Rebel Moon (2023) Review
1/10
A farming village on a moon is ordered to surrender its grain to an imperial force. A woman with a hidden past rides out to recruit fighters. She finds them. That’s the entire first film.
The 1 is for a work assembled from recognizable parts with no understanding of why any of them worked. The visual references are constant, the structure is borrowed wholesale, and the film has no idea what the borrowed structure was for.
On paper this should be my kind of movie: Seven Samurai in space, a siege, a band of misfits against an empire. What arrived is a two-hour trailer for sequels nobody asked for, dressed in borrowed costumes, and it annoyed me from the first grain harvest to the last slow-motion stare.
It also exists in two versions of considerably different length and content, released months apart. That’s its own kind of admission about what was delivered the first time.
It Removes the Recruitment
The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai both spend their first act on recruitment, and each fighter arrives in a scene that establishes a skill, a temperament and a reason for accepting. That’s not a preamble. It’s the entire mechanism by which an audience learns seven people well enough to care when four of them die.
This film has the same structure and skips the work. Each recruit is found, does something impressive in a single action beat, and joins, and the audience learns a capability and nothing else. Kora asks, they agree, the film moves on.
There’s one exception and it’s instructive. Tarak, the man who breaks a creature by speaking to it, gets a sustained sequence with a clear internal logic, and he’s the only recruit in the film whose introduction establishes a temperament, a set of priorities and a reason for agreeing to any of it, as well as a set of capabilities.
By the time the siege arrives there are six people the audience can identify by weapon and by nothing else. The deaths land as events instead of as losses, and the film can’t understand why the ending feels weightless.
Bae Doona is the clearest waste. She’s a commanding performer, is given a swordfighter who has sworn off killing, and the film establishes that vow in one line and breaks it in one fight without either scene being about anything.
This is the waste that makes me angriest. Give Bae Doona a sword and a vow and you have a character. The film gave her a sword and a deadline, and I kept wishing she’d walk out of this movie and into a better one.
Djimon Hounsou gets the same treatment. A former general with a defeated army and a reputation. That’s the most promising recruit in the group, and his entire characterization is a speech delivered once and a position held in a battle line.
Borrowing a structure means borrowing its function. The recruitment sequence exists to make the reader care, and removing it while keeping the siege produces an action scene about strangers. Ask what each borrowed element was doing in the original before you decide how much space it needs.
A character established by capability alone is equipment. Skill plus temperament plus a reason produces a person, and the third is the one most often dropped.
If your climax isn’t landing, the problem is almost always in the first act. Nobody fixes a weightless ending by making it larger.
Everything Is a Reference
A farm boy on a backwater world, an imperial dreadnought, a cantina, a masked enforcer, a mechanical companion, an aristocratic villain in a cape, and a group of misfits assembled for a mission against an empire. The problem isn’t that these are familiar. Every genre is built on repetition. The problem is that they arrive without any transformation, so a viewer is continuously identifying sources instead of following a story.
The design work makes it worse. Ships, uniforms and weapons are recognizably adjacent to other properties, and the film’s visual identity is a composite of things the audience has seen elsewhere.
What a good pastiche does is take a shape and put something new inside it. Star Wars did this with samurai films and westerns, and what it added was its own mythology and its own sense of humor. This adds slow motion. Anthony Hopkins voices a mechanical knight and the character is the film’s one original idea. A machine built to serve a monarchy that no longer exists, tending a graveyard because nobody has given it another instruction, and the film gives it perhaps six minutes.
Six minutes. I’d have traded the cantina, every lens flare and half the recruits for a film about that robot in its graveyard. It’s the one stretch where I could see a better movie hiding inside this one.
The Slow Motion
Snyder’s signature technique appears constantly and it’s stopped functioning as emphasis. Slow motion works by contrast. It marks a moment as significant because the surrounding footage isn’t slowed, and once a third of your film is in slow motion there’s no baseline left to measure against. Everything is emphasized and therefore nothing is.
The Wild Bunch invented the technique to make an audience look at something they had been watching comfortably, and it appears in perhaps four sequences in that film. Here it appears in harvesting grain.
I laughed out loud at the grain. Slow-motion wheat is the moment the film stopped being disappointing and started being funny to me, and I doubt Snyder meant it to be.
The photography is also Snyder’s own, and the lens flares, shallow focus and heavy grading applied to every shot produce a film where the audience can’t always see the action they’re supposed to be following.
Shallow focus is the problem. In a wide shot of a battle, a lens that holds one figure sharp and renders everything behind it as light makes the geography impossible. That’s the opposite of what an ensemble siege requires.
An emphasis technique used continuously stops being emphasis. This is true of italics, of short paragraphs, of sentence fragments and of any device that works by contrast. Count your uses. If the device appears more than a handful of times, it’s become your baseline.
The strongest version of any stylistic tool is the one used once. Readers remember the single instance and stop noticing the twentieth. Ask what your technique is marking. If the answer is everything, you’ve removed your ability to mark anything.
Two Cuts Is an Admission
The film was released in December 2023 at around two hours, and a longer version arrived in August 2024 running about an hour longer, with different content and an adult rating. Snyder’s position was that the longer version was always the intended one. Whatever the truth of that, the effect is a work released in a form its maker disowned, followed by a second attempt at the same audience.
The longer version isn’t better. It contains more of everything, including more of the material that wasn’t working, and the additional hour mostly supplies backstory that the shorter version had correctly implied.
It also changes the tone considerably. The longer cut is considerably more violent and includes a sexual assault sequence that’s not in the theatrical version. That’s a significant change to present as a restoration of intent.
That’s the useful observation. A film with a structural problem in its first act doesn’t improve by adding forty minutes to its first act, and length is almost never the fix for a story that hasn’t set up its ending. An extra hour of this is a punishment. The director’s cut defense only works when there’s a vision hiding under the studio’s scissors, and I can’t find one here.
What It Was For
This was commissioned as a franchise. Two films, a series, games and a stated intention to build a universe, announced before the first one had been seen by anybody. That’s the same error as Black Adam and the same error as most of this page. The value proposition was about what would follow, and the first entry was built as a foundation instead of as a work.
The result is a film that ends with a journey beginning. Nothing is resolved, the village isn’t saved, the antagonist survives, and the picture stops because it’s out of runtime instead of because it’s finished.
The second film arrived four months later and delivers the siege. That raises the obvious question about why this was two films. The combined material is a single story with a recruitment, a defense and a resolution, split at the point where a first film should have been ending.
Netflix later scaled the plans back considerably. What remains is an expensive object, two versions of it, and a lesson about building a universe before establishing that anybody wants to visit. The reported budget across both films was around one hundred and sixty-six million dollars. Streaming makes the return difficult to assess from outside, and the scaling back of everything that was announced is the clearest available signal about how it performed.
A first entry has to work as a complete thing, because you may never get the second one. That’s true of trilogies, of series and of anything pitched as a universe. Write book one so that a reader who never reads book two has still read a book. The foundation instinct is the most common structural error in ambitious work. It produces first entries that are all setup, and setup isn’t a reading experience.
If your ending is a journey beginning, you’ve written a prologue at feature length. Find the story inside the material and tell that one first.
Should you watch Rebel Moon?
No. Seven Samurai with the recruitment removed, a visual identity assembled from properties it couldn’t license, slow motion until it stopped meaning anything, and an ending that exists so a second film can begin. The 1 is for the robot knight and for Bae Doona doing her best with nothing. The rest of it feels to me like Netflix paid a hell of a lot for the idea of a franchise and forgot to order a movie.
