Rebel Moon final trailer

[EggKookoo]

I think the scale problem with the farmers is more along the lines of basic logic. The village is small. We see a few dozen or maybe a little more than a hundred people, but assuming it's bigger than that and more like a thousand or so, they're producing their food all by hand. That will generate a certain amount of food. It's mentioned that they eschew modern tech for that, so we know whatever they're producing is less than what they would be able to produce if they didn't do all that eschewing.

Meanwhile, we have a big ship that probably has a crew larger than the village. A US aircraft carrier has a crew in the thousands, and the Imperial ship looks like it's about that scale, maybe? They either produce their own food or are fed from a supply point. But wherever it comes from, that food is almost certainly produced using "modern" high-tech methods. Meaning the existing food supply would be much higher than anything that dinky little farm could generate. It's hard to see how they could contribute. So sure, maybe they want the farm's output for some low-priority reason, but there feels like a sense of urgency to the Empire's demand for it that no one questions.

Maybe there's some kind of food supply problem back home. I don't think that was mentioned but it's possible the lens flares obscured the closed captioning when it was. And the Empire has absolutely insane power-generation ability. They have ships that can casually jump up out of a planet's gravity well and back (and so does everyone else, it seems). Regardless of the technomagic involved, physics is physics, which means they can control energy at a level we in the real world can only dream of. Food supply wouldn't be a problem for a society that can do that. They could build hydropnic plants that can feed multiple planets with the energy output of one or two of their ships. *

Thing is, the writer(s?) kind of understood this. The Imperium isn't there for food. It's there for subjugation. Claiming their food is just them having watched A Bug's Life and understanding how to keep people suppressed. The reason we get caught up in the food thing is because the script gets caught up in it, spending all kinds of time debating how many bushels they can make and who's right and who's wrong and blah blah blah. If they ended that stuff mostly after she said "Everything," I think the point would have been made. As it is, it comes across as unfocused. They needed an editor.

Overall, I agree with the impression that the writing was lazy throughout. The opening food situation isn't the only example. At no point watching it, did I think anything like, "oh, huh, didn't see that coming."

* One of my big beefs with Interstellar, too.

Spoiler: Edit: I'm wrong, there was one thing I didn't see coming.

Show

I didn't expect Jimmy to show up at the end of the first fight scene and shoot the last Imperial guy. That was cool, I admit, and it made me excited to see more of that character. Sadly, that was all the writers had for him and he ran off to prance around with antlers on his head. Ah well...

[Mechalich]

Thing is, the writer(s?) kind of understood this. The Imperium isn't there for food. It's there for subjugation. Claiming their food is just them having watched A Bug's Life and understanding how to keep people suppressed. The reason we get caught up in the food thing is because the script gets caught up in it, spending all kinds of time debating how many bushels they can make and who's right and who's wrong and blah blah blah. If they ended that stuff mostly after she said "Everything," I think the point would have been made. As it is, it comes across as unfocused. They needed an editor.

The writing here is very unfocused. The opening crawl implies the villagers are already subjects of the Motherworld. Remote subjects without any active supervision to be sure, but still subjects. Worse, when the Admiral initially shows up, he offers to buy the supplies he needs at very generous rates and the villagers nominally agree in principle to sell, it's just that they lie to him about not having any food available for sale. This lie is incredibly stupid and the Admiral sees through it immediately. All the subsequent violence sources to this blatant lie - the Admiral is pissed that a bunch of peasants in the middle of nowhere would dare to defy him and imposes a brutally punitive demand upon them in response.

This is a terrible setup, because while the Admiral is being unnecessarily cruel, the villagers' refusal to sell to him in the first place, and to attempt to deceive him on top of that, is basically begging to be attacked. They could hardly have handled things worse. Oh, and said stupid plan is the nominal hero's fault too.

What they ought to have done is ignored the food issue entirely and cut to the chase with the sexual assault aspect the later scene with the garrison establishes. If the Admiral had shown up and demanded women to 'comfort' his soldiers because of an unexpectedly prolonged employment, then we're done, all unnecessary complications resolved, including annoying technological ones regarding hydroponics and such.

