‘Rebel Moon’ Is Culturally Innovative, but Creatively Chaotic

It opens much like the Thor movies do, with voiceover from Anthony Hopkins imbuing extraneous exposition about millennia-old lore with surprising weight. None of it really matters—Hopkins’ voice scores scenes of enormous battle ships floating through space—since it’s the verbal equivalent of an opening Star Wars text crawl. All you need to discern from it is that there’s a space king somewhere, and that the story unfolds in his empire. Beyond that, information is conveyed in mostly character-centric ways, at least at first. The major setting is a quaint, Anglo Saxon-inspired agrarian community on Veldt, a planet colony lit by an enormous red star encompassing the entire horizon.

Veldt is home to Kora (Sofia Boutella), a quiet, hardworking outsider who diligently plows the fields, even as her doting friend Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) and her adopted father-figure Hagen (Ingvar Sigurðsson) gently suggest a suave local hunter as a potential husband. Kora has only been on Veldt a year, and marriage would be a way for her to become a full-fledged member of the community. While the idea of ethnicity doesn’t explicitly come up in dialogue, it hovers over every scene; Veldt’s villagers are all played by white actors putting on vaguely Scandinavian accents, while Boutella is Algerian.

The specter of race becomes entirely unavoidable when a convoy of imperial officers—led by Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), right-hand man to the king—touches down on Veldt in search of rebels against the empire (known as “The Motherworld”). If it sounds exactly like Star Wars, that is perhaps the point, because it draws from the same well of influences and then multiplies them. The Empire in Star Wars was Nazi-influenced, but in Rebel Moon, the villains wear Nazi uniforms practically un-altered, except for a lack of actual Nazi insignia. The predominantly white soldiers all have either British or South African accents; the scars of real-world colonialism are woven into Rebel Moon’s creative DNA. These imperial forces play on the trust and naïveté of Veldt’s farmers, only to meet them with violence (Skrein is quite imposing in his role), and the only person who seems appropriately afraid is Kora, given that she’s not only seen this kind of violence enacted on her people, but she’s been a pawn to it herself, having been kidnapped and trained by the Motherworld as a child.

In distinctly Snyder fashion, flashbacks in the form of vivid, slow-motion action tableaus take us through Kora’s backstory, as a victim of the Motherworld’s fascism, when her sandy home planet was invaded by ruthless military forces. This, too, screams Star Wars in concept, but it goes a step further. Rather than simply using a nebulous Middle Eastern setting, it invokes real-world imperial politics with a clear and direct rebuke of American foreign policy. The narrow streets and crowded buildings of Kora’s home world have hints of Islamic architecture, while the soldiers who unrepentantly reduce it to rubble are adorned with a beige-green armor overtly inspired by modern U.S. military gear.

The film, in this way, aligns itself spiritually with George Lucas’s original Star Wars from 1977 which, in addition to modeling its villains off the Third Reich, sought to subtly critique the Nixon era of foreign policy, with the Empire being opposed by bands of scrappy militants organizing in jungles, akin to the Viet Cong. This United States-as-Empire trend would continue in Lucas’s early-2000s Star Wars prequels, which all but put George W. Bush speeches in its villains mouths during their power grabs, but the Disney-owned sequel trilogy of the 2010s would largely avoid such entanglements. Rebel Moon picks up that dropped political baton, by crafting a space opera in which the United States' prolonged “war on terror” in West Asia and North Africa is likened to Nazi occupation. These contemporary and realistic overtones are laced with plenty of fantastical elements too, from spaceships and laser weapons, to ceremonial guards with ornate masks and enormous red headdresses bearing witness to the soldiers’ merciless ambush, like a silent externalization of some unspoken religious fanaticism that’s driving the Motherworld.

