JcDent

°loud fart noise° pee-ew, who cut one? 😀

The first movie to break my short reviews only rule. It's still just 200 words, but I'll probably delete it tomorrow. I just needed to say A Thing. You know how it is.

daavpuke

Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire2023

★½

Watched Dec 22, 2023

You know, Zack Snyder has a contempt for cinema that's almost commendable, were it not expressed in an equally hyper-consumerist manner. Every scene is shot, written, scored and colored like a trailer, with two-tone complementary shades for every occasion. There is no action too insignificant that it doesn't warrant slow motion. Hell, at one point, a scene in slow motion starts going into slower motion! Both story and dialogue are so barren that it genuinely feels AI-generated. The setting of the world, however, looks incredibly cool.

A true example of naive art, it's clear that Snyder has no creative bone in their body and just wants to recreate the media they experienced when they were younger. A cantina full of weird little guys? Great idea! A cyberpunk place that’s also Asian? I mean, what other one could there be! Those marines? The space kind! The farm town is literally called “Field,” for crying out loud. This man should be making banger music videos. Instead, we gave the world’s oldest 12-year old almost $100 million for yet another space Nazi story with robo-racism sprinkled in.

If all you care about is aesthetics, then this flashy movie serves up an easy 5 stars, with the most stereotypically Bad Guy a bunch of bad guys have ever looked. You want substance? Haha, good luck with that one.

Lavish visual style? Yes
Takes all the bombast seriously? Yes
Plot stupid? Wait, no, we already have Jupiter Ascen-

Well, IMFDB calls them an AK/MP-40 hybrid due to the back half being stolen off an MP-40

but like

come on, guys

the AK probably has the most iconic handguard/barrel & gas pipe/front sight combo in the history of "fuck that guy over there," surely you could have chosen something more (or at all) obscure

When I first saw them I was like "ok, Netflix is spending a lot of money promoting this thing. It's clearly based off of a comic book or manga, because the character designs are wacky and look like they're from different universes. It's got a little 'part one: the gobbledegook' thing on it, indicating to fans that they're adapting the whole series and which part this covers. I have never heard of this thing, but it's clearly mega-popular, so my guess is it's a huge Chinese nerd series maybe."

And I just looked it up and learned that I'm wrong about everything. How was this allowed to be made? It looks extremely like it's taking the piss as a pastiche of bad sci-fantasy epics with too many ridiculous characters ("Darrian Bloodaxe", "Atticus Noble") and tropes that look like a kid banging all their action figures together. This cannot be a serious attempt at a story but the budget is far beyond 'bad star wars parody'. I feel like I'm going insane

supposedly Snyder conceived it as Star Wars fanfiction, tried to pitch it to Lucasfilm for decades and failed, and then removed all the Star Wars brand parts and pitched it to Netflix as its own thing

because that's the only sci-fi universe that has a dark gothic atmosphere

Wot's that? Start with a single structure, a handful of dipshits, and a pile of resources?

And I have to build both the housing and industry from scratch?

And my dipshits are OK without the more advanced goods up to the point where I can produce those?

Man, I love that almost as much as I love the city having no organic development.

I love placing every shack (house) and shanty (plastic gathering center).

I love setting all the roads.

I'm going b o n k e r s for y o n k e r s for managing dozens of named citizens with rudimentary skill systems and nothing else going for them.