Rebel Moon final trailer

[Sapphire Guard]

I mean, anyone can make any judgement for any reason, but if you're going to say 'the bigger problem in this movie is X' I feel like whether you have seen it or not is relevant. Pointing this out does not mean you're not allowed to say anything you like.

[gbaji]

Finally got around to watching part 2. I'll comment below.

Star Wars is very much a space fantasy...

Yup. Which is why I actually like SW a lot. They are absolutely horrible at using tech, but totally own it. Which (IMO) works. It's fantasy/magic set in a space setting. It's not science fiction. And I'm perfectly fine with this. The tagline "Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away..." kinda tells you what you're getting. Is it the past? Is it the future? Do we care? No. We do not. We have space wizards and pew pews and great characters in grand conflicts. That all works (when they remember that this is their model).

One of Rebel Moon's problems is that it lacks internal consistent within its own setting, and the hand-farming techniques being especially notable in this regard. It's noticeable enough that Snyder included a line to lampshade it 'we do this extremely inefficient thing for spiritual reasons,' only that merely creates more problems because it just sounds dumb and dogmatic to a modern English-speaking audience and undercuts support for the people who the audience is supposed to be rooting for.

Yeah. That bit bugged me as well. And the explanation was a very very obvious lampshade. Hard to see this as anything other than "I wanted to show a long dramatic montage of folks harvesting wheat by hand". And to be fair, from an artistic pov, it kinda.... worked? He's contrasting the "evil empire" with their machines and weapons and crisp uniforms, with "people of the earth". So.... I get it. Kinda (more on that later).

It's pretty normal stuff for planetary romance/space opera. The tone is darker, and the cinematography is very stylized, but there's nothing terribly weird about the setup. It's really only the one village that is deliberately low tech, which is explained quite clearly on the film; they're a pacifist religious sect doing it for religious reasons. This religion isn't terribly detailed, but it clearly involves things like fertility rituals and hospitality to strangers, which is enough to be getting on with. The rest of the galaxy is frequently dirt poor, but not deliberately anachronistic.

Yeah. Their "religion" seemed to be pretty much "we harvest grain by hand", and pretty much nothing else. Don't seem to have any issues picking up weapons and fighting (so no. Not pacifist). Don't seem to have any particular moral rules at all (didn't notice any specific prohibitions present in their society in terms of drinking, sex, whatever). Pretty much it was just "these are the good guy/victims".


Honestly, the bit that bothered me even more was the idea that, given the size of the village and the surrounding area, that they were even capable of producing enough food to matter here. I very much got a"view of farming communities from someone who's never actually seen or worked in one" feel from this. We got the Hollywood version of a farming village. Which... Ok. I get it. But yeah. I don't think they realize the volume of actual land involved in farming the kinds of volume of food/grain that would even be a blip on the Empires radar here. I didn't have too much of an issue with this in the first film (there were so many other problems) because it was quite obvious that the "give us all your food" wasn't really about the food, but about manhandling the village in the hopes of drawing out the rebels.

But then, in film 2, they use the food as a shield to prevent bombardment ("cause they need/want the grain"). Um... Except they really shouldn't, so that should not have actually been a deterrent at all. So there's that.

Having said that, I actually kinda enjoyed this one. I mean, it was pretty much one long scene of "getting ready for the battle" and then one long scene of the battle itself, so not a lot of opportunity to screw this up really. As an action sequence, it was beautifully filmed (played to Snyder's strengths here). Yes, it had the usual trope of "guys armed with rifles run into melee range to fight with guys with melee weapons" bit. It wasn't "Legends of Tomorrow" level bad with this (seriously, watch that series and this happens like.... every single time), but it was noticable in several spots. And then, of course, my first thought when the "rebel fleet" arrives, was "Um... You guys could have really helped out if you'd showed up like 30 minutes ago", but sure... dramatic arrival.

The entire sequence was a pretty stock "set up dramatic tension, then resolve" over and over. Each sub battle was done this way. It was formulaic as heck (even to the point of who died being quite predicatble). Each small victory, followed by a "uh oh" new thing, then resolved, then another, etc. So I got the arrival of the rebel ships when they got there (that was the last "what do we do about this?" moment). But... and this is not at all a criticism, this absolutely is what Snyder does best. Standard diialogue? Sucks. Characterization? Sucks. World building? So so. But... showing escalating violent action and dramatic character actions/dialogue within that action with beautifully integrated and interacting scenes? That's what he's really really good at. And it shows in this film IMO.

He actually stuck to his core skill set here. So yeah. I appreciated it for that fact. Doesn't make it a great film (cause it's part two in a three part trilogy that is otherwise somewhat disjointed and nearly offensively deriviative), but it did make it an enjoyable couple hours. So like 10x better than the first film.