[Sapphire Guard]

What are you talking about? If the Admiral wants women, he doesn't have to come back in nine weeks, he can just take them now, and massacre the village if they resist, therefore everyone gets slaughtered in Act 1. Really didn't think that one through.

The thing about that 'basic logic' to is that it requires half logic where you logic your way to particular point and then don't go further. If you arrive at the conclusion 'this village can't support the fleet by itself', if you use logic slightly further, you get to 'therefore they have other sources of food as well'. Only by stopping halfway do you get the bad logic of 'this village can't support the fleet by itself, therefore the premise doesn't make sense. If you're going to use basic logic, don't stop halfway.

[EggKookoo]

What they ought to have done is ignored the food issue entirely and cut to the chase with the sexual assault aspect the later scene with the garrison establishes. If the Admiral had shown up and demanded women to 'comfort' his soldiers because of an unexpectedly prolonged employment, then we're done, all unnecessary complications resolved, including annoying technological ones regarding hydroponics and such.

Exactly. They gave themselves an out with the "What do you think they want?/Everything" bit. Good stuff, cuts through the fat. It makes it clear that whatever reasons the Admiral uses for their visit are just cover. The Imperials want control. Yeah, they probably would need to write in something to justify the Admiral going away and coming back in a few weeks, but that's easy enough. He has to go dominate some other poor village-moon, or put down some uprising, or heck, go home for the annual Gas Giant Festival (everybody who's everybody will be there!).

The thing about that 'basic logic' to is that it requires half logic where you logic your way to particular point and then don't go further. If you arrive at the conclusion 'this village can't support the fleet by itself', if you use logic slightly further, you get to 'therefore they have other sources of food as well'. Only by stopping halfway do you get the bad logic of 'this village can't support the fleet by itself, therefore the premise doesn't make sense. If you're going to use basic logic, don't stop halfway.

Sure, I even said the ship would be feeding itself or be supplied. The Imperials weren't starving. They had food. They just wanted more. So the logic I'm working through is, how much more? Given the tech and power (literally, in terms of energy production) available to the Imperials, they would have many orders of magnitude more food than that colony could supply. It makes very little sense that they would actually need food for themselves, and it doesn't make much more sense that the Empire would need food systemically. Or, if they do, it doesn't make sense that they'd send a ship way out to some remote location, crewed by people who consume much, much more than the remote world produces, in a ship that could power cities' (if not a whole continent's) worth of hydroponic farms, to get some dinky amount of wheat or whatever -- if they were there for the actual wheat.

Sure, you can say we don't know how energy or food production works in this show's universe, but that burden is on the writers. If we see spaceships jumping up into space from the ground, with no explanation or demonstration of the limits of how that all works, I'm going to assume they just have the power to do that. Maybe the moon farmers farming it by hand implies some kind of inherent limitation of food production, but even the Admiral is surprised that they do it all by hand, so it seems like they're an outlier.

"Galaxy-spanning Empire needs food" is just... stupid.

Again, the essential problem with Rebel Moon isn't the food equation. That's a symptom of the problem, which is lazy writing. The script is riddled with cliches and short cuts.

[Mechalich]

Again, the essential problem with Rebel Moon isn't the food equation. That's a symptom of the problem, which is lazy writing. The script is riddled with cliches and short cuts.

Rebel Moon is mashing together Star Wars: A New Hope and Seven Samurai, without any recognition that these are two different doing two different things and organizing the writing in a manner that produces a functional story structure. It's visible from the very opening shots - there's a giant interstellar empire with combat spaceships and there's also farmers growing their crops using seemingly medieval-level farming technology. These two things do not belong together.

I mean, it's possible to imagine a situation in which a star cruiser runs out of food. Perhaps their hydroponics plant is damaged in battle, or their stockpile of recyclable organics got contaminated somehow or whatever. It's also possible that they would need to extort replacements from an independent subsistence community, but that community needs to look like it belongs in the same operational universe as the imperials.

