So, I can't really call myself a person who is into science-fiction and not take a time to devote a full blog post to Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon-Part One: A Child of Fire. This is a movie that seemed to throw everything at the screen in some incredible visuals that is rare to see outside of a Star Wars film. But it is also one in which I believe content trumped substance. In fact, substance was left crying in a corner while content was just king of the entire show. It came at you faster than a Harry Potter movie, and it seemed like there was breathless motion all of the time in every single scene. The narrative lurched from one plot point to the next without really any style or bothering to create any connection with the audience watching it. All that really mattered was that it was action-packed, and characters were in danger, and the stakes were high. This is my first impression of Rebel Moon.
Some people like to say that Rebel Moon is just Seven Samurai. However, I'm not going there, because it isn't. Saying that Snyder has made a movie kind of like a Kurosawa movie is a flat critique that comes 63 years after John Sturges remade Seven Samurai but with cowboys, decades after Sergio Leone took the actual beat-for-beat script of Yojimbo set in the same year and just swapped in cowboys, forty some odd years after George Lucas remade Hidden Fortress in Space and later his studio remade Seven Samurai three times in three separate series also in space. Remakes happen all of the time. The successful ones have critical elements in common. They are also able to add their own material, ideas, and style in a way that feels different enough to make the retelling justifiable and interesting. Snyder (I think) has done this with Rebel Moon. However, I think it needed to be much longer in run-time than Snyder was allowed. This first part just crammed in too much. It felt like a ten-episode series given a run time of two hours.
A lot of that is simply because there is so much world-building that needs to happen before you can understand anything. That has always been the problem with big ideas: they generally require some kind of info dump. Snyder would have been better served taking the "Riddick" approach to space opera. The first movie in the Riddick trilogy was Pitch Black, and it was a perfect movie that introduced some very simplistic things into the story. The next movie called Chronicles of Riddick blew up the story to an epic that spanned an entire galaxy, and it wasn't too much because the director didn't have to establish his characters at the same time. I know that some people may not see the Riddick trilogy as a masterwork example of how to do a space opera, but I really like it. And I think the pacing of that trilogy is just about perfect as far as how fast information is presented to the audience before it is expected to be absorbed.
I like what Zack Snyder tries to do in telling his stories. Here's a guy that started directing Dawn of the Dead, which was written by and likely shadow-directed by Romero. Then he got two graphic novels which he filmed essentially comic-frame by comic-frame, also written by some excellent storytellers. He also gets massive credit (from me) for Watchmen (which I still rewatch whenever it is on television because I like it a lot). Because of these successes, studios throw money at him. He's also a visual stylist, and I'd put him in the same category as Hitchcock in this way. But being unleashed from money concerns leads Snyder to become indulgent in the things that he really likes. That's why you get bombarded with sepia tone and slow-mo in most of his stuff. But you also get incredible creature designs that pull from things like Dungeons & Dragons and the worlds of Warhammer 40K. It's honestly stuff that the gaming community has been obsessed with for decades, but we haven't really seen a whole lot of in movies or television. Snyder knows how to make visuals that smack of something that most people haven't ever seen before, and kind of evoke that "what am I looking at exactly?" feeling that can be so enjoyable while you are watching one of his films. Zack Snyder has a guaranteed rabid and somewhat trollish fanbase of which I'm probably becoming a part of. However, I'd really appreciate it if Zack Snyder slowed stuff down and allowed us to care about his characters.
I wonder if Snyder is a great example of someone who is "Internet Famous." He has a massive fanbase of extremely loyal, vocal fans but none of this has translated to mainstream success (at least recently). If that were the case, then Rebel Moon would be a massive theatrical release, and we'd all be getting bombarded by ads constantly. Instead, the only people who seem to know it exists are the fans who follow Snyder's career on social media and watch extensive YouTube videos about his craft. In the future, he may find it difficult to attract new fans or recapture the interest of former fans once they've seen his tricks. No matter what though, Snyder will always be able to make beautiful locations that I want to go to.
On Friday, I want to talk about Loki season 2 and The Marvels
