Watch Of The Week: Rebel Moon – Part One: Child Of Fire
-
- February 10, 2024
Like the Death Star obliterating planets, Zack Snyder is out to topple countless innocent genres. He already turned the DC Comics films into a black hole of misery with the gloomy Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. And now the diabolical director is also zapping the enjoyment out of outer space in Rebel Moon — Part One: Child of Fire on Netflix. While that winding, buzzword- filled title sounds like a cheap parody of a science-fiction epic, this is about as unfunny and unadventurous a movie as you could possibly imagine. What Rebel Moon really amounts to is “Zack Snyder Strikes Back.” Our Tatooine rip-off is an orange-hued world called Veldt, where a group of uptight grain farmers push around dirt all day long and then gather in a meeting house to speak like they’re Moses from the Old Testament.
They sleep in what resemble 1800s Irish peat houses that are incongruously souped up with electric sliding doors and fluorescent lights. Actually, the overall look
of Rebel Moon is a mixed bag of mismatched time periods and multicultural visual references in a desperate attempt to be clever. However, because they so vastly overdo it, none of these places is believable, even in the context of spaceships, reptilian aliens and villains named Balisarius.
When the benevolent King of the Motherworld is slain, and the totalitarian Regent (pretty much the Emperor from Star Wars) takes the reins, he sends a store- brand evil admiral named Atticus (Ed Skrein) and his
Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.
