REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE

Name: REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE
Item: REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE
Author: Lillie Jaenchen

"Endlessly Boring, Violent and Dull"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

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Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE is the latest science fiction epic from Director Zach Snyder. It follows a young woman named Kora, a nomad who has been living in the peaceful farming town occupying the moon called Veldt for a couple of years. The new evil galactic emperor sends a ruthless colonel to pillage their entire food supply. He leaves a group of soldiers and a robot to gather the supply for ten weeks. However, the robot joins Kora in a revolt against the soldiers. Kora, who once protected the empire’s royal family, and one of the town leaders depart the moon to recruit warriors to defend the town when the colonel returns.

No one in REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE shows any personality, including the heroine. She teams up with a space pilot named Kai and a few other interchangeably boring characters. They all face repetitive, highly violent battles on the way to a final showdown with the ruthless colonel. REBEL MOON – PART ONE also has brief references to pagan deities and an attempted rape scene.

Content:

(PaPa, FRFR, ACAC, B, Ho, L, VVV, SS, N, A, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong pagan worldview includes scene where a town leader talks about gods, and the harvest at a party and exhorts people to “make love” promiscuously as an offering to their deities, with a strong attitude about fighting tyranny and oppression, plus a homosexual male alien tries to forcibly make a human male be its sex slave before the heroine kills the alien with a laser bullet to the head;

Foul Language:

Eight obscenities (including five “s” words);

Violence:

Nearly nonstop shootings, stabbings, slicings, limb-lopping, and evisceration throughout the movie’s endlessly repetitive, redundant fight and battle scenes, plus there’s an attempted rape scene;

Sex:

Three men grab a young woman and laugh about their plans to rape her and forcibly kiss her as she screams, they taunt her male suitor with their plans to tie him to a pole and make him watch her get raped every day as she “becomes a whore,” before another woman stops them, they call her “dessert,” meaning they plan to rape her as well, and a homosexual male alien tries to verbally force a human male into being his sex slave, but he’s also killed;

Nudity:

Men are shirtless in several scenes to show off their muscles a man is seen naked from the side;

Alcohol Use:

Alcohol use and a character is in a drunken stupor when he’s introduced;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Betrayal, kidnapping, gambling.

More Detail:

REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE is the latest cinematic disaster from director ZACK SNYDER, who single-handedly ruined the DC superhero universe with his pretentious, boring, hyper-violent takes on Superman, Batman and the Justice League. Somehow, Netflix decided to throw $90 million at him to rip off the final STAR WARS trilogy.

REBEL follows a young woman named Kora (Sofia Boutella), a nomad who’s been living quietly in a peaceful farming town occupying a moon called Veldt for two years. Veldt is part of the Motherworld galactic empire, whose king and queen were assassinated by an ambitious general named Balisarius, who wanted to rule as an emperor. Balisarius has picked a ruthless colonel named Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) to take over and pillage all the moons in the empire.

When Atticus and his evil minions land on Veldt, he quickly murders the town’s leader and announces he will return in ten weeks to seize nearly their entire crop and food supply. Kora is pressed into leading an expedition to find a disgraced general named Titus (Djimon Hounsou), in the hopes that he can raise a group of warriors to defend Veldt.

Along the way, she teams up with a space pilot named Kai (Charlie Hunnam) and a few other interchangeably boring characters, and they all face repetitive, highly violent battles on the way to a final showdown with Atticus. After two hours and 15 minutes of endlessly narrated flashbacks to show Kora’s backstory and a seemingly endless series of shootouts and fights where people and aliens who are eviscerated, stabbed and whacked to pieces, the movie seems to come to a conclusion.

Then, a key character is revived via heavy-duty electrical shocks, and viewers are left with the knowledge that an utterly pointless Part Two is coming in April.

No one shows any personality in this movie, even Kora, who just mopes depressingly through all her talking scenes stitching together more slaughter. REBEL also uses her to keep an annoyingly woke trend going in science fiction, fantasy, superhero movies, where the female leads are unstoppable killing machines, but all men are helpless cowards ducking almost every fight.

Viewers may wistfully look back on John Williams’ amazing STAR WARS scores and wonder what went wrong with this movie, which is filled with dirge-like, depressing orchestral blasts of sound. While the CGI effects are well-done, the fact that they are used in more than two hours devoid of any sense of fun negates their impact.

One can’t watch REBEL MOON – PART ONE without seriously reflecting on the level of violence in the movie, which is brutal and almost incessant. However, many viewers, even Christian families, will be duped by the fact it’s just rated PG-13, because the ratings board (and many viewers these days) thinks it’s not “really” violent if it takes place in a “fantasy” world.

The movie’s villains also have a repellent attitude toward women. For example, an early scene shows the ruthless colonel’s men forcibly carrying a young woman off to be raped and forcibly kissing her as she screams. When Kora steps in to save her, the group’s leader sneers that she’ll be “dessert.” Earlier, the people of Veldt have a celebratory festival to false gods, where their leader exhorts them to “make love” promiscuously as an offering to the deities.

Watching brutal killings in any setting should be recognized as mentally and spiritually damaging. Most Marvel movies know where to draw the line and have plenty of entertaining pizzaz with charismatic performances, great jokes and a bright, joyous sense of color. REBEL MOON – PART ONE has none of that, however. Netflix viewers have rejected it roundly, as this movie dropped out of the Top Ten movies on the streaming giant after the first two weeks. Meanwhile, DC has finally wised up and replaced Director Zach Snyder with the far more entertaining James Gunn (GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY series) now running the show. Here’s hoping Netflix also will get rid of Snyder, after facing the second half of this megabomb when Part Two drops in April.