Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire
- -When a peaceful colony on the edge of the galaxy finds itself threatened by the armies of the tyrannical Regent Balisarius, they dispatch Kora, a young woman with a mysterious past, to seek out warriors from neighboring planets to help them take a stand.
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Zack Snyder’s latest film ventures far and wide in order to plant revolutionary seeds.
Though sadly pushed into a PG-13 rating, Rebel Moon Part One is an entertaining science fiction film with excellent worldbuilding and visuals. Keep reading!
The Positive:
The world-building and visuals work together to give the story an interesting backdrop.
The Drawbacks
The movie is blatantly inconsistent, so it makes perfect sense that an extended version exists.
In brief:
In recent years, Zack Snyder has emerged as one of the most divisive and controversial directors. We are talking about a director who is passionate about energetic filmmaking, iconic iconography, and slow motion. The amount of hate the director receives on the internet shows that not everyone agrees with his approach, but despite my appreciation for his work from a cinematic perspective, I also support him as a filmmaker who wants to tell his own stories and has a distinct style—qualities that are sadly lacking in today’s blockbuster scene. His most recent film, Rebel Moon, carries on this tradition.
Plot:
The vicious admiral of the belligerent Imperium, Atticus Noble, lands on the backwater moon of Veldt on behalf of the Mother-World, an intergalactic empire fueled by centuries of conquest and warfare. He tells them that the brothers Darrian and Devra Bloodaxe are leading a group of rebels that he is searching for, and that they will need cereal from the village. The chieftain, Sindri, says no. Then, before he arrives in ten weeks, Noble murders him and gives the order for the people to supply enough grain, which means the village will not have enough to survive. After Noble leaves, not many soldiers remain in the village.
One of the villagers named Kora finds most of the soldiers preparing to rape another villager in a group; she confronts them and ends their lives. She warns the villagers that Noble will return and massacre them in order to get what he wants if they do not fight back.
Kora leaves for Providence, the nearby harbor town, carrying Gunnar, a villager who had previously sold grain to the Bloodaxes’ uprising. She informs him that she was once a soldier for the Imperium during their travels and that after General Balisarius killed her family and destroyed her home planet, she was taken in and raised by him.
The Imperium’s conquests were supposed to come to an end with Mother-World princess Issa, so she was promoted to be her bodyguard. However, she was unable to keep an eye on her during her coronation, when the entire royal family was killed. Balisarius then proclaimed himself regent before the Imperium began to conquer again.
Upon their arrival in Providence, the two encounter Kai, a smuggler and criminal who offers to accompany them to recruit Titus, a disgraced Imperium general, to lead the mother-world defense. While traveling, Kai leads them to find two more fighters: Nemesis, a skilled swordswoman with robotic arms, and Tarak, a beast tamer. Titus is soon discovered by the group in a drunken stupor. To defend them, too, Titus agrees. They later meet their commanders on the planet Sharaan, where they make use of Gunnar’s previous knowledge of handling the Bloodaxes’ rebellion. Darrian offers to defend the community and brings a small band of rebels with him, but Devra feels that fighting Noble’s dreadnought, the King’s Gaze, is pointless and a waste of their resources. After they depart from the planet, Noble appears and wipes out every resident for having aided the rebels.
Kai informs Kora that he is inspired by her desire to give up his illegal life as a smuggler and that he needs to drop off one last shipment in order to do so. After leading the group to a trade station where Noble’s ship has docked, he betrays them to Noble and says he always planned to do so in order to collect the bounty on their heads. Kora is revealed by Noble to be Arthelais, a sought-after man who betrayed the Imperium. When Kai orders that Gunnar immobilize Kora, he kills Kai and releases Kora instead. And the other fighters are free too. There is a battle that results in the deaths of Noble and Darrian. The warriors who have survived then travel back to Veldt.
Noble is resurrected by Motherworld forces after conversing with Balisarius on an astral plane. He is then given the order to put an end to the uprising against him and bring Kora to him alive so he can personally execute her.
Star Performance:
Even in these introductions, which are incredibly cool for each character because Snyder obviously loves them, it is evident that a great deal more dialogue is left out of this version. Upon their introduction, some characters remain isolated from one another for the duration of the movie. The film needs more time with the characters, so we can only hope that the director’s cut can arrive soon.
Even so, despite the characters’ limited screen time to develop a relationship, the actors do a fantastic job with the material. I think this is the role in which Boutella has landed her biggest to date. The actress plays the role of the emotional one quite well, even though she has a reputation for being very physical. She plays the main role in the film, and she does it with a confidence that we have never seen before. Regarding Ed Skrein, he does a fantastic job depicting the evil Admiral Noble, and a lot of people will quickly see how ironic his name is.