The first act sees Kora wrestling with how to respond to her place of refuge being invaded by familiar foes. Her first instinct is to run—it’s all she knows how to do—but when the battalion placed on Veldt attempts to sexually assault a local girl (this is a much rougher and grimier Star Wars), she’s forced to make a vital decision. She isn’t the only one, either. The film goes to great lengths to set up not one, but two conscientious objectors to this revolting act: a compassionate Motherworld soldier named Aris (Taiwanese actor Sky Yang), and a humanoid imperial robot, Jimmy (voiced by Hopkins), who has a change of heart after being shown kindness on Veldt. The flashpoint that kicks the plot into motion is this tiny act of rebellion staged by Kora, Aris, and Jimmy, involving guns, axes, and other blades, all filmed in Snyder’s signature speed-ramping style.

Unfortunately, after meticulously building to this moment, this is also where the movie starts to break down. The action choreography, while fluid and conceptually stunning, falls victim to editing that sanitizes every bit of impact and bloodshed. It has echoes of brutality, but the film always cuts around violence, or presents it out of focus in the background. Once the sequence ends, and Kora has inadvertently attracted the wrath of the Motherworld, she and Gunnar are forced to embark on a secret mission to round up fellow rebels and soldiers to defend Veldt once Noble and his forces return. It’s Seven Samurai, the Japanese classic in which seven scattered fighters join forces to protect a village from bandits (re-adapted numerous times, including in Hollywood’s The Magnificent Seven and Bollywood’s Sholay), in all but setting and name. With four warriors already on Veldt’s roster, it doesn’t seem like it ought to be long before Rebel Moon gets to the action. Well, that would be true if there were any purpose to setting up Aris and Jimmy as such vital and interesting characters. But for some head-scratching reason, not only do they not join Kora and Gunnar on their quest, they also don’t show up in the movie again.

As alluring as the film’s first 40 minutes may be, they aren’t followed by what you’d typically describe as a story either progressing, or building to anything of note. Instead, it simply cuts to Kora and Gunnar arriving on different planets (without scenes of them even traveling there) and recruiting various other potential fighters with their own histories against the Motherworld, in scenes that grow progressively truncated. Rebel Moon is essentially a first act followed by five more first acts—each shorter, faster, and more confounding than the last—in which brand new characters are introduced, seem reluctant to join the cause, but are quickly convinced to do so, usually by means of an empty speech from Kora that amounts to “So, you don’t want to fight…but what if you did?” (Cue triumphant music).

Apart from Charlie Hunnam’s scumbag mercenary and escape pilot, Kai—who all but turns to the camera and says “I’m Han Solo, but with an Irish accent”—the litany of characters introduced on Kora’s journey do actually have the potential to be fun and interesting. Indian-Russian hunk Staz Nair plays Tarak, an enslaved indigenous man with a connection to animals (which, in this universe, include enormous griffons, resulting in an Avatar-inspired scene of a warrior connecting with a flying beast). Korean actress Bae Doona plays Nemesis, a cyborg and reluctant vigilante plucked from a gothic western, who wields flaming swords that may as well be lightsabers (she shows up fighting a spider-lady played by Jena Malone). But by the time the movie introduces the likes of washed up general Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and sibling revolutionaries Darrian and Devra Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher, Cleopatra Coleman), the screen time they’re afforded becomes increasingly condensed, until the movie devolves into less of samurai riff and more of a samurai parody, depicting the outward shape of familiar story beats before accelerating forward to the next recruitment. This happens ad nauseam until the story arrives at its sudden climax some two hours in, but instead of having the decency to end, it keeps going for nearly another twenty minutes, through an extended epilogue meant to tease the sequel.

There’s a good movie hiding somewhere inside Rebel Moon – Part One. Snyder’s passion for this burdened battle-maiden saga shines through in every scene—he’s intent on presenting Boutella as both ripped and thoughtful—while the sci-fi setting is rife with tangible, weathered material awash in foggy atmosphere (Snyder doubles as cinematographer), and led by a visually exciting, multi-ethnic coalition of heroes teaming up to fight space Nazis. It’s a film that looks and feels alive, but beyond its first act, it’s completely dead on arrival, unfolding mechanically while maintaining only the barest appearance of Kurosawa’s classic and its handful Star Wars hallmarks. While it avoids Hollywood’s penchant for orientalism, and instead uses its designs to create an explicit anti-imperial and anti-colonial text, it fails to live up to both its eastern and western influences, and exists only as a mal-formed piece of marketing for something better.