"A good conscience is a continual Christmas," Benjamin Franklin once wrote. So it's with a heavy heart and a liberated soul that I cannot honestly recommend the new Netflix space fantasy, "Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire," to anyone but the most hardcore of Zack Snyder acolytes.
And that pains me as a serious admirer of Snyder's previous work on sci-fi and fantasy features like "Dawn of the Dead," "300," "Watchmen," "Man of Steel," "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice," and "Justice League." However, "Rebel Moon," with its DNA firmly buried in the "Star Wars" sandbox, cliched B-movie westerns, and Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," is a shockingly sadistic, cruel, and mean-spirited affair that wears out its welcome 10 minutes in.
