Zack Snyder pitched his passion project – a Star Wars and Seven Samurai homage – to different studios for years before it was eventually picked up by Netflix and its deep pockets. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire, and its second part, due out in spring, have a combined budget of $166 (£131) million. With such illustrious inspiration, and Snyder, the man behind 300 and Watchmen, on writing, directing and cinematographer duties, expectations should be high.
But it’s like someone gave those millions to a five-year-old boy to indulge his fan-fiction fantasies without any semblance of originality, coherence or pride. This is not so much an homage as an obscenely lazy copycat space opera, where the plot, characters and even lexicon are numbingly familiar.
Kora (Sofia Boutella), a perfectly-sculpted protagonist of questionable parentage, is living in a remote farming community on a moon with a scarlet sunrise to rival that of Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine. But the territory is threatened by visitors from the Empire, ahem, sorry the Imperium. Kora does a strong line in smouldering glares straight out of the Zoolander playbook, and speaks almost exclusively in platitudes like “Kindness is a virtue worth dying for” and “What happened to honour?”. She also has a backstory with which we are not so much drip-fed as waterboarded every half an hour as she stares moodily into the horizon and the music swells.
After a lot of tedious conversations about grain harvest that recall the interminable Trade Federation talks in Star Wars: Episode 2, Kora flees with handsome farmhand Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) to assemble a band of misfits from various planets to fight the Motherland. A rebel alliance, one might say. First, they find a ship via cheeky bounty hunter Kai (Charlie Hunnam), in, yes, a cantina with an array of strange creatures from galaxies far, far away. They are joined by a degenerate general, a sibling warrior duo, a samurai wielding “laser swords” and, last but not least, the hunky Prince Tarak (Staz Nair), who rides a griffin and looks good bare-chested and baby-oiled leaping in slow motion on and off cliffs. Oh God, there’s so much slo-mo.
There’s an enjoyably villainous turn from Ed Skrein as Atticus Noble, the SS-style military man (cut-glass British accent, naturally) who wages war around the galaxy on behalf of the true tyrant (the Darth to his emperor, if you like).
And I’ve nothing against slo-mo per se (or indeed, baby oil). But marshalled in this way, with such staleness and with no fresh context or attempt at anything beyond the barest characterisation, this assembly of clichés and cardboard cut-outs are less than the sum of their parts. It’s outrageously, brazenly boring stuff. Please, spare us Part 2.