SyncVib

After all, Rebel Moon is about (surprise, surprise) a defiant rebel standing against an evil empire, although when we meet her she has no plans to ever fight again. Raised since childhood to be a foot soldier (or stormtrooper) for an imperial government centered around “Motherworld,” Kora (Sofia Boutella) has since sworn off violence and found peace on a small farming moon in the outskirts of the galaxy. Living in a provincial community that resembles a medieval Nordic village, Kora is content with life if not overjoyed. That changes on the day the Imperium arrives. Nothing but condescending smiles and malevolent, searching eyes, Admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) brings immediate violence and the threat of death to town. If this pastoral commune does not surrender its entire crop in 10 weeks’ time to Noble’s dreadnought, he will massacre everyone on the moon.

Kora’s first (and blessedly) brief instinct is to run, but after seeing imperial soldiers attempt to brutalize an underage girl, she has a change of heart—and plenty of slow-mo shots of her hacking at the brownshirts’ own vital organs too. She and the smitten farmer Gunnar (Michael Huisman) will traverse the stars in order to find a disgraced rebel general named Titus (Djimon Hounsou), insurgents in search of a leader, and other assorted rogues, scoundrels, and ciphers bereft of characterization. Together they’ll return to the Space Norsemen as magnificent heroes, ready to fight the might of the Imperium.

Much has been made in the press about how Snyder envisioned Rebel Moon as Star Wars for adults. Our own correspondent was told it’s George Lucas’ fantasy “but with violence, sex, and swearing.” Yet for all that alleged maturity, a viewer is left to ponder why is the sex, along with everything else in this universe, so uniformly violent? In Part One, we get graphic attempted space rape, leering space pedophiles, and even a most unwelcome hint of space tentacle foreplay. But any sense of emotional or healthy connection between grown-ups, romantic or otherwise, is absent. There are adult characters, to be sure, but the only way they communicate is through competitions of stoicism and adolescent brooding, exposition blather that sounds like a thousand other movies, or other hitherto unlisted forms of cruelty and depravity.

Despite existing in a galaxy with a thousand star systems and worlds, there is no sunlight in the thing. Or charm. It is an unrelentingly bleak cosmos that mistakes a lack of humor for a lack of life. At one point, a character muses that their newest idyllic location is a good place “to die.” None of them seem to spare a moment’s thought on what it might be like to really live.

At this point, dear reader, it should be pretty obvious Rebel Moon was not for me, nor would it be for anyone else who rolls their eyes at the thought of watching a Star Wars movie where the lightsabers are replaced by clubs, and when they hit someone, a shot of bloody teeth splattering across the floor will surely follow. It’s a derivative work that is full of despair. And yet, strangely, I cannot help but respect Snyder for getting to make it in exactly the shade of grim-dark he wanted.

Whatever shortcomings are inherent in the screenplay’s collection of clichés, the actual world-building onscreen is dense. The alien designs we witness at its Mos Eisley-like bar pull just as much from mythology as they do the works of Lucas or H.R. Giger. There are spider-women who look like something Theseus would fight in the Labyrinth, and one parasitical alien uses a human being as a meat puppet in a watering hole without anyone batting an eye. It’s even kind of nice to see Snyder double down on his use of speed-ramping slow motion again after all these years, which whether by design or accident turn flashbacks of Kora’s Space Nazi days into a regular intergalactic Leni Riefenstahl picture.

ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue8inq56qpp6yuL%2BOnJ%2BepJ%2BjrrR50aKqnmWgqse7uMRmqqikpam2sLqMq5inppmoeqWt0aRkpqefo3w%3D