Rebel Moon debuts with brutal Rotten Tomatoes score after first reviews
Rebel Moon has debuted to a brutal Rotten Tomatoes score after the first reviews.
Zack Snyder's sci-fi epic – which originally started life as a Star Wars pitch – is set to stream on Netflix in two parts, with the first (subtitled A Child of Fire) premiering later this month.
The story follows a woman called Kora (Sofia Boutella), a former member of the army of the Motherworld who recruits warriors to take on the Motherworld's forces.
Related: Zack Snyder explains why now was the right time for Rebel Moon
The movie has been largely slated across the board, attracting an initial score of 23% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing.
Many critics have suggested that Rebel Moon is an inferior version of better influences such as Star Wars, with other criticism aimed at its cinematography as well as problematic handling of topics such as sexual violence.
Here's what reviewers have been saying:
Digital Spy
"Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire bears all the familiar traits of a Zack Snyder movie – from the good to the bad – and if you're not already a convert, you will be wondering what all the fuss is about."
Variety
"Rebel Moon, while eminently watchable, is a movie built so entirely out of spare parts that it may, in the end, be for Snyder cultists only."
The Daily Telegraph
"This first half of Snyder’s diptych (the second is due in the spring) is more of a loosely doodled mood board than a functioning film – a series of pulpy tableaux that mostly sound fun in isolation, but become numbingly dull when run side by side.
"That even after a reported 20 years in the making the film still feels fundamentally pointless isn’t just disappointing, it’s entirely bewildering. The method was Bonsai; the outcome cress in an egg cup."
The Independent
"It’s a film populated by some of the Justice League Snyder Cut filmmaker’s worst impulses: a mess of imagery, some of it attempting to shock, congregated largely around the idea of what might look good in a trailer."
The Hollywood Reporter
"Snyder never met a superhero team roundup he didn’t love, and although he’s put aside capes and spandex for rugged galactic garb, the screenplay he co-wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten plays like the result of someone feeding Seven Samurai and Star Wars into AI scriptwriting software."
ScreenDaily
"The first instalment of a two-part picture serves up Snyder’s usual operatic excess in the story of a ragtag gang of rebels trying to vanquish an evil empire. But nostalgia only takes this dreary space opera so far, and it lacks the indelible characters and riveting adventure that made George Lucas’s blockbusters so resonant."
IndieWire
"It’s hard to be even morbidly curious, let alone excited, about any future iterations or installments of a franchise so determined to remix a million things you’ve seen before into one thing you’ll wish you’d never seen at all."
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is out now in select cinemas and is released on Netflix on December 22.
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