Film Ohhhhhh Noooo, Moooore, Slooooooow Moooo
Rebel Moon begins with a dramatic voice over about dead kings and evil empires, and it achieves something I had never seen before; Anthony Hopkins sounding boring. It is the ignominious start to Zack Synder's two part effort to meld Star Wars with The Magnificent Seven. The starting exposition is just the first taste of a bloated, slogging, dreary movie that captures none of the energy or joy of either inspiration.
Rebel Moon is a simple premise. An evil empire shows up at a farming village, bullies the locals, and threatens to come back to pillage the place. It falls to Kora to find the local rebellion and rustle up a rag tag posse to protect the village. That there is a workmanlike, solid action sci-fi premise, which Snyder completely buggers up. In Magnificent Seven, the recruitment part takes up about 20 minutes of screen time and then it gets on with the story. Snyder denies us any such brevity because he has two whole films to stretch his story across, so almost all of two hours of Moon is devoted to Kora travelling from one murky planet to the next, finding and recruiting the next badass, but not before some contrivance forces the badass to flex their muscles. Foot dragging aside, if this whole recruitment arc was handled well, then there would be no problem. But instead every scene is boring and perfunctory. And it's not even original.
Snyder "pays homage" to many better movies. There is a sequence where the heroes go to find a pilot, so they go to a seedy alien bar. We are shown a rogue's gallery of weird, wacky actors in funny alien costumes. Then a pig faced alien picks a fight with the naïve farmboy hero, gets quickly dispatched, and then they team up with the sleaziest human freighter pilot in the place. The only novel thing Snyder ads to this extended New Hope rip off is a weird homophobic element. There's quite a bit of weird sex stuff in this movie actually, such as a teen girl who is nearly gang raped, and a villain who fucks octopuses. Thanks for sprinkling those in, Zack.
I hadn't finished complaining about rip offs, here's another one. Our heroes also pick up Titus. His deal is that he is a disgraced general who dreams of revenge and has to fight as a Roman style gladiator. And in case you didn't figure out which movie Snyder was thinking of, he casts one of the main characters from Gladiator to play Titus, the gladiator. The most exciting thing Titus does in his scene, and the whole movie, is get out of a chair in slow motion.
There is something adolescent about Snyder's approach to film making. He clearly has a lot of affection for comics, anime, sci-fi, and wider geek culture. But his appreciation is so shallow that all he can do is clumsily imitate the appearance of source material, "improving" upon it with ever more slo-mo gif material. Rebel Moon squanders the talents of some very fine action movie stars, and it will squander your time if you let it.
Film Maybe I just don't like Zack Snyder movies?
Is it just me? Am I the problem here?
It's not like I wasn't giving this movie a chance–after the DCEU debacle I was very excited to see a film he had complete and total creative control over... that wasn't Army of the Dead.
I understand that Zack Snyder movies have a lot of themes and metatextual messages. I know this mainly because he very openly talks about it, like a comedian explaining a joke when the audience remains silent after the punchline. And if that fails, he has a veritable army of people–most of whom I'm fairly certain are not astroturf accounts–who will sing from the highest rooftops that yes, indeed, this thing means a thing.
How clever.
This is an issue that I've been noticing with every single one of his movies post 300; they're all saying something meaningful, but in a way that makes it totally meaningless.
300 was a lot like that (to the point that people as still debating whether it can be interpreted as propaganda or not), but it had this raw, over-the-top machismo that gave it a crucial campy edge that made it seem like it was more self-aware than it probably was intended to be.
Pretty much every movie after that–this one included–is trying so hard to be multi-layered that it handicaps itself, turning everything into thematic white noise.
Like the wormhole opening up in the shape of a vagina while a phalic spaceship passes through it. ... What was that even supposed to be? What did it mean? Why was it even there?
"This is how Man fucks the stars"?
It's not awful, it's just... not very interesting. There are these flash-in-the-pan moments that work and seriously threaten keep my attention, but they don't gel together into anything that keeps the crucial flow going. I remember Sucker Punch suffering from similar problems.
Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if the film didn't have this subtle off-putting feeling of indulgence that permeates every single fucking frame. I understand you're making the movie you want to make, Mr. Snyder, but if this movie were to be even 1% more self-gratifying there would've been a 40-foot statue of your dick that pisses fire while "Rock Me Like A Hurricane" plays in the background and F-16s do barrel-rolls overhead.
Maybe 300 was just the one good movie he had in him? It happens. One day you're directing The Sixth Sense, next you're directing Lady in the Water.
According to a recent post in his blog he's sworn off making movies for the "main stream," which is for the best, I suppose. The mainstream has not been particularly kind to him. I'm certainly not wishing he'd stop making movies–you make all the weird films you possibly got in you, you mad bastard, but I think you're done surprising me.
And, in case you're wondering, no, I probably wouldn't say all of this to his face.