We're supposed to root for Kora despite her actions in that scene because she clearly feels that her actions were abominable and is fighting against the Motherworld in no small part to atone for them. Or at least, that's how I understood that scene. Far be it from me to imply that Rebel Moon has well-written characters.

Yeah. Remember when I said that Snyder sucks at characterization? I mean. I get where he's going here. We need to show why Kora is who she is. We know she was raised and indoctrinated to be the right hand woman of the big bad. We know that something happened to make her reject that. But... And look. I'm going to give Snyder credit for "going there". Most writers would have had Kora realize the horror of what she was being told to do, and either fleeing on the spot (shooting her way out like she did) or even rescuing the princess instead of killing her (or otherwise using her actions there to set up the whole "the pricess is still alive" bit). The audience would see her as a sympathetic character who "didn't know any better" due to her upbringing, but then, when it really really mattered and she was faced with an absolutely evil choice, she choose to reject the evil.

But... That's not what happened here. She does the evil thing and *then* changes her mind. Which, is kinda 5 seconds too late IMO. And yeah, that entire sequence is just akward, and I can almost imagine the thought process: I really want her to actually be the one who killed the princess, so she can be wracked by guilt. So she has to do the deed. But I also need her to have a dramatic refutation of that act, so.... I can't just have her go off to her quarters, think about things, decide this wasn't what she wanted and then start working against her adopted father (you know, like how most people might actually do things). Nope. Must have a dramtic shootout and escape scene right there. Which, yeah. Makes zero sense.

It shows a lack of understanding of human nature. People either choose not to do the evil act, and try to fight against it right then and there *or* they do the evil act, and then sometime later, after reflection and feeling the weight of that decision and action on them over time, they decide to do something against it (we see this with the classic "embedded in the evil organizataion, but helping the good guys with intel/plans because he just can't take all the evil around him anymore and wants to help" character). But how this was done was just... wrong. As much as it would have been less dramatic, it would have been far more realistic if she'd continued serving the evil guy for some time after that, but realized her heart was no longer in it, and she could not handle what she'd done, so she steals a ship and goes off and hides. That would have worked perfectly and set up the character (and even perfectly explained her choice of location to exile herself to). But... not as dramatic and immediate I guess.

So yeah. That sequence was by far the worst component in the film. It was just... bad. And frankly, utterly unnecessary. Literally replaced a realistic sequence of events with a less realistic one, with the added bonus of also being far far less likely to have worked (how the heck does she manage to escape?). And again. unnecessary. She's already shot the princess. The royal family is already dead. She has no reason to take action right then. My assumption is that in part 3, we'll discover that her disruption of things and flight (and having people have to go chase her), will turn out to have been the key distraction that allowed some loyalist to sneak the princess away while everyone else was chasing Kora. And this will be used in a "your action, despite making zero sense at the time, actually saved everyone. So you are a hero! Yay..." bit of dialogue or something. Which.... yeah. Hamfisted as heck. Just a prediction.


Also...

Spoiler

Show

Let's face it. The whole "Oh. The princess is actually alive" bit was so predictable as to be absurd. I mean, the robot guy literally has no reason for being in the series if there isn't going to be a member of the royal family found. So... Yeah. But the way they reveal it is kinda like stepping on their own story. Just... off. It's like someone just skipped the part of writing class when the whole "how to pace events in a story" was taught.

[OracleofWuffing]

He actually stuck to his core skill set here. So yeah. I appreciated it for that fact. Doesn't make it a great film (cause it's part two in a three part trilogy that is otherwise somewhat disjointed and nearly offensively deriviative), but it did make it an enjoyable couple hours.

Thanks to Pitch Meeting, it has been brought to my attention that Snyder is aiming for a total of four-to-six movies in this trilogy.

I have not decided if that's a good thing.

[BloodSquirrel]

I still haven't gotten through part II. I've gotten almost an hour in, but it's been a real slog. It feels like nothing has actually happened since the start of the movie.

So far, the plot structure of the whole project has been atrocious. Far too much of the genuine drama feels completely underdeveloped and absent from the main story because it's all been shunted off into dispassionately narrated flashbacks. The epic space opera full of intergalactic politics that Snyder wants to tell is completely at odds with the basic structure of The Seven Samurai, and he was in such a rush to get the team together than the individual members' character arcs got squished. The main villain for the first two parts is an underdeveloped lackey of the real villain, who hasn't shown up yet.

Also, people have been ragging on the princess-murder scene, but the prince-guy standing on the balcony with his thumb up his ass while he watches his mother jump off to her death was so much viscerally worse for me. What the color-degraded **** are you doing? Stop her you useless ****!

I was more positive on Part I than a lot of other people were, but this whole thing is looking more and more like a disaster.