurai films, Westerns, World War Two resistance movies... the list goes on.
Yet, having spent years imagining his story’s mythology, Snyder has created from his brew of sources a sci-fi epic with its own flavor. True, his film’s complex backstory may prove a little too rich for some viewers’ tastes, but Part Two will likely bring things into clearer focus, and it’s a shame we don’t get a chance to explore his leading characters in more depth since they're so striking. Given the film’s constraints, it is remarkable what a good job Snyder has done of making something fresh out of dated movie tropes, how cleverly he pulls new rabbits out of old hats. And, for all his story’s familiarity, he still manages to spring surprises that will knock viewers sideways.
Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire is in theaters now and is streaming on Netflix from Friday, December 22.
