Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon Part One is just a surface-level, sketchy Star Wars
Make it through the entirety of Netflix’s new sci-fi adventure Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire, and you’ll be greeted with the five most horrifying words in the English language: “Director of Photography: Zack Snyder.”
After his studio career of machismo excess and sepia stylism ground to a halt in the wake of his departure from Justice League, the man behind Man of Steel and Watchmen was resurrected by the powers that be at Netflix. After shooting and lensing 2021’s Army of the Dead for the streamer, he produced its prequel, Army of Thieves, while working on Rebel Moon, a two-part movie he’d really like to see as a sprawling multimedia franchise.
It would be great to report that the first installment, Rebel Moon Part One: A Child of Fire, heralded a bold new sci-fi epic storming onto the scene. But everyone but the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fanboys would be better off immediately ejecting this turgid whimper of a movie into the farthest reaches of the galaxy.
I’ll admit I went into my screening with a bit of masochistic glee, ready to be shoved into the usual Snyder-orchestrated blender of digitally enhanced fight sequences, slo-mo, and bared heroic abs. I’m not immune to the charms of this polarizing auteur’s filmography: For all his faults, he’s been one of the only superhero-movie directors actually attempting to bring the visual language of comic books to the big screen. For every 10 ponderous, bombastic moments of drudgery in his oeuvre, he’s offered at least one grace note of magnificently realized splash-page maximalism. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that he’d deliver a space fantasy with the right kind of pop-art flair.
Alas, left to his own devices — and without a collaborative DP to bring his
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