The most annoying part is that this isn't even a new failure. Way back in 2004, anime studio Gonzo created a steampunk-y version of Seven Samurai called Samurai 7, in which the bandits were giant cyborg mecha things, and it had exactly this same fundamental problem of mismatched circumstances undercutting everything it tried to do. That series was at least lighthearted and mostly an excuse to have guys with swords chop up mecha in cool anime action scenes, but it was still really dumb. Rebel Moon does basically the same thing, only drowning in Zack Snyder's grim seriousness and super slow mo and of course it slams flat on its face.

[Sapphire Guard]

Having to write something to justify the return in 9 weeks means you have created a problem, not solved one.

This objection appears to be 'it's silly that this spacefaring empire needs food', which might be true if that was the Admiral was desperately in need of food, but it's clear enough he isn't. He wants it anyway. There are any number of reasons why he might want some wheat (making sure they can't sell it to rebels, it tastes nicer than field rations, maybe he just likes organic food). So what's being said here is 'it's stupid that the admiral needs food, even though I really know he doesn't need it'

. It's visible from the very opening shots - there's a giant interstellar empire with combat spaceships and there's also farmers growing their crops using seemingly medieval-level farming technology. These two things do not belong together.

Why not? We have lots of farming tech on earth, but just because it exists doesn't mean it's available, affordable, or wanted by everyone. There are plenty of farms on earth still worked by hand,

This particular planet is very remote, a long way from the Empire's heart. The technology level being different is not so unlikely, especially as it seems to be some kind of religious commune. There are different farming methods in Afghanistan than there are in Idaho. It is not a worldbuilding problem that this might be the case.

There can be problems thoughtlessly mashing genres together, it happens all the time in Mandalorian or Clone Wars. There isn't any similar problem here, it's just making a faulty assumption (the primary reason the starship is doing this is that it needs food), and then complaining that the assumption doesn't fit the text because it was an incorrect assumptiuon to begin with.

[GloatingSwine]

Having to write something to justify the return in 9 weeks means you have created a problem, not solved one.

This objection appears to be 'it's silly that this spacefaring empire needs food', which might be true if that was the Admiral was desperately in need of food, but it's clear enough he isn't. He wants it anyway. There are any number of reasons why he might want some wheat (making sure they can't sell it to rebels, it tastes nicer than field rations, maybe he just likes organic food). So what's being said here is 'it's stupid that the admiral needs food, even though I really know he doesn't need it'

The objection is more "this village as presented could never produce enough food to be relevant to a space empire, or rebellion against a space empire".

A village of a few hundred that plants everything by hand is one bad harvest away from being unable to feed itself, let alone anyone else.

At which point the suspenders of disbelief snap completely and the story is left red faced and trouserless.

[Errorname]

The thing is it would have been possible to scale up the farming community in accordance with the scale of the raiders. You could absolutely design a community with more farmland worked with mechanized tools capable of producing enough food that it is significant for a warship but that is still clearly impoverished enough that losing their years harvest would be an existential threat

[EggKookoo]

Having to write something to justify the return in 9 weeks means you have created a problem, not solved one.

That's not how writing works. An author -- even a good one -- puts stuff into the story to make things make sense. If the writer really wants the villain to show up and be threatening, then disappear for a period of time to give the heroes time to respond and plan and do whatever they need to do, then the writer needs to insert justification. Having the Admiral arbitrarily show up 9 weeks before harvest just so there's that time buffer is no worse or better than any other justification, as long as it makes sense in-story. The buffer in Rebel Moon makes sense as far as it goes, but it's not like it's some perfect manifestation of narrative. It's just a gimmick to give the heroes time to act.

This objection appears to be 'it's silly that this spacefaring empire needs food', which might be true if that was the Admiral was desperately in need of food, but it's clear enough he isn't. He wants it anyway. There are any number of reasons why he might want some wheat (making sure they can't sell it to rebels, it tastes nicer than field rations, maybe he just likes organic food).

