Rebel Moon (full duology)

This... was the most painful movie-watching experience I've had in years. A duology consisting of painful dialogue, bad writing choices, and direction clashing with the writing so badly that it defuses any tension or care for the characters and replaces it with just agony and misery. This duology has a baffling amount of choices made that don't work together at all. Let's get into Rebel Moon Part 1 and Part 2!

PLOT: Split up weirdly.

The best comparison I can make is to Star Wars as the first Star Wars movie is the perfect example of great pacing (and I mean New Hope, not Phantom Menace). An exciting first scene to grab the audience, then followed by natural exposition through Luke getting the droids and meeting Ben, followed by a suspenseful scene of them going to Mos Eisley and meeting Han, then followed by a continuous loop of each element makes A New Hope exciting and engaging all the way through. What the first film tries to do is copy this except it stops at the point where Darth Vader fights Obi-Wan and proceeds to end there. Then, the last half of that movie is stretched thin into the 2nd movie. That is why I think these movies are split up weirdly. If this was one movie, I wouldn't question it and would instead probably think it more engaging. But, since it's two movies, I force myself to separate each one and treat it as separate movies. The first movie struggles to engage me because it's all exposition and meeting new characters while the second one struggles to engage me because it's just nonstop action and characters I don't care about dying. This film is just straight up a worse version of Seven Samurai (Magnificent Seven in the west).

CHARACTERS: Cutouts.

Each character is one of the characters from Seven Samurai mixed with a trait from a character from Star Wars. The main character is a former soldier turned rebel like Obi-Wan. Her love interest is a hopeful optimist like Luke, which asks a lot of questions but we're ignoring that. They introduce a loveable scoundrel like Han played by Charlie Hunnam. However, what ends up happening is none of these characters leave an impact because we hear them talk about their problems rather than seeing it. The second movie shows us some of their troubles, but has them monologue over the whole thing, eliminating what could be beautiful scenes with no dialogue featuring the actors emotionally conveying powerful scenes. Instead, it's painful and dull because it lacks any actual emotion.

SHOTS: Okay, it looks kinda cool.

...is what I would say if anything was a different color besides brown or smudged with brown. Baffling as it is, Zack Snyder has yet to learn that things can be other colors. It's incredibly beautiful cinematography covered in a lens smeared with brown crap that muddles everything together.

SOUND: Not gonna lie, got annoyed quick.

This film has a great soundtrack until it gets reused a thousand times. For the samurai lady, they reuse her soundtrack like fifty times and it's repetitive and annoying. This is by far the most egregious point because it's solid music that's just reused too damn much.

WRITING: Ooh, boy, it's bad.

Monologue after monologue after dialogue after dialogue after scene of Anthony Hopkins expositing makes this movie feel empty. There's too much wordy dialogue in this movie and not enough showing the damn emotions. Let us feel something for five freakin' seconds instead of bombarding you with dialogue detailing how important the "Slain King" played by Cary Elwes is. For the love of God, this movie needs to cut dialogue and show us what happened.

LITTLE THINGS: The production.

Zack Snyder's most famous movie was a little piece called Zack Snyder's Justice League, a four hour recut of a movie he made called Justice League, which had been redone and finished by Joss Whedon originally. But, Warner Brothers, the production company, let him come back and finish his movie. This movie was decently reviewed and did okay on streaming. However, this mindset of a "Snyder Cut" never left minds and deeply affected the production of this movie. With Netflix wanting a Star-Wars-Killer, they had to make this movie PG-13 and make sure it was watchable in a short timeframe. Most Star Wars movies are two hours, hence these movies were cut down to two hours each. Now, a four hour cut of each film will be releasing next year. I want to bring this up because it's the worst way to expect a film production to go. He goes in expecting to shoot a R-rated four hour movie that's then recut and re-rated to PG-13 at two hours long. To expect this film to be good at all was a pipe dream. I will not be re-reviewing the new cut, however, unless there's a substantial change in quality. Even then, I am perfectly fine never watching the recuts. MAKE ONE GOOD FILM INSTEAD OF MAKING A SUBPAR RECUT FILM THAT CAN BE RE-RELEASED AT ITS INTENDED RUNTIME.

VERDICT: Pain and misery.

While I think these movies are messy, they are not the worst movies I have ever seen. Agonizing to watch? Hell yeah. Boring? Also yes. But, what I see here is an at-least visually interesting movie that is covered in sepia filters and given tons of slow-mo, bad writing, and confusing direction. Zack needs to let someone else write his movies and take a serious cut to his ego, because this is by far the worst of his films I've ever seen.

SCORE:

Part 1: 3/10, a slog of a film.

Part 2: 2/10, blind dumb action with no purpose.