Rebel Moon final trailer

[Tyndmyr]

Sure, either way, that alone isn't that exciting.

Plenty of action movies feel real generic. Gotta have something beyond a punch-up to make it actually special.

[Palanan]

Just watched the trailer. Looks like someone’s first homebrew campaign, given a big-budget cinematic treatment and a jarringly out-of-place rock soundtrack.

Target demographic seems pretty clearly in the mid-to-late-teens. Loud, splashy, packed with action and every known cliché. A mighty eh.

[Clertar]

"ChatGPT, give me the perfect script for an action blockbuster."

[Dragonus45]

"ChatGPT, give me the perfect script for an action blockbuster."

And thus The Marvels was written.

[Errorname]

Reviews are in, and apparently it's a complete mess. Which, y'know what, good. The worst thing this movie could be was mid, if it's a trainwreck at least it's interesting.

[Trixie_One]

He's also threatening a 3 hour long director's cut.

Snyder is such a weird guy to me to evaluate. Not helped than in the heightened discourse of today he's basically the messiah or satan incarnate.

He made Sucker Punch which is might well be the film I utterly despised the most. It's a hateful, nasty piece of trash. I had a significantly better time watching Transformers: The Last Knight and that's supposed to be by far the worst of the Bay-formers. .

He made 300 which has issues but I put many of those down to the source material as it's pretty much shot for shot to the original panels of the comic. Only thing you can question is him choosing to be so slavish in the adaptation.

He made Watchmen which again issues, but dang some of it really is genuinely excellent, and honnestly I don't see how you could do some of it better with another live action adaptation. The efficient and effective recapping of the history of the heroes that came before set to the Times they are a Changing is absolutely flawless. Someone who can put that good a sequence together has to have something going for them.

[KorvinStarmast]

He made Watchmen which again issues, but dang some of it really is genuinely excellent, and honnestly I don't see how you could do some of it better with another live action adaptation. The efficient and effective recapping of the history of the heroes that came before set to the Times they are a Changing is absolutely flawless. Someone who can put that good a sequence together has to have something going for them.

It was a good movie, but there were some moments of "man, he didn't capture what the book was after" ... I really liked the graphic novels and had great hopes for the movie.

[Dragonus45]

It was a good movie, but there were some moments of "man, he didn't capture what the book was after" ... I really liked the graphic novels and had great hopes for the movie.

It was less he didn't capture it and more that he just had a different take on the material so he didn't even try and capture it. Which is valid enough as adaptation goes, it's not the first time and it wouldn't be the last.

[Lemmy]

Imagine "A New Hope", but devoid of any fun or creativity. There you go!

[Divayth Fyr]

Imagine "A New Hope", but devoid of any fun or creativity. There you go!

Lacking those two does sound like a Snyder movie...

[Dragonus45]

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It is alright. Some structural issues and casting issues are a problem. But visually it's a feast for the eyes. It's way less Star Wars 40K then it looked though. It's looking a lot further backwards straight towards 7 Samurai specifically and Kurasawa in general. So the movie is very much just looking pretty while it goes to new places and has someone do something ****ing awesome so they can be the new party member and that's fine it's a formulae that's worked for a reason. But... that's a recipe for a star vehicle. You put your Toshiro Mifunes and your Yule Brenners and Denzel Washintons into the spotlight for a reason, because it takes a really specific kind of charisma and star power to be the centerpiece of the ensemble and pull them all together Sofia Boutella is really good in this and really sells her action scenes well but it's not really the right kind of good. Also, Djimon Hounsou is criminally wasted, and it would only have taken a really slight writing shift to having him already know Boutella's character to immediately fix almost all the problems with his recruitment scene. Also it skips arguably the actual most important part of films like this which is the "training the villiage" scene in favor of a twist involving betrayal and the timescale of the story moving up significantly as a result. That's where you always get the change to transform the characters from just being their cool designs and auditions to being actual characters. Even if it's not usually a big full picture it's enough you feel it deeply when they die. It also doesn't clear the board out entirely since there is a second movie so I'm not sure how much of this is just deferred for that is up in the air I guess. Also the ****ing griffon is gorgeous. It might be one of the most beautiful bits of CGI work I've seen all year, the various aliens look cool and real thanks to good practical effects. I'll be nitpicking and bitching about things all over the movie but I rather liked it on the whole.
Oh and the villains were without a doubt the most fun to hate delightfully evil mother ****ers I've seen in a long time.