Yes, it would be nice if the story provided some reason the Admiral wanted to starve this particular village aside from "my troops need food." And that leads into the next...

So what's being said here is 'it's stupid that the admiral needs food, even though I really know he doesn't need it'

Even though he really knows he doesn't need it. Or should know. Or if he does need it, the story hasn't explain how or provided any justification for how that could be credible. His troops don't look emaciated. The story shows them trying to violate one of the village girls, not one of the granary stores. There's no mention of a food crisis back home.

I mean, at the very least, the Admiral should have insisted the villages use modern, high-tech methods, conflicting with their ideology. He doesn't even do that. It's almost like he doesn't give a crap about food, and was just using that as an excuse to exert control over a remote commune of rando farmers. Which would be fine, but jeez, did we need to spend 15 minutes debating wheat bushels then? It creates the impression that the writers don't even know what their own story is about.

[GloatingSwine]

In theory, but there always remains the nagging problem that if one side has a spaceship and the other has a combine harvester the one that can do orbital bombardment has nothing to fear from the one that can't.

Battle Beyond the Stars was at least copying the pew pew spaceships side of Star Wars not the cool laser swords side, which meant that it ended with spaceships vs spaceships and there was a meaningful sense that the resistance was on the same plane of action as the attacker.

Doing it all as a Sword & Planet story with local non-spaceship hostile invaders would have been a better way to retain the suspension of disbelief and still use the cool laser sword trappings.

[InvisibleBison]

The objection is more "this village as presented could never produce enough food to be relevant to a space empire, or rebellion against a space empire".

This is a very silly objection. The village doesn't need to be relevant to the entirety of the space empire, it just needs to be relevant to the one spaceship whose commander is plundering it. There's no reason to think that the 10,000 bushels of grain the admiral intends to confiscate from the village isn't going to be a worthwhile amount of food other than an assumption that it can't possibly be so. And when your assumption causes a story to not make sense, the problem is with your assumption, not the story.

[KorvinStarmast]

At which point the suspenders of disbelief snap completely and the story is left red faced and trouserless.

Yeah, nice turn of phrase. I hope that they upgrade the writing for episode two.

[EggKookoo]

There's no reason to think that the 10,000 bushels of grain the admiral intends to confiscate from the village isn't going to be a worthwhile amount of food other than an assumption that it can't possibly be so. And when your assumption causes a story to not make sense, the problem is with your assumption, not the story.

Would you accept a modern-day story about a US aircraft carrier pulling up to a tiny island with a population only a fraction of the size of the crew and demanding food from their 17th century farms? Assuming we're not talking about some post apocalypse here or anything. The carrier is still part of the US Navy and is party to all its infrastructure and supply lines.

In order for that to make sense, we would need additional info, like it was a post-apocalyptic setting or something along those lines, to explain why the carrier needs food. And then, narratively, we'd want to underscore that by having the carrier soldiers commit violence against the village in pursuit of food, not women.

One of my favorite moments in Fury Road is when Max sees the wives washing themselves off with the water truck hose. Filmed all slowmo and lustily. He lumbers toward them in clear desire, but when he reaches them he grabs the hose! Great storytelling.

Remember, the overall complaint isn't that Rebel Moon sucks because of food. It's that RM suffers from lazy writing, and the food situation is a good early example of such. There are plenty more.

[Saph]

This is a very silly objection. The village doesn't need to be relevant to the entirety of the space empire, it just needs to be relevant to the one spaceship whose commander is plundering it.

It's a spaceship that can fly in and out of a planet's gravity well. If you've got that kind of power, it really doesn't make much sense that you'd need to go around extorting stuff from random villages. That's like a nuclear aircraft carrier showing up next to some hunter-gatherers and demanding that they hand over all their wood and stone.

