You could read Zack Snyder’s latest transgalactic travesty as, in part, an apology for Sucker Punch, his notoriously chauvinistic 2011 romp. Sofia Boutella is not prancing around in exotic lingerie or cooing like an eroticised adolescent. She speaks in arid quips. She wears a properly concealing cape. She punches giant lizards in the face. Kora, the protagonist, is, in short, Regulation Girlboss #349. A role model for the ChatGPT generation.
If you want to avoid cliche and overworked influence you have come to the wrong place. The word on Rebel Moon: Part One – no space armada can halt an incoming second spurt – is that Netflix has allowed Snyder, director of 300 and lots of DC rubbish, to develop his own take on Star Wars. That’s not an insane precis. The film follows a plucky band of insurgents as they take on an apparently indestructible fascist regime. Kora is Luke Skywalker. Someone else is Han Solo. There is a cute robot. But the familiarities go back further – deep into the inspirations for the first part of George Lucas’s space opera.
If Star Wars didn’t exist critics would be focusing here on the shameless references to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. It’s not just that the characters gather together a band (of around about that number) to protect a literal and figurative village from marauders. Rebel Moon is also much at home to pseudo-Japanese set and costume design. The awful thing also plays like yet another gift for the Johnny One-Books who still jaw about Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell and Kurosawa were, of course, the godfathers of Star Wars.
Anyway, never mind all that. The undemanding punter is allowed a slab of mindless space mayhem to while away the yawning afternoons during the Christmas break. Right? As so often with Snyder, one wishes the project were as much fun as it seems on paper. To be fair to the guy, he did discover a sense of humour for the recent, tolerable Army of Thieves, but, though there are attempts at levity here, we are, for the most part, stuck with his dreary stygian self-importance.
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You will get some sense of the subtlety at work from a summary of the opening section. A happy farming village is disturbed when a space vessel disgorges a legion of smartly uniformed straight-backs – garbed as you’d expect in a fascist-themed production of Julius Caesar – led by the reliably snake-eyed Ed Skrein. He smiles and opens negotiations to appropriate grain for his troops. At least one local reacts like the character in Mad Max 2 who, confronted with the mountainous villain, declared: “This Humungous ... is a reasonable man.” Well, no. After more preamble than is strictly necessary, Lord Skrein, or whatever he is called, takes to battering the citizens to death and stripping the land. “It’s simple. I want everything,” he says. You amaze me, Man in Jackboots and Shiny Peaked Cap.
Kora – as so often in Campbellian tales an adoptee to the village – finds herself tasked with assembling a gang to fight back against the oppressors. What we end up with is a colossal, colossally boring preamble to a less-meandering second part that will, I’m guessing, appeal largely to viewers with screwdrivers lodged in their frontal lobes. There are endless hunks of spoken exposition. There is a lot of space travel. A great many uninteresting people are introduced. By the first hour all narrative drive has slackened into a limp connecting thread.
One thing does interest, though (if you’ll excuse the spoiler). A surprising number of the worst villains turn out to be Northern Irish or white South Africans. How amusing it would be if the DUP were to call for a boycott.
Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire is on Netflix from Friday December 22nd
