It’s not Zack Snyder’s original—I use that term sarcastically—Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire is too long and leaves the story with no real closure or ending, which you should always keep in mind for the audience. The script offers minimal character in terms of development despite endless exposition minutes going nowhere.
For all its epic scope and world-building, Rebel Moon is a vain and hollow attempt at a love child “throupling” of grandeur adventure films such as Star Wars, The Matrix, and the Indiana Jones franchise that tests your patience immediately after the first act. Not to mention abandoning an exciting theme of artificial intelligence.
Netflix’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire’s Plot Summary and Review
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire‘s story follows Kora (Sofia Boutella), a beautiful farmhand with a secret. Kora lives peacefully on the independent planet of Veidt with her inner circle, a father figure in Hagen (A White Day’s Ingvar Sigurdsson), and love interest Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), the community’s expert agriculturalist. Well, Kora’s past is about to catch up to her.
On the day of the harvest on Veidt, a planet with rich soil, the notorious Imperium forces visit. Led by the evil Atticus Noble (Midway’s Ed Skrein), they take over the earth, forcing the residents to work and giving them their only food supply, which means they will starve. Kora is about to leave when the new soldiers attack a young girl, and she decides to take matters into her own hands.
In a way, you may wonder if Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon is some cinematic version of The Milgram Experiment or, in a more entertaining vein, Community’s The Duncan Principle, pondering how much painstaking neon-colored boredom one can take. The first act has some juice, with Boutella developing an exciting action character that matches Snyder’s fast-start, slow-stop fight scenes.
Netflix’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire hallow “throupling ” of better films.
Then, the second act begins, most of the mystery dissolves, and endless exposition becomes the name of the game for the last 90 minutes. Your standard clichés spend an hour recruiting characters to bring back to Veidt, but the scenes are overly long. Each character is explored in a backstory that’s grating.
These are usually scenes done in a quick montage within a few minutes. From Djimon Hounsou’s General Titus, Staz Nair’s “Fabio-light” animal whispering Tarak, and Doona Bae’s annoyingly empathetic cyborg swordmaster Nemesis, these are all cardboard cutout action film characters you’ve seen before.
And when Rebel Moon finds something interesting, Kai’s (Charlie Hunnam) character is a storytelling trope with no reason to exist other than to move the plot to a more conspicuous location. When Snyder, Shay Hatten (Army of the Dead), and Kurt Johnstad’s (300, Atomic Blonde) script des find a character to spark an emotional impact, we meet them so briefly that the big scene the film builds towards isn’t entirely earned, and the audience feels cheated.
Is Netflix’s Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire Worth Watching?
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is not worth watching in theaters or streaming until we find out where the companion part is headed. That leads us to the most interesting character, a robot named Jimmy (voiced by Anthony Hopkins), who explores the theory of “autonomous robots.” However, we don’t see the character again until a brief shot at the end.
This is the most exciting theme in the film—your only hope is if this is explored more in Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver. Almost everything else is an exercise of science-fiction banality. In the meantime, you’ll be stuck with the same Indiana Jones’s oppressive totalitarian characters, The Matrix’s Existentialism regarding reality vs illusion, and Star Wars rebellion recycled thousands of times in our lifetime.
The second part of Mr. Snyder’s vision may relieve some criticisms. However, the likelihood of anyone having the stamina to stomach the second film after this mess is a gamble you shouldn’t net the house on.
You can watch Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire on Netflix this Friday
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