[GloatingSwine]

This is a very silly objection. The village doesn't need to be relevant to the entirety of the space empire, it just needs to be relevant to the one spaceship whose commander is plundering it. There's no reason to think that the 10,000 bushels of grain the admiral intends to confiscate from the village isn't going to be a worthwhile amount of food other than an assumption that it can't possibly be so. And when your assumption causes a story to not make sense, the problem is with your assumption, not the story.

I mean yeah. It's just not going to be a worthwhile activity for anyone who has a working spaceship to confiscate what essentially works out to one single modern road trailer of grain.

That's how much you're talking about. About a quarter of a rail hopper. One lorryload!

[BloodSquirrel]

Would you accept a modern-day story about a US aircraft carrier pulling up to a tiny island with a population only a fraction of the size of the crew and demanding food from their 17th century farms? Assuming we're not talking about some post apocalypse here or anything. The carrier is still part of the US Navy and is party to all its infrastructure and supply lines.

This isn't as implausible as you think. During WWII, pillaging was heavily used to feed the Wehrmacht on the Eastern front, and the IJN's logistics were bad enough that a Japanese carrier (if they hadn't been sunk already) looting food from a local population would have been entirely in character for them. The main differences between those and your scenario is that the USN is not in a major war (and thus not compelled to operate at the limit of its logistics network) and current technology is such that fuel and ammunition are more likely to be limiting supply factors for a modern Navy (not for the carriers themselves, but for the non-nuclear support ships and aircraft).

Even the difference in scale here is not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, the carrier will need your entire harvest just to feed themselves for a week or two. Yes, that means your village will starve. The movie even points this out- the farmers tell the admiral that they don't have enough surplus to feed the ship. He doesn't care. He'll take whatever they have anyway. Pointing this out as a problem with the story's logic is like pointing out that a bear is much larger than a trout, and that it would have to eat multiple trout every day to survive. This is not a reason for a bear not to eat a trout, it is a reason for a bear to eat a lot of trout.

I'd suggest that the real problem here isn't that "spaceship needs to steal food from a small low-tech community" is inherently illogical or improbable, but that juxtaposing spaceships and people farming by hand creates dissonance that people are having trouble getting over (even if it isn't that far-fetched by itself). This seems to be a case where people are making assumptions that aren't any more justified than the alternatives, but if people's common perception, even if it's based on a mistaken understanding of reality, leads them to make those assumptions then it's still a problem for the storyteller if he wants them to accept the story.

[GloatingSwine]

Even the difference in scale here is not a bug, it's a feature. Yes, the carrier will need your entire harvest just to feed themselves for a week or two. Yes, that means your village will starve. The movie even points this out- the farmers tell the admiral that they don't have enough surplus to feed the ship. He doesn't care. He'll take whatever they have anyway. Pointing this out as a problem with the story's logic is like pointing out that a bear is much larger than a trout, and that it would have to eat multiple trout every day to survive. This is not a reason for a bear not to eat a trout, it is a reason for a bear to eat a lot of trout.

But if the bear has to use several billion times the energy it gets from eating the trout to catch every trout, that's a reason.

[EggKookoo]

There's a massive difference between a WWII ship needing the food from a small farming village and a space opera starship needing food from a small farming village.

People think ecology is magic. Like, in the sense that you can't just produce endless food like you can produce, I dunno, endless amounts of steel or something. But it just comes down to energy. Farms take up land because that's the cheapest way to get sunlight on them, and sunlight is cheap. But if you can generate the power to fly up into orbit seemingly as easily as pulling out of your driveway (and remember Kai's little ship could do it too), then you have access to levels of energy far beyond what we can do here and now. It's not reasonable to compare that to what a WWII ship can harness. The WWII ship might as well be a sailboat in comparison.

To have a galaxy-spanning civilization, you almost certainly will need "industrialized" food production. Like, massive hydroponic plants, and many per world. That takes ungodly amounts of energy, but if you can dance casually around gravity wells like they show, then you have that power.