[Lemmy]

Lacking those two does sound like a Snyder movie...

Really? to me it sounds exactly like everything he's produced... Snyder is good for making stylish action scenes... And that's it. He's pretty bad at everything else involved in making a movie.

And if there's something Snyder has shown the world, it's that exciting action scenes can't save a bad movie.

[Palanan]

Critical Drinker has some thoughts.

His first ten seconds plus “Zack Snyder” told me all I needed to know; but the rest of his commentary spells out just how painfully derivative this really is.

[t209]

So the movie might not be good but seems to have a following from 40k community.

Spoiler: Size spoiler and like check the uniform

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[KorvinStarmast]

Imagine "A New Hope", but devoid of any fun or creativity. There you go!

Yes, the fun was missing.

And if there's something Snyder has shown the world, it's that exciting action scenes can't save a bad movie.

We noticed something being off with the visuals and SFX, all throughout the movie.
I can't put my finger on it. CD mentions something about being out of focus, maybe that is what we were picking up on.

The dialogue was clunky and didn't flow too well. As we discussed it (my son, I, and a friend) we arrived at this: the all seemed to be speaking in cartoon bubbles rather than natural dialogue. They both rolled their eyes at the "lady boss/mary sue" issue with the lead character, and of course the "Yeah, they made this with a sequel already in the planning process"

The ending was ... out of synch and a barely tension making hanging point.

In particular, the king/emperor figure began as one thing, and ended up as something else, which isn't covered in the lore/exposition.

This is one of those "there were some good bits, but they were interrupted by a lot of clunky stuff."

Both my son and friend were way ahead of the betrayal scene, calling it out well before it happened.

Narrative tension ... some was attempted but the successes were few.

Opening scene was frustrating, from a visual perspective: you've got a regular person plowing a field, and while the sky was SFX, sure, the whole scene had like a wash over of SFX layer that was non necessary for two people engaging in a conversation and more or less introducing themselves to the audience. The whole movie had things like that in it.

The villain: yep, he's a bad guy. No nuance. The snake/eel fetish? WTF?

And one last hygiene factor: I am not a Warhammer guy, but at some point can Hollywood please stop it with antagonists' wardrobe all being drawn from the Third Reich's fashion template?
Show a little creativity, folks.

[Lemmy]

And one last hygiene factor: I am not a Warhammer guy, but at some point can Hollywood please stop it with antagonists' wardrobe all being drawn from the Third Reich's fashion template?
Show a little creativity, folks.

Hollywood creating a fantasy/sci-fi villain who isn't yet another Magic Hitler or Space Hitler? I think that goes against the laws of physics...

[Mechalich]

I made it thirty minutes through this before I had to give up. I can only take so much scale fail, and this movie is a black hole of scale fail.

In the original Seven Samurai there are 40 bandits, and they have 3 rifles. They are opposed by the titular seven samurai, and an alliance of villagers that places the numbers advantage squarely on the side of the villages, something that is hugely important to the strategic and tactical situation and how the conflict plays out.

Rebel Moon, by contrast, has a village similar in size (and schizophrenically, similar in technological development since they plow and sow by hand for no reason) to that of the village in Seven Samurai, but that is under attack by an Admiral with a giant starship who shows up with three powerful gunships at the start of the film. The idea of these villagers contributing to a resistance in any meaningful way is ludicrous, and it just sucks all the tension and stakes out from the start.

Worse, these invading soldiers are supposed to be the representatives of some giant interstellar empire. One village simply isn't important. There aren't even 100 people in this village. Even if all their food was taken, it's not enough to feed any sort of substantial force. Zack Snyder has monstrously upscaled the bad guy side from a gang of forty dudes who just want to eat well for the winter to an interstellar empire suppressing rebellion and completely forgotten to upscale the good guys accordingly and the result makes no sense and there's simply no point to continue past the framing stage.

[InvisibleBison]

they plow and sow by hand for no reason

There is actually an explanation for why the villagers use such primitive tools, though it's not particularly detailed: The village head mentions to the admiral that they use them for ideological/spiritual reasons.

[Mechalich]

There is actually an explanation for why the villagers use such primitive tools, though it's not particularly detailed: The village head mentions to the admiral that they use them for ideological/spiritual reasons.

