‘Rebel Moon’ Is Such an Egregious Star Wars Knockoff, It’s Embarrassing
Putting “Part One” in a movie’s title simply forewarns audiences that they’re about to watch an incomplete affair—a misguided decision that plagued Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1,
and Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One. Zack Snyder falls into the same trap with the excessively punctuated Rebel Moon—Part One: A Child of Fire, the maiden chapter of a two-film science fiction saga (in theaters Dec. 15; on Netflix Dec. 21) whose lack of originality is only matched by its humorlessness. Cribbing so liberally from Star Wars that George Lucas deserves hefty royalties, this misbegotten attempt at creating a new out-of-this-world Snyderverse is merely a knockoff dressed up in its director’s stylistic signatures, and all the more depressing for not even properly concluding its painfully shallow tale.
While Lucas’ Episode One was famously inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, Snyder instead mimics Lucas as well as the Japanese master’s Seven Samurai (and its progeny, The Magnificent Seven and A Bug’s Life). This appears to be some sort of deliberate double homage, but it speaks to the threadbare derivativeness of this endeavor, whose plot and designs come across as faded photocopies of photocopies.