It's not like "galactic empire needs wheat" can't make sense. It's that the movie didn't even make the attempt, and what worldbuilding logic we do see seems to make it hard to digest (no pun intended). It was presented in a taken-for-granted sort of way. Like they hit on that initial conflict and stopped thinking about it or what it would mean for their universe. If it was just that, some nagging issue about food logic at the start of an otherwise tight and satisfying story, I doubt as many would be complaining. But the entire script was low effort and superficial.

[warty goblin]

It helps to remember that most space opera is fundamentally set in about 1870 +/- 20 years, just with cooler (or at least nerdier) aesthetics.

[BloodSquirrel]

But if the bear has to use several billion times the energy it gets from eating the trout to catch every trout, that's a reason.

There's a massive difference between a WWII ship needing the food from a small farming village and a space opera starship needing food from a small farming village.

Energy doesn't just magically turn into food. The ship needs food. It's been out on deployment for longer than was anticipated, and their logistics network is too distant/stressed to supply it. They can't just redirect their powercore into the dirt to make harvestable crops pop up.

The difference between the power output of a WWII carrier and a spaceship is irrelevant here. Neither one is capable of producing food, regardless of how much more powerful it is than the primitive farming community nearby.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

In theory, but there always remains the nagging problem that if one side has a spaceship and the other has a combine harvester the one that can do orbital bombardment has nothing to fear from the one that can't.

This is what got me, as well. The food storyline is dumb but ultimately throwaway. The larger crux of the plot doesn't make much sense because of the power imbalance, though. A military flagship that can freely come and go - there are no ground defenses and another plot point is trying to scrounge up a ship, so we know they aren't commonly available to the village - has nothing to fear from the heroes. The village is completely indefensible no matter how many rebels they can round up.

In most Seven Samurai stories, the antagonists are a local bandit gang or warlord. Someone who nominally has power, but one good victory would upend it. In the best case scenario of Rebel Moon, the village wins a pitched battle against these professionally trained and equipped soldiers, which buys them a small amount of time until the Imperials regroup and bomb then into oblivion. Even if they somehow manage to destroy the whole ship, that just paints a giant target on their back. The village is done for either way; in victory, they only survive long enough to pack up and leave. And they could've left in the nine weeks they were given.

It's an adaptational fault where the writers did a Find-Replace on the script, changing out "Bandit Warlord" for "Imperial Admiral" without thinking of the ancillary impact.

[InvisibleBison]

Would you accept a modern-day story about a US aircraft carrier pulling up to a tiny island with a population only a fraction of the size of the crew and demanding food from their 17th century farms? Assuming we're not talking about some post apocalypse here or anything. The carrier is still part of the US Navy and is party to all its infrastructure and supply lines.

A story like that would be pretty implausible. But the movie never says it's telling a story like that. You are assuming that 1) The ship has a crew much larger than the population of the village. 2) The ship is part of a well-developed logistics network capable of supplying it with all the food it needs. 3) The admiral is demanding food from the villagers because he needs food. If you discard these assumptions and instead assume that the story makes sense, things hang together much better.

It's a spaceship that can fly in and out of a planet's gravity well. If you've got that kind of power, it really doesn't make much sense that you'd need to go around extorting stuff from random villages. That's like a nuclear aircraft carrier showing up next to some hunter-gatherers and demanding that they hand over all their wood and stone.

I mean yeah. It's just not going to be a worthwhile activity for anyone who has a working spaceship to confiscate what essentially works out to one single modern road trailer of grain.

That's how much you're talking about. About a quarter of a rail hopper. One lorryload!

Again, you are assuming that it would be easy for the admiral to get food shipped to him from elsewhere in the empire. There's nothing in the story that requires that to be true, though. And even if it is, even if it's easy to ship food from the core of the empire to the frontier, it's easier for the military forces already on the frontier to support themselves by foraging. However cheap it is to send food over interstellar distances, it's still cheaper to not do so.

It's not like "galactic empire needs wheat" can't make sense. It's that the movie didn't even make the attempt, and what worldbuilding logic we do see seems to make it hard to digest (no pun intended). It was presented in a taken-for-granted sort of way. Like they hit on that initial conflict and stopped thinking about it or what it would mean for their universe. If it was just that, some nagging issue about food logic at the start of an otherwise tight and satisfying story, I doubt as many would be complaining. But the entire script was low effort and superficial.