Yeah, that's still no reason. 'We have chosen starvation' is not a viable ideology.

[Errorname]

The thing is he could have had the military want to set up a mining outpost or something, would have been entirely acceptable

[InvisibleBison]

Yeah, that's still no reason. 'We have chosen starvation' is not a viable ideology.

They hadn't chosen starvation. They were doing just fine until the bad guys showed up. They even had enough of a surplus that that one guy could sell some to that resistance group.

[Eldan]

And one last hygiene factor: I am not a Warhammer guy, but at some point can Hollywood please stop it with antagonists' wardrobe all being drawn from the Third Reich's fashion template?
Show a little creativity, folks.

Hey now, sometimes they are creative and use the Third Reich template for the "good" guys, see Dune.

[Saph]

They hadn't chosen starvation. They were doing just fine until the bad guys showed up. They even had enough of a surplus that that one guy could sell some to that resistance group.

I think the point is that it comes across as lazy worldbuilding. The villagers aren't using hand tools because deep cultural traditions blah blah, they're using them because the peasants in Seven Samurai used hand tools, and this movie is a mash-up of Star Wars and Seven Samurai.

The problem is that if you just blindly mash movies up you get a story that doesn't make any sense. It's possible to come up with situations where a massively powerful galactic empire could want the resources of a poor-as-dirt farming village badly enough to send a cruiser squadron over to extort it, but you have to actually put in the work and it doesn't sounds as though the writers on this film did.

[InvisibleBison]

I think the point is that it comes across as lazy worldbuilding. The villagers aren't using hand tools because deep cultural traditions blah blah, they're using them because the peasants in Seven Samurai used hand tools, and this movie is a mash-up of Star Wars and Seven Samurai.

There's nothing lazy about the writers creating the world in such a way as to enable them to tell the story they want to tell. And the villagers clearly are using hand tools because of deep cultural traditions; they say as much in the film.

The problem is that if you just blindly mash movies up you get a story that doesn't make any sense. It's possible to come up with situations where a massively powerful galactic empire could want the resources of a poor-as-dirt farming village badly enough to send a cruiser squadron over to extort it, but you have to actually put in the work and it doesn't sounds as though the writers on this film did.

I think the bad guy's actions make perfect sense. They're foraging from local communities to support themselves, a very common thing for militaries to do. The amount of food they get from this one village won't sustain them for long, but they don't need it to so long as they can find another village to pillage before it runs out. And the bad guys seem fairly familiar with what they're doing, so I get the sense they do in fact do this a lot.

[warty goblin]

I'd also point out that sailing cruiser squadrons around to steal stuff from the comparatively poor locals is a pithy but fairly accurate gloss on most of colonialism. You know, the period of time that space opera generally mimics, indeed the period of time that gives us the very notion of cruiser as a type of warship, which is in no small part a consequence of colonial activities. You need a long range ship to exploit the periphery, the gains of that exploitation are vulnerable to, and must be protected by, other long range warships. Ships that can cruise for extended periods of time. Cruisers.

[Sapphire Guard]

I don't feel like these criticisms actually represent what happens in the story.

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'Cruiser squadron' is misleading, he arrives in one big ship that detaches three smaller gunships as the escort for the Admiral, who seems to be a fairly fringe figure in the Empire. He's not feeding the empire with this one village, he's feeding his own staff, but the produce isn't entirely the point, so much as laying down the law/asserting his authority, and possibly even doing scorched earth to stop the rebels getting any more food there.

It's painfully accurate as to what happens to people unlucky enough to be farming when active conflicts are happening.

The idea of these villagers contributing to a resistance in any meaningful way is ludicrous, and it just sucks all the tension and stakes out from the start.

That would be why they don't try to do that. The initial goal of the villagers is 'get the admiral to go away by pretending to be starving' and when that doesn't work, 'try and get them to go away by giving up the tithe', which then becomes 'oh crap we're screwed, we need help from the rebels, because we can offer no realistic resistance by ourselves'.

It's not the most creative story ever written, but it's competent enough. This is the first film in a series, they have plenty of time to branch out in the sequels.

[Mechalich]

I don't feel like these criticisms actually represent what happens in the story.

The problem is the framing. Rebel Moon frames the struggle of the farmers as part of a much larger conflict for the fate of the galaxy, a struggle that their ability to contribute toward is infinitesimally small. This fundamentally mangles the whole point of the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven story which is about warriors sacrificing themselves and their ambitions for the sake of protecting farmers from a threat to their community and only that community. Seven Samurai makes this point explicitly, when one of the samurai they try to recruit says he's holding out for more than fighting some bandits, and repeats this point at the end by stating 'It's the farmers victory, not ours.'

If this is a story about a rebellion against an evil intergalactic empire, then the major characters need to be important to that rebellion, and the opening of the film does in fact imply that Kora, and also the -not-technically-a-droid-don't-sue-us voiced by Anthony Hopkins, are, but the village is not, it simply cannot be. There's a reason why in A New Hope, which frames its conflict correctly, the Empire murders Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and burns down Luke's home offscreen.

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And Rebel Moon could have done that. After Kora stops the rape and kills the garrison with the droid's help she could simply leave to protect the village from retaliation and the plot could proceed normally.

The whole setup is a messy mash-up that doesn't work. This is very typical of Snyder's films.

[InvisibleBison]

The problem is the framing. Rebel Moon frames the struggle of the farmers as part of a much larger conflict for the fate of the galaxy, a struggle that their ability to contribute toward is infinitesimally small. This fundamentally mangles the whole point of the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven story which is about warriors sacrificing themselves and their ambitions for the sake of protecting farmers from a threat to their community and only that community. Seven Samurai makes this point explicitly, when one of the samurai they try to recruit says he's holding out for more than fighting some bandits, and repeats this point at the end by stating 'It's the farmers victory, not ours.'

So what if Rebel Moon doesn't do the exact same thing as the Seven Samurai? That just means it's telling a different story. How is not having the same story as one of the films that inspired it make it a bad story?

If this is a story about a rebellion against an evil intergalactic empire, then the major characters need to be important to that rebellion, and the opening of the film does in fact imply that Kora, and also the -not-technically-a-droid-don't-sue-us voiced by Anthony Hopkins, are, but the village is not, it simply cannot be. There's a reason why in A New Hope, which frames its conflict correctly, the Empire murders Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and burns down Luke's home offscreen.

Spoiler

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And Rebel Moon could have done that. After Kora stops the rape and kills the garrison with the droid's help she could simply leave to protect the village from retaliation and the plot could proceed normally.

The whole setup is a messy mash-up that doesn't work. This is very typical of Snyder's films.

The story is not about an entire rebellion against an evil intergalactic empire. It's about a single, specific act of resistance against an evil intergalactic empire. Destroying the empire entirely isn't the goal for the protagonists; they just want the specific military force that is threatening their village to be defeated.

And regardless of the overall scope of the story, the village does matter to the rebellion. The village matters from a moral perspective because the villagers are innocent and don't deserve to be murdered, and it matters from a tactical perspective because the bad guys are going to be shoing up there at a specific time, so the rebels can get there first and ambush them.

[KorvinStarmast]

The problem is that if you just blindly mash movies up you get a story that doesn't make any sense. It's possible to come up with situations where a massively powerful galactic empire could want the resources of a poor-as-dirt farming village badly enough to send a cruiser squadron over to extort it, but you have to actually put in the work and it doesn't sounds as though the writers on this film did.

This makes sense to me.

So what if Rebel Moon doesn't do the exact same thing as the Seven Samurai? That just means it's telling a different story.

It's trying to tell the same story, but does it badly. The Magnificent Seven (McQueen, Coburn, Brynner, et al) did a decent job of telling the same story well enough. (The original is still superior, in my view).

[Sapphire Guard]

It's not trying to tell the same story, though.

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As you can tell by the ending being completely different, it's an ambush, not a village defence. Also, the mission is not to collect merceraries, it's 'get help from the rebels', the mercs are a bonus on the way.

The alternative suggested was that the lead character just leave to village to avoid reprisals, optimistically thinking that the Admiral would... just ignore the discovery of a dozen of his men dead? The Admiral is very prone to indiscriminate reprisals and everyone in and out of universe knows it.

'Humanoid shaped robot' is generic enough that it's pretty common, and Jimmy doesn't particularly resemble any Star Wars robot, I'm not aware of any 'royal guard turned pacifist' droid, although knowing the EU there might be one somewhere.

The fact that the story has differences from Seven Samurai isn't a fault, because the story being told isn't Seven Samurai. They're not trying to tell the story and failing, they're just making a different story.