I’m not a Zack Snyder diehard, but unlike a lot of my fellow critics, I still look forward to new Zack Snyder movies. I’ve liked more of his work than not, though I acknowledge that he tends to aim higher than his talent allows. I say that to set up my review of Rebel Moon: Part One - A Child of Fire, a movie that I’ve been looking forward to since it was first announced. Even as other critics started panning it, I held out hope that it was just a bunch of Snyder haters going for low blows.

Having now see this first part of Rebel Moon, trust me when I say that it is not only laughably bad, but the worst movie Mr. Snyder has ever made.

Originally written as a Star Wars movie, Rebel Moon feels like a space menagerie of excerpts pulled from other, better films. The opening sequence feels like a poor rip-off of Inglorious Basterds, there’s another that looks like it was straight out of Avatar, and more. Even worse, the movie suffers from bland characters, confounding edits, and inconsistent exposition. 

There apparently will be an R-rated and much longer director’s cut at some point in the future, which begs the question (other than hitting business objectives) why Netflix didn’t just release the originally intended version in the first place. This thing feels nearly as awkwardly edited as Justice League, but unlike with that notorious mess, Snyder is the only one to blame here (for the record, I liked Zack Snyder’s Justice League). 

Rebel Moon is at best cheesy, and at worst incoherent. New, seemingly lead characters, emerge without any introduction. Visible chunks of the story appear missing. Shit that you can tell Snyder thought would be dramatic and awe-inspiring come off as flat and silly. The writing isn’t good, the dialogue frequently terrible.

What’s most shocking about Rebel Moon however is how lackluster it looks. For all his faults, Snyder has an eye for visual effects, but if you didn’t know this was a Snyder movie going in, you probably would assume some no-name director made this thing. It’s not that there aren’t a lot of space-y backdrops and visuals in play; it’s that the movie at times looks and feels more like a SyFy Channel production than a $166-million epic. 

The action, edited down to a PG-13, is lackluster, too. The movie is not without its moments, but for the most part the action is forgettable. Even the movie’s “climax,” if you can call it that, is disappointing. Perhaps with the right material around it, the action would have worked, but Rebel Moon really needed the action to carry the story. It simply doesn’t.

There are pieces of Rebel Moon that I liked, but they come too few and far between. If you do hate yourself and decide to spend two hours with this movie, watch it with a good friend like I did so you can mock it together.

Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.