Still, despite Snyder’s stylistic gifts – having mastered the art of the superhero pose all the way back to “Watchmen” – there’s not enough reason to invest in the larger story or indeed even smaller aspects of it. The structure allows time to flesh out Kora’s backstory while she pulls the team together, which includes Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Doona Bae, Staz Nair, and “Justice League” alum Ray Stevens. Given a few weeks before they must act, Kora takes off with the farmer Gunnar (Michel Huisman) to recruit mercenaries who might help them, realizing that the odds are stacked against them. When the empire’s (for lack of a better description) fascistic troops arrive under the leadership of Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein, perhaps the most arresting presence, channeling Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds”), the villagers face a choice between fighting back and surrendering. Cut to a farming community on a small out-of-the-way outpost, where a former soldier, Kora (Sofia Boutella of “The Mummy” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service”), has taken quiet refuge. Unfortunately, even that latter low-budget effort generated better characters than “Rebel Moon” can muster, and the latitude of the two-part structure merely allows Snyder (who wrote the story, collaborated on the script and also served as director of photography) to plump up the introductions in less-than-flattering ways.īuilding not just a world, but an entire galaxy, “Rebel Moon” paints a portrait of a universe that saw its royal family murdered, leaving its planets under the boot of an imperious regent. The shorthand description of the movie would be allowing the visually ambitious director to try his hand at a “Star Wars” movie, but that’s actually a poor representation of the underlying bones of the story, which owes more of a debt to “The Magnificent Seven” (or “The Seven Samurai,” take your pick), which itself was adapted in 1980 by Roger Corman into the space-set “Battle Beyond the Stars.”
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