Zack Snyder is not a director.
And Rebel Moon is not a movie.
So, Zack Snyders Star Wars is finally out and it sucks, who would've thought.
(I'm not kidding here, Snyder was in talks back in 2013 to make a Seven Samurai-inspired Star Wars-movie, and Akira Kurosawas famed Seven Samurai basically is a recruitment film about a village that hires a band of misfits to fight off evil overlord villains, which is pretty much the plot of Rebel Moon, in which we get a story about 7 space-rebels, no less. So yeah, Rebel Moon is Zack Snyders Star Wars.)
However. Zack Snyder is not a director. And Rebel Moon is not a movie.
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Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (US 2023, Zack Snyer) ★☆☆☆☆
Zack Snyder is an audio visual artist collaging colorful images into what he thinks makes a movie, but mostly doesn't. He only made one actual movie in his carreer, and that would be the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The rest of his Oevre is just visually crafted image composition in which storytelling takes a backseat in favor of supposedly "mindblowing", maximalist imagery.
This kind of filmmaking sometimes works. In Watchmen, for instance, it's not Snyder doing any work as a moviemaker, a storyteller using moving images. Instead, in Watchmen, he's solely serving as a cinematographer slavishly constraining himself to the source material. The film works because the actual storytelling completely comes from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons monumental, genre-exploding comic, which Snyder simply and literally copies image by image, in detail, with no own contribution or directional decisions whatsoever. The same can be said of his adaption of 300, albeit he added some own contributions in that one. But this kind of visual craft is not directing a movie.
A film directors job is to marry visual and narrative crafting into one unified vision of how to tell a certain story. Snyder surely does the visual part, and it's debatable if he's good at it or not, but he completely fails and doesn't give a shit about the narrative part. This is why Snyder can work, if you confine him to the role of a visual artist in a directors chair, to recreate the narrative work of others in his maximalist visual style. You may sneer at this visual overload, smearing overly ornamental and convoluted images on screen, but i have to admit that i do have a soft spot for this kind of maximalism, if done right.
This one, however, is not only "directed" by Zack Snyder, but also produced, written, and photographed by the guy, and he simply lacks the skill to unify those aspects into one clear narrative vision. In Rebel Moon, Snyder finally and absolutely goes all the way back to the horrible, terrible, outragously and baffoonishly bad italian scifi-trash of the 70s, with ridiculous space nazis and ripoffs at every corner, no original thought anywhere, unintentionally funny moments caused either by baffling narrative decisions or those unbearable moments of overly grim, overly dramatic earnestness in which no character, ever, shows a sign of humanity or, gasp, smiles once in a while. Rebel Moon is what Luigi Cozzis infamous 1977 Star Crash would look like, if he'd have had a threethousand billion million dollar budget in 2023, except for David Hasselhoff, we get a bunch of overacting b-listers that either present a constant hyperactive face-version of a mimical marry-go-round, or are allowed to show only two face-expressions like the main character (painful-grim and vengeful-grim). At least, those italian trash scifi-flicks were fun, in their trashy, crappy, shitty, no-fucks-given way. But fun seems to be a word that has no place in the Snyderverse, at all.
Snyder bloats this narrative trainwreck of a movie with big budget blockbuster FX, trying to paint over his lack of directional finesse with broad smears of CGI-excess, which is just maximalism as visual deception of the audience. The result of this are images that are, in all their maximalist excess, stay hollow and empty, two hours where no image stands out because everything in this movie is turned up to 11 while being flattened by a hilariously simplistic script that pretends to drip of meaning.
In a few (sometimes painful) scenes the movie introduces a robot (voiced by Anthony Hopkins), suggesting it will become an important supporting character akin to C3PO or something, a comic relief in this overly grim film, and sure enough, the robot shoots a bad bad Nazi in the climax of the first outburst of action in an actually pretty cool move — and then he just runs off, not to be seen again until the very end.
This is emblematic for the whole movie, which is just a collage of more or less cool scenes, only loosely connected by the minimal story. Characters and their decisions simply don't matter here, so Snyder throws them around willy nilly without coherence or, you know, sense. This is a moviemaker with no understanding of narrative balancing and who doesn't give a damn about how to build tensions between plot points, characters and their story arcs.
And finally, while the movie is not truly AI-generated, as far as I know, it absolutely could've been.
Rebel Moon not only looks like all the maximalist synthetic images coming out of Midjourney from a compository perspective, but also from a kinetic perspective. You see, in video GenAI, those generated videos more often than not don't really show actual moving things. They show static images, people looking at something in barely moving backgrounds, slow zooms, but rarely actual walking, passing, shifting stuff that changes it's position or is moving it's body (and if they do, the body compositions break apart to hilarious or surreal effect). Rebel Moon often looks exactly like that, and it's Snyders typical excess in slow motion binding it together, giving this a kind of synthetic visual coherence, if you want to call it that.
Zack Snyder is not a director, and this is not a movie. He's a collagist of what was called cinegraphs a few years ago, GIF-versions of moving still images, and in Rebel Moon, he just threw a bunch of those Cinegraphs into Midjourney and prompted it with Star Wars x Seven Samurai x Space Nazis x every SciFi-trope ever.
The best you can say about Rebel Moon is that it's testament of our times: A flat collection of empty images, pumped up by steroidal CGI-maximalism full of hot air and when you scratch the surface of bits and bytes you find: Nothing.
Honestly haven't tried to watch it yet, but may there be more than one way of directing movies and telling atories?
I think the biggest mistake about Rebel Moon is the "This is Netflix's Star Wars" marketing. It puts your expectations on the wrong track. A better comparison would be "300 in space". If you watch it as a ridiculously over-stylized painting of a future-ancient battle, it just works. Loved it.