BEFORE: I've got a busy week coming up, even though I'm not due back at the theater until next Sunday. My ex-boss is having her 60th birthday party, and I have to start preparing for a colonoscopy exam a week ahead of the date, by changing my diet, that's not going to be fun. I'm not supposed to eat any nuts, seeds, corn or beans for a week, but those are some of my favorite things, so I really don't know what I'm going to eat. That fun starts on Thursday, after the party on Wednesday. On Tuesday I'd really like to go see "Deadpool & Wolverine", because I won't be able to eat popcorn for a while after that. Also, I have not seen a movie in a theater for almost a year. I know, it almost doesn't make sense because I WORK at one. But I may not be able to post the review until Thursday. It's OK, just like the beer festival I was at yesterday, anything that slows down my movie watching right now is a good thing. If I don't take breaks, I may run out of slots for the year. But since there's really nothing on TV except the boring Olympics, I have to watch movies this week just to keep myself entertained.
Anthony Hopkins carries over from "Armageddon Time".
THE PLOT: When a peaceful settlement on the edge of a distant moon finds itself threatened by a tyrannical ruling force, a stranger living among its villagers becomes their best hope for survival.
AFTER: What I really should be doing is figuring out my horror movie chain, October is closer than I think it is, however in my defense I haven't figured out how many slots I have for October, because if you take away a few days for vacation and a few days for NY Comic-Con, I may not have a full month to program, it could be more like 20 days or even 15, and that's a lot easier than 30 days. I probably couldn't even link 30 horror films together any more, so maybe it's for the best. Still, I should devote some time this week to blocking it out, or just picking a smallish chain (or two) and running with it. I also can't even start to link there until I watch the new Deadpool film, I want to be surprised by the cameos so that means I can't program after it until I, you know, watch it. But not having a destination past the next 3 movies or a way to get there is a very unsettling feeling, I don't like it.
Let me try to stay in the moment and just focus on "Rebel Moon". I worked at a screening of this film last December, so I saw little bits of it, but I also tried to not learn too much, I wanted to go in to it cold, when I could link to it. It's definitely a riff on "Star Wars", but really, what sci-fi movie isn't? I heard the rumor that at one point Zack Snyder pitched these "Rebel Moon" films as potential Star Wars sequels, but it didn't work out. So this film COULD have become SW: Episode 7, maybe? Only Lucasfilm wanted to go in a different direction? So the Imperium here is a stand-in for the Empire, there's a bunch of plucky rebels who need to work together to take down the evil forces ruling the galaxy, sure, it all fits. But Snyder now claims that the real inspiration for this film is "Seven Samurai", or the American Western version, "The Magnificent Seven", because in both cases a team of 7 warriors has to be put together to defend a small town from the Imperialist forces. George Lucas cited Japanese films as an inspiration for the first "Star Wars" film, too, only it was a different Kurosawa film.
But then there's also Zack Snyder drawing on his own work, because this film also brings to mind "Justice League", which also has 7 heroes with different powers and different backgrounds working together to defeat the evil power. So Part One of "Rebel Moon" is therefore really about bringing the team together, and we probably won't get to see what they can do when they work together until Part Two. Yeah, this tracks - so really today's film is "Star Wars" meets the first half of "Justice League", but maybe with a little bit of "Guardians of the Galaxy" thrown in. Don't get me wrong, that's a fine formula, but it also seems just a bit derivative, like it can't just be it's own thing, we have to have two people travel to other planets and recruit five more warriors, because the number in the group has to be seven. They found out through a focus group that movie watchers can't handle eight people on a team, it has to be seven. (Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca, Obi-Wan and 2 droids. Yep, 7 seems about right)
The trouble starts when a small farming colony on a remote moon is visited by an Imperial Dreadnought ship (kind of like a rectangular Star Destroyer) and the soldiers want to buy the colony's excess grain. The farmers claim there is no surplus, no excess, they only farm enough to keep themselves fed. But the Imperium leader, Atticus Noble, digs a little deeper with conversation and finds out that there IS a reserve of grain, so he gets to accuse the village leader of lying, and then he gets to kill that leader and take the grain - but you feel the negotiations were probably always going to come down to this, with the army taking what they want and paying the minimum for it, with the intent of allowing the farming colony to starve. They leave a bunch of mean, rapey soldiers behind and say they'll come back in nine weeks for the grain. This at least gives Gunnar (the lead farmer) and Kora (a stranger from another world living in the farming colony) time to put a team together to defend the moon, after they fight and kill the soldiers who were about to rape an innocent farm-girl.
Somewhere else on their moon, they find a bar with a lot of weird aliens (kind of like that cantina in, well, you know) and Kora and Gunnar have an incident with some shady people there, but they meet a smuggler and starship pilot named Kai in the cantina. (Reminds me of Han Solo in the Tatooine cantina, but whatever...). Kai agrees to take them to Pollux to find the fabled General Titus, who's fighting in the gladiator arena there, but Kai also has some other ideas about people they can pick up along the way, heroes from different worlds who will join their cause. There's Tarak, a sort of Tarzan/John Carter character who can tame large beasts, and Nemesis, a cybernetically-enhanced swordswoman who has two swords that light up but are somehow not lightsabers. (Hmmm again...). Finally they get to Pollux and find the great warrior Titus, but he's drunk and sleeping in an alley, which is very kind of "Magnificent Seven".
The rag-tag bunch of misfits with different powers picks up one more member, when they reach the rebel base - I mean, the hide-out of the Bloodaxes, they get Darrian Bloodaxe himself, one of the leaders of, well, the rebels. This conveniently brings their force up to seven major people with a bunch more rebels tagging along as cannon fodder. Focus on the seven. But that's all the plot I'm willing to give out, no spoilers here, but it's obvious that since the team was put together to battle Atticus Noble and the Imperium, that's what they end up doing. And they appear to win, sure, but come on, remember this is Part One of Two, if they really won at the end of this film there would be no need for Part Two. Sorry, Mario, your princess is in another castle, and really, it was no surprise at all that the bad guy would be only MOSTLY dead, and get Darth Vadered (or something close to it) so he'll be back again tomorrow, when the real fight begins, I assume.
I wish Part One could have been about something more than getting the team together, and in a way it is, but this is a necessary part of the storytelling, to show us the hero's journey for each character, especially Kora. Whenever there's some downtime she reveals a bit more of her backstory to Gunnar, and really, there's a lot to sort through, she had a whole different life before she had to hide out on that tiny moon, and eventually we're going to figure it all out, it's just a bit unfortunate that flashbacks were the chosen method of relaying this all to us, because it's coming in a form where some assembly is required. You get the feeling that it's all eventually going to come together, well, here's hoping anyway. The advantage of waiting so long to watch Part One is that I can just go right into Part Two tomorrow. So we'll see where this story ends up landing, is it all just more stuff that will call other films like "Dune" to mind, or is there something original here that doesn't just rip off other movies?
True to form for a Zack Snyder outing, there is now the original cut of Chapter One (2 hrs, 14 min.) and a Director's Cut (3 hrs, 24 min.) so I had to make a choice. I went with the original cut, there will always be time later to watch the longer cut if I should deem it necessary to do so. Still, it's really great to be watching fiction again.
Also starring Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Prisoners of the Ghostland"), Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Gran Turismo"), Ed Skrein (last seen in "Midway"), Michiel Huisman (last seen in "Kate"), Doona Bae (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Ray Fisher (last seen in "Justice League"), Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "A Million Little Pieces"), Staz Nair, Fra Fee (last seen in "Les Miserables"), Cleopatra Coleman (last seen in '"In the Shadow of the Moon"), Stuart Martin (last seen in "Slow West"), Ingvar Sigurdsson (last seen in "The Northman"), Alfonso Herrera, Cary Elwes (last seen in "Georgia Rule"), Rhian Rees (last seen in "Babylon"), Elise Duffy, Jena Malone (last seen in "Lovesong"), Sky Yang (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Charlotte Maggi, Corey Stoll (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Stella Grace Fitzgerald, Greg Kriek (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Brandon Auret (last seen in "Chappie"), Ray Porter (last seen in "The Runaways"), Tony Amendola (last seen in "Father Stu"), Dominic Burgess (last seen in "Ma"), Derek Mears (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Dustin Ceithamer (last seen in "The New Mutants"), Elizabeth Martinez, Josefine Lindegaard (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Melissa Hunt, Colby Lemmo, Sisse Marie, Thomas Ohrstrom, Thor Knai, Savanna Gann, Danielle Burgio (last seen in "The Dictator"), Julian Grant, Patrick Luwis (last seen in "Barbie"), Tomm Voss, Christine Kellogg-Darrin, Skylar Okerstrom-lant, Caden Dragomer, Kayden Alexander Koshelev (last seen in "Me Time"), Kingston Foster, Christopher Matthew Cook (last seen in "Black Adam"), Ben Geurens, Raphael Corkhill (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Kendall Wells (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Daisy Davis, Rayne Bidder, Kristen Endow, John Fantasia, Maeve Garay, Yu-Beng Lim, Pia Salo, Zoe Sansanowicz.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Hawkshaws (bounty hunters, hmmm....)
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