Netflix
Zack Snyder’s new film Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire, which is set to release on Netflix on December 21, has debuted to the worst reviews of the filmmaker’s career.
At the time of this writing, Rebel Moon has a 19% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes after 26 reviews. Having seen the film myself, that score feels right, if not a bit high: even as someone who likes Snyder’s work more than most seem to, Rebel Moon is aggressively bad.
So bad, in fact, that I walked out of the theater with about 45 minutes to go — I’d seen all I needed to see to make a determination and the response from my peers makes me feel largely vindicated in that decision.
And I’m someone who genuinely loves Dawn of the Dead, 300, Watchmen, and Man of Steel. I also think Batman v. Superman is better than its reputation and Zack Snyder’s Justice League was also proof that he made a much better movie than the one Warner Bros. ultimately put out.
Rotten Tomatoes
The over-direction, even for Snyder, is jarring (not even kidding, maybe 30-40% of the movie feels like it was shot in slow motion), the plot is painstakingly boring, and the acting — whether it be due to the script or the quality of performance — is dire, as well. It’s the first lead role of Sofia Boutella’s career and Rebel Moon highlights why.
Generally, most of the criticisms focus on the lack of development of the character and urgency of the plot and the borrowing of elements from other sci-fi films without doing anything unique with them.
“Rebel Moon often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth,” said a reviewer for RogerEbert.com.
“Snyder mistakes exposition for world-building, the lugubriously delivered reams of backstory removing the audience from the fantasy rather than immersing them in it,” says The Guardian’s review of the film.
“A movie that feels like a million isolated storyboards without a single thing welding them together,” reported IndieWire.
“The film is too invested in table-setting to be fully enjoyed on its own, at times feeling more like a studio presentation deck than a piece of organic storytelling,” wrote the Los Angeles Times.
Given the economy of Netflix, however, the reviews for Rebel Moon really don’t matter — what does is the viewing hours (which is what’s ultimately eroding the quality of cinema, but that’s a discussion for a different article).
That’s why a movie like Red Notice immediately got a sequel greenlit despite also being terrible: if enough people tune in, Netflix’s algorithm will tell them to make more of it, regardless of what it might be. That’s why it feels like there’s a new season of Love Is Blind once every fiscal quarter.
The sequel, Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver, is already in the can and is set to release on April 19, so that’s coming no matter what the ultimate response of critics and audiences may be.
A third film, however, which Snyder said he’s already developing, seems more unlikely than it did before the film’s release.
Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire is now playing in select theaters and will hit Netflix on Thursday, December 21.