After what feels like deliberate torture on my part trying to put it off, I finally said “Fuck it, let’s see what the hell Zack Snyder cooked up with “Rebel Moon”. And yes, I’m reviewing both parts as one premium package.
Or should I say inferior package because CRUCIFIED CHRIST ON A CROISSANT, this is Snyder’s style run amok in the worst way possible.
For dousing itself in such a maximalist color palette with ugly orange-reddish-brown hues contrasting against chiaroscuro lighting and a large scope, you have to wonder where that gargantuan $166 million budget went into if this PS3-shaded B-movie render was all that could be agreed upon. Worldbuilding seems like a missed opportunity here and the production design is just a myriad sea of placeholders, ripped clean of any recognizable traits to help anything stand out especially since, despite tiny superficial differences, EVERY SINGLE WORLD LOOKS THE GODDAMN SAME. The aural and visual elements intentionally crafted by Synder to establish a specific tone has no ambience or atmosphere and the raw half-assed nature of its presentation? Facepalming.
I can praise his camerawork, at least, for being consistent but even that looks and feels largely unremarkable. We get a cool visual effect or eye-popping screensaver image every separate, what, 45 minutes and the rest just look and feel recycled as the editing.
Only one of Junkie XL’s loud, bombastic orchestral scores stood out to me throughout the entire affair, not that the music in general was bad but the sound design trumps how repetitive the percussion becomes. Costumes and makeup are given little attention to detail to where everyone looks caked or glued on, the action scenes are ineptly choreographed and burdened with jump-cuts that, for once, aren’t as annoying as the slow-motion sputtering the pacing with all the grace of a malfunctioning droid, the blistering array of VFX is dogwater on your eyes and every character can best be identified as either a rote, generic RPG or NPC; trust me, the two aren’t that mutually exclusive.
Anthony Hopkins continues to make for an excellent hype man while Ed Skrein pours his all into being a weirdly muted chaotic version of Vader. The rest of the cast are just as wooden as the dialogue given to them depressingly.
Both parts of the story combined feel like the early released version 1.0 of Final Fantasy XIV: so obsessed with being as grand and grim and epic as possible that whatever ambition was promised by its expansive universe collapses under the weight of its own hollowness, making the extensive laundry list of cliches feel like an exhausting parade to the mind cemetery and that’s when it’s NOT trying to imitate so many space opera clones like the second coming of Grass Simulator or blatantly rip off the template of the Seven Samurai. It’s just a largely derivative botchjob when spliced together and the clunky, episodic plot structure only heightens that lack of narrative compensation due to the absence of any defined focus. Characters don’t matter, emotions are meaningless and whatever passes for themes or substance might as well be brain dead.
Looming senses of dread are practically nonexistent as both parts actively go out of their way to sidestep any lingering seeds of tension and cut corners in the phoniest manners known to man, denying you the catharsis of a proper emotional attachment or moment that might convince you to give a shit about anything going on. All tell, no show; this is just a shittier version of Artemis Fowl only with double the amount of filler, no meaningful themes to dissect and more tenuous plot holes large enough to orbit a black hole. Seriously, the logic behind this tale pushes credulity when you realize the whole war started over a ton of wheat and by the time Part Two tries crowbarring any of that missing substance from Part One in an last ditch effort to save the unstable narrative from ruin, it damn near breaks the “lore” into pieces.
Why does the empire want to take the surplus food from this one village when it supposedly has many others to take from? Why does the empire not just attack right now? Why should Kora even have any concern for them when her beef is more so with the empire than the safety of said village? Why does said bloody village actually matter? Nearly 50 years have passed since the first Star Wars movie revolutionized blockbuster theatrics AND basic, rudimentary storytelling in screenwriting; there is NO REASON to STILL be screwing this up.
And once again, the 2018 Predator and BVS Deja Vu continues because both interconnected film’s story execution is both begrudgingly paper-thin and so mildly overcomplicated to such a baffling degree, you’d think Snyder was actively trying to find the longest, most painfully convoluted path he can take to fuel this obsession with length and replay value; it’s not healthy. Fatigue bubbles over really quickly before we even get past the one hour mark and it forcibly has to pad out the “And then” method for minutes at a time in order to not knuckle the weight of its own strenuous, anticlimactic runtime.
But apparently, I forgot this is what Zack’s directing is like when he goes full prima Donna. Gone is the meditative, somberness I praised him for in the Snyder Cut; everything here is blunted, lethargic, formulaic with no synthetic bells or smoke or mirrors attached. He’s more of a stylist than a poet, obviously, but it is damning how backwards all this feels.
This so-called “elaborate” space opera universe Zack Snyder crafted feels more like an excuse for him to just huff his own farts, like it was created for his amusement alone and no one else’s. Putting this back to back alongside Madame Web actually makes these films look more anemic and negligible compared to that; you managed to be worse than MADAME WEB. What the fuck!