The story isn't "galactic empire needs wheat". The story is "this one spaceship wants wheat", and it's not clear whether the wheat qua wheat is wanted, or if the admiral just wants to oppress the villagers and is using the wheat as an excuse. It's not bad writing for the story to not explain things it isn't trying to do but you assumed it was.

[EggKookoo]

Energy doesn't just magically turn into food. The ship needs food. It's been out on deployment for longer than was anticipated, and their logistics network is too distant/stressed to supply it. They can't just redirect their powercore into the dirt to make harvestable crops pop up.

Is that what was going on? That one ship needed food? But they weren't going to come back and get it for weeks. Did I miss something where they explained why they couldn't head to a supply depo to restock in that time? The empire seemed stressed, for sure, but I didn't get the impression it was malfunctioning. If that ship needed food, time was of the essence. Maybe they should have insisted the farmers drop their silly objections to modernized harvesting tech.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the writers didn't think about any of this stuff and just dropped "we need food" without considering the implications.

It's not bad writing for the story to not explain things it isn't trying to do but you assumed it was.

I would argue that not explaining motivations is one of the classic properties of bad writing. Unless the writers were intentionally keeping those motivations a mystery for storytelling purposes. But in that case, what would those be?

It's lazy writing.

[GloatingSwine]

Again, you are assuming that it would be easy for the admiral to get food shipped to him from elsewhere in the empire. There's nothing in the story that requires that to be true, though. And even if it is, even if it's easy to ship food from the core of the empire to the frontier, it's easier for the military forces already on the frontier to support themselves by foraging. However cheap it is to send food over interstellar distances, it's still cheaper to not do so.

Given that foraging appears to be done one truck at a time, no it isn't.

A single modern bulk freighter carries four hundred times what they'll pick up from this village. One resupply ship per year would still beat the intake they'd get if they raided a village like this every single day.

Especially because they're taking unprocessed grain not direct comestibles.

If the empire can't keep them resupplied to that extent it doesn't even exist. (Like they use all the same space fascist imagery, but there's a good chance that an Imperium of Man captain who raided a poxy little village like this would be executed for wasting the fuel to get there, he'd at least have to take the harvest from the whole planet to avoid the disapproval of the adeptus administratum.)

[BloodSquirrel]

Is that what was going on? That one ship needed food? But they weren't going to come back and get it for weeks. Did I miss something where they explained why they couldn't head to a supply depo to restock in that time?

Why are you assuming that they can travel back to a supply depo in a few weeks, and why are you assuming that they can afford to take the time to do so instead of continuing with their mission? Even if they can get to a supply depo and return before the harvest comes in, that's a delay in their mission.

You're making complaints that are loaded with assumptions that the movie doesn't require of you.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

Why are you assuming that they can travel back to a supply depo in a few weeks, and why are you assuming that they can afford to take the time to do so instead of continuing with their mission? Even if they can get to a supply depo and return before the harvest comes in, that's a delay in their mission.

You're making complaints that are loaded with assumptions that the movie doesn't require of you.

This isn't an assumption. The rest of the movie shows the heroes jumping around between half a dozen different planets well within the deadline. Space travel is explicitly demonstrated to be quick and cheap enough for a small smuggling ship to provide for its captain. There's no explanation of why an Imperial warship would be so much slower or desperate that it has to raid a solitary village for some bread.

Funny enough, this whole thing would be fixed with a two minute scene right after the 9-week demand was given. Have the Admiral return to the ship and an officer speak up, asking why he'd be so hard on them and reminding him that the ship's stockpile is still 60% full. Then he can reply, "What's our mission again, Lieutenant? Sniffing out the rebels. No need to waste our time and fuel scurrying about. Place your boot on enough of these yokels and the Bloodaxes are bound to swoop in to play hero on one of them. And we get some much needed entertainment." There. Villain established, motivations secure, even introduces a bit of dramatic irony that our protagonist flying off to get the rebels is exactly what the villain wants.

