Rebel Moon Teil 1: Kind des Feuers

I wanted this to be good so badly. Like really badly.

Other than the world design and effects, there really isn't much else to salvage from it.

In true Snyder style we've got lens flare and slow motion, but this time he's dialled it up over the top.

Some of the action scenes are absolutely ruined from way too much diving in and out of slow motion.

The biggest disappointment is the writing.

The first 70% of the film is absolutely a waste of time and not needed.

You don't find out most of the characters actual relevance until the back end of the film.

Everything before that is a mixture of utterly pointless painfully boring scenes done for the sole purpose of filler.

Looks great, but that's all.

As an other reviewer wrote, there are wooden language, wooden expressions and wooden dialogue.

The first ting I noticed in the movie was the words the actors spoke seemed like they had been written by a teenager... so many pointless words.

Then there where the actors speaking the words, they just seemed wierd and emotionless.

Then there are the action scenes. There are a lot of them, and they could have been really good. But the editing are just a bunch of normal speed, slow speed clipping to make it look good, and the bad guys just stand still doing nothing while the "hero" spends minutes moving around in the open...

CGI/Greenscreen galore.. but very well done. So this is perhaps the strongest part of the movie.

Waisted and nonsense slowmo sections... there are so many of them... and they are so pointless and gives nothing to the movie. There are movies and directors that know how to use slow motion sequences in a movie, and then there are this movie and director, that did not take that class... it's just a waist of time.

In summary, if you are able to ignore all the writing, dialogue, acting/directing issues... its a passable scifi action movie.

The movie could have been so much better, because there is a decent enough story underneath.. and they obviously had enough money to do what they wanted...

I'm assuming Netflix payed for this. So I'm guessing that there where a big payday for writer/director and no requirements for quality on the delivered product. So they just cut from the budget anyone that could have given the director feedback on the uality issues.

The biggest problem of the movie is the plot. It is just bad. And not just the main storyline which makes little sense and the villains are comedic, but almost every interaction ends up with the viewer asking "but, why?" or "how does it even make sense?".

The assembly of heroes (what the movie is about) is also rushed as hell, and the motivation of the people to join is straight-up nonexistent in most of the cases and is simply skipped entirely.

As for the villain who comes to find mysterious troubling rebels, apparently every single person knows who are the rebels and how to find them and shares that information to the first stranger they meet. It's not like they are even hiding.

Next, combat and action scenes. Blasters that penetrate people in armor through, but can't penetrate a thin piece of wood. Remember when in the new Star Wars trilogy a red guard could strike Ray but was just making dumb random moves to simulate action? Well, it's absolutely the same here. Maximum drama, lots of slow motion, frequent switch of the scenes every few seconds and very little sense.

The acting is ok, but it's difficult to judge the actors if they do good because the script tells them to follow an unnatural character arc in the first place. I'd say Sofia played Kora well, but Kora is just a poor character which is out of place in the very story she's central.

It's not all bad. The picture is nice.

I'd say it's the most disappointing Snyder's movie so far.

Watching this film, it felt like it was created by committee and written for an audience that the director thinks is not particularly clever.

There were so many elements in this that seemed like they had been added because someone thought "hey wouldn't it be cool if there was a... *cool flying bird you can ride* or *a bar scene that looks like the one in Star Wars*

The script also needed some work. The parts of the story were just thrown in as backstory or someone explaining the bleeding obvious. A little more respect shown for the audience would have allowed us to know some of that through watching, understanding or less didactic dialogue.

On the plus side, it looks great. Visually there is always great depth and detail. I enjoyed it enough to want to see the next one, although I suspect my guesses about major plot developments will be correct.

A test of the degree of imagination shown in a sci-fi film is whether it could equally have been done as a cowboy movie. "Rebel Moon Pt. 1" could have, and the movie would have been "The Magnificent Seven" (1960, 2016, 1998-2000 as a TV series, or indeed "Seven Samurai" of 1954), because the plot is err.... identical. And I expect the plot of the second half will be identical too. So if you have ever seen any of those and a spaceship taking off, you don't need to see this movie (OK, some of the spaceship imagery is very good). But I have to wonder whether anyone was actually paid for "writing" the script :-)