Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” immediately announces its presence as a giant mound of derivative fertilizer in the opening moments, when we hear the clichéd sounds of an Important Story Choir as an intergalactic dreadnought emerges from a Freudian-imagery portal and we get a voice-over telling us about the evil and oppressive Motherworld that is seeking to control the entire galaxy and kill all the rebels, that kind of thing.
Unless this is a parody of “Star Wars,” it looks like we’re in for a long and ponderous, CGI-dominated slog filled with stock characters, slow-mo battle sequences and interminable flashbacks designed to give clarity to a murky and convoluted story.
Spoiler alert: It’s not a parody. We should be so lucky.
Clocking in at an interminable 134 minutes, “Rebel Moon” devotes an entire movie to the Assemble-the-Team part of the story that usually takes about a half-hour in a typical action film, whether it’s a Western or a heist film or set in outer space. (“Rebel Moon — Part Two, the Scargiver” is set for release on April 19, 2024.)
Our journey begins on the remote moon world of Veldt, which is set against the backdrop of a Saturn-looking planet that looks like something you’d see in that Sphere deal in Las Vegas. The good people of Veldt have a kind of 1960s hippie commune vibe, as they farm the land and enjoy the spoils of their labor — but their idyllic existence is shattered with the arrival of a Motherland ship filled with Stormtroopers, I mean, Imperium soldiers, as well as non-violent robots who are tasked with doing manual labor. (One of them sounds just like Anthony Hopkins, who sounds like he’s imitating C-3PO’s grandfather, though I don’t think C-3PO had a grandfather.)
In an unsettling scene in which a group of soldiers attempt to gang-rape a local girl, a hero arises in the form of Sofia Boutella’s Kora, a newcomer to the village who as it turns out is a legendary warrior with a complicated past that she keeps having to explain in extended flashback sequences. After Kora wipes out a dozen or so soldiers, it’s on: She has no choice but to lead the rebellion against the Motherland.
Time to draft a team of warriors! Charlie Hunnam is the Han Solo-esque mercenary starship pilot Kai; Djimon Hounsou is a hard-drinking gladiator who was once the great Gen. Titus; Staz Nair is Tara, a fierce and noble imprisoned warrior who gains his freedom by taming and riding a hilariously cheesy-looking giant griffin, and Doona Bae is the cyborg sword master Nemesis, whom we meet while she’s doing battle with an enormous spider-humanoid (poor Jena Malone!) who has kidnapped a child because she’s mad about her infertility, I kid you not.
There’s also Cleopatra Coleman and Ray Fisher as the sibling rebel leaders Devra and Darrian Bloodaxe, who sport such elaborate badass looks that it must take them like three hours every morning to do hair and makeup. All this recruiting takes us from one planet and outpost to another, most of them rendered in murky and unconvincing fashion. We feel we’re more in Green Screen Land than outer space.
We’d be remiss not to mention the main villain in “Rebel Moon,” the psychopathic and sadistic Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who wears a uniform with distinct Third Reich influences and sports a haircut that indicates he might be a big fan of Jim Carrey’s look in “Dumb and Dumber.” What a drooling, creepy, evil weirdo.
“Rebel Moon” ends with the promise, or maybe it’s a threat, of a great and final battle to come. In April. Whether we want it or not.