[GloatingSwine]

Why are you assuming that they can travel back to a supply depo in a few weeks, and why are you assuming that they can afford to take the time to do so instead of continuing with their mission? Even if they can get to a supply depo and return before the harvest comes in, that's a delay in their mission.

You're making complaints that are loaded with assumptions that the movie doesn't require of you.

Yes, this is what happens when people are no longer suspending their disbelief. They ask awkward questions about why the story is the way it is instead of accepting that it is and moving on.

In this case they see a spaceship resupplying itself in quite possibly the least efficient and effective manner it would be possible to conceive of and do not proceed to thinking "well there must be an explanation for why they do it that way, so I will allow for that and no longer question it".

[BloodSquirrel]

This isn't an assumption. The rest of the movie shows the heroes jumping around between half a dozen different planets well within the deadline. Space travel is explicitly demonstrated to be quick and cheap enough for a small smuggling ship to provide for its captain. There's no explanation of why an Imperial warship would be so much slower or desperate that it has to raid a solitary village for some bread.

We aren't given any distances between any of those planets. There's a huge difference between traveling to the next nearest start and traveling halfway across the galaxy. Also, a small smuggling ship would be expected to be faster than an Imperial warship. Speed is pretty important to smugglers. And smuggling is also extremely profitable, even with (and sometimes especially with) goods that take up very small volumes.

This is a perfect example of you actively making assumptions that aren't warranted.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

We aren't given any distances between any of those planets. There's a huge difference between traveling to the next nearest start and traveling halfway across the galaxy. Also, a small smuggling ship would be expected to be faster than an Imperial warship. Speed is pretty important to smugglers. And smuggling is also extremely profitable, even with (and sometimes especially with) goods that take up very small volumes.

This is a perfect example of you actively making assumptions that aren't warranted.

An warship could be expected to be slower than a small smuggling craft, but not so much slower that a few week trip for one is an odyssey for the other. Even assuming that's the case, the Imperial ship is easily large enough to carry several supply run shuttles that would match the smuggling ship for speed. There's just no way it holds water that the ship is cut off from a supply line.

On top of the conjecture, the movie also contradicts your argument. Are you just forgetting the scene at the end where the Imperials show up once given the signal? On a planet that seems to be a major supply hub? And that they're also shown moving between these planets without issue? They literally show up right after the heroes talk to the squidfolk and wipe them out.

[EggKookoo]

Why are you assuming that they can travel back to a supply depo in a few weeks, and why are you assuming that they can afford to take the time to do so instead of continuing with their mission? Even if they can get to a supply depo and return before the harvest comes in, that's a delay in their mission.

Others have replied but the simple answer is because that's the most sensible interpretation of the situation. If I see a warship show up offshore, not obviously damaged or in any kind of distress, I assume it's still seaworthy. If there's a reason it's not, I would expect that to become a conversation point. In the case of Rebel Moon, I'm not there to ask the question but it feels sensible that someone on the moon would ask it. Either of the Admiral or at least they'd ask among themselves.

Storytelling is about communicating the story to the audience. It's not like "reality" where things go unexplained, unless it serves the story for them to be unexplained. Spec fiction is especially sensitive to this. When you deal with magitech like FTL and galaxy-sized civilizations, you need to set some basic rules if those rules are going to impact the story. The need for food impacted the story, so we need to get at least a general sense of why and how.

Again, I agree with the interpretation that they weren't really there for food, but instead were using food as a means to suppress the locals. I'm only hung up on it (aside from it being the current example of writing problems for the movie) because they spent a good deal getting into the details of it all while avoiding saying anything about why it was happening or how it made sense that it was. They could have skipped a good 10 minutes of that and just left it at the empire just likes to oppress locals. It even seems like they wanted to with the "Everything..." line, but then I guess decided to muddy it by blathering about irrelevant